Benjamin Wyatt MLA
Benjamin Wyatt MLA Shadow Treasurer of Western Australia Key points: • With high levels of public debt and a number of credit rating downgrades, Western Australia needs to consider new ways of funding major infrastructure projects. • A Labor Government would establish Infrastructure WA, which would have a similar role to independent infrastructure agencies around the country.
Looking at the speakers that you’ve had at what has been an extraordinary conference, I am a little bit unique because I’m from the west, which makes my comments somewhat different: perhaps a little bit of a curiosity. I also have the title – a very humbling title – of Shadow in mine. In Western Australia, we are moving towards a state election next year, so my comments today will be general in nature because there will be policy announcements as we move towards the election. Regardless of who is elected in Western Australia in 2017, the demands for infrastructure will not change. Our economy is changing from a period of extraordinary investment to a period of operation, especially in the mining sector. It is having a dramatic impact on employment, and we’ve gone from an unemployment rate of just over two per cent to comfortably over six per cent. The economy is changing, subject to the inevitable boom/bust consequences of commodity prices, like the changes we’ve seen in the iron ore sector. Iron ore makes up just over 90 per cent of total royalty revenue received by the Western Australia’s Treasury. There has also been a significant shift in the share of gross state product by the mining and petroleum sector. Over the last decade, there has been such significant investment in that side of our economy that it has had a market shift. This shift can [be seen] in services. While services are still the larger employer by a long shot – more than half of us Australians are still employed in that services sector – a significant share of our gross state product comes off the back of what has been a huge investment in services by mining and the mining sector. This is the reflection of what has happened to the state’s finances, and has fed to the broader conversation around GST, and the percentage of GST that is distributed to the various states. In a very short period of time, iron ore sales, mainly from Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, went from just over five 84
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Volume 7 Number 1
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