Get behind northern Australia’s potential: Littleproud

Northern Australia Minister David Littleproud has called on the private sector to demonstrate the ‘courage and conviction of their own wallet’.

David Littleproud is the Minister for Northern Australia, a region that ­encompasses 53 per cent of Australia’s land mass. Picture: Supplied

Northern Australia Minister David Littleproud has called on the private sector to demonstrate the “courage and conviction of their own wallet” to unlock the ­region’s economic potential.

A landmark report by Infrastructure Australia underlined the “untapped potential” of the vast region, adding to a litany of parliamentary white papers, green ­papers, committees and taskforces stretching back to 1948 that have sought to turn northern Australia into an economic powerhouse.

On the return leg from a trip to the Gulf of Carpentaria, Mr Littleproud said Australian notions that the government was going to “do it all” were “naive at best”. The reality was the public sector could only “fill the gaps” where private investment was lacking.

“This is where the challenge is: people are going to have to have the courage and conviction of their own wallet to go out and make that investment to go and develop a resource – whatever it might be,” he said.

The role of the federal government was to “de-risk” economic opportunities in northern Australia – highlighting the $10bn effort to address soaring insurance premiums in the region – to the point where investors were confident enough to make financial commitments.

Spanning from Carnarvon to Cairns, northern Australia ­encompasses 53 per cent of Australia’s land mass, but just over 5 per cent of the population.

Despite criticisms of the limited draw down of the Northern Australian Infrastructure Facility, which has only seen a fifth of its $5bn funding pool distributed, the Nationals deputy leader said this was in fact evidence the Morrison government was ensuring applicants had “skin in the game”.

“We expect those proponents to use their own capital first, not to use … taxpayers’ money; that they have skin in the game; they prove that we can see the colour of their eyes by the colour of their wallet,” he said

But Mr Littleproud conceded development was also dependent on Australia’s governments undertaking a “philosophical change” to find ­solutions to problems.

“We are a smart nation, but sometimes we don‘t back ourselves. We allow ourselves to take the easy way out and simply say, ‘why we can’t go and develop things here in this country’,” he said.

The minister said this was evident by the failure to address the looming water scarcity problem facing the nation, with state governments’ unwilling to build dams despite the Morrison government’s $3.5bn infrastructure funding pool available.

“We hold the lever of the chequebook and we are prepared to spend … Tasmania seems to be the only state that wants to take advantage of all infrastructure. Since 2003, there have been 20 dams built in this country, 16 of those have been in Tasmania,” he said,

“(The Tasmanian government) have effectively plumbed the state, while the eastern ­seaboard hasn’t necessarily gone on with it.”