The Liberal Party is looking to dethrone the Cook Labor government when Western Australia soon heads to the voting polls on March 8, with the opposition promising sweeping changes in the state should they win.

While there are plenty of battlegrounds where Labor and Liberal will clash, a big one is the mining and materials industry – a sector HotCopper, of course, knows well.

In the build-up to the big ballot day, HotCopper’s Sonia Madigan spoke with Neil Thompson MLC today from the Liberal Party about what investors can expect for Western Australian businesses should the Liberals claim victory.

Above is the interview in video. Below is the full transcript of the interview.

Transcript: Neil Thompson MLC speaks to HotCopper

Sonia Madigan: Now, Neil, you’ve sent me a statement and it was – and I quote: “WA experienced record investment in our resources sector under the Liberals” and that’s not been exceeded in eight years of Labor.

Neil Thompson MLC: No, and there’s no greater friend of the mining industry than the Liberal Party WA and we saw under the Barnett Government we had up to $50 billion a year on capital investment during that peak period of investment. It’s never been exceeded, and whilst there has been significant investment in the mining sector in the last eight years, my great concern – and I talked to people in the industry – is the risks that have been embedded into our regulatory environment, the uncertainty, particularly coming from the Commonwealth but also just the cultural issues in the state approval agencies and the challenges we have in getting through that unnecessary red tape in the industry.

SM: Before we have a look at that, I did go to one of our key investment themes at the moment and that is, of course, AI, and I asked AI whether your statement is true and it actually came back as false. It said the Liberal Party did spend on the traditional material sectors of iron ore and LNG, but since 2017 under Labor the investment has continued but has also been especially strong in critical minerals and renewables.

NT: Ah, so what I was talking about there was capital investment, private sector capital investment. That’s definitely true, my statement is true: $50 billion a year. I mean let’s face it, if you’ve got a broken system and you throw more taxpayers’ money at the broken system and ineffective programs, that’s not delivering outcomes. If you’re trying to shut down the industry, for example with the Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Act or the Nature Positive legislation that they’re trying to push through, it doesn’t matter how much taxpayer investment you put in. AI is a good friend, it may be there’s some taxpayer money poured into the industry through taxpayer-funded schemes, but in terms of capital investment by the private sector, it was record investment under the WA Liberals and it’s never been exceeded.

(Editor’s Note: Mr. Thompson later sent HotCopper further details on the above question, assuring “my statement is correct.” HotCopper has cited the statistics.)

SM: You mentioned there a couple of times concerns around red tape and difficulty for companies to get projects through to production. Can you tell us more about what a Liberal government would do to address that?

NT: First of all, I’d like to say we’re starting with unblocking the roadblock on uranium mining, we’re going to allow uranium mining comments again in West Australia, vital for our future energy requirements and vital for the world’s decarbonisation process as well. We have a moral obligation to mine uranium in West Australian and we’ll be supporting the uranium industry. The second thing we’re going to do is we’re going to do a root-and-branch review of the Environmental Protection Act. There were a number of reforms that were put through after the Vogel-McFerran Review that was undertaken by the Labour government, of which did come through, and we supported, but it didn’t go far enough and the sorts of things we will do, we will make sure, for example, are not only parallel approvals, but we’ll have deemed approvals which will allow for decisions to be made when time’s up in terms of the number of days. We’re also going to restrict those appeal rights under part four of the Environmental Protection Act to make sure only persons with standing can make an appeal, and we’re gonna go hard on those groups, those internationally funded lobby groups that come in here and initiate campaigns against our mining industry. If we look at the EDO, the Environmental Defender’s Office, we’re not gonna throw taxpayers’ money at a group that has been found by a court of Australia to be working contrary to the law in relation to the Santos project. We’re gonna go very hard on that and also look at the big money that’s coming in and supporting our groups. We want genuine appeals. There’s a whole range of other things where we looking at, for example, and you’re listeners will probably know the Social Surrounds policy. The Environmental Protection Act should be all about the environment, it shouldn’t be about planning, it shouldn’t be about Aboriginal heritage; those things are under separate legislation. We will institute what they call a statement of compliance so that if people get their approvals through the other piece of legislation, they don’t have to go back over it again through the EPA. The EPA should be making decisions purely based on Environmental Protection. Our focus will be on Environmental Protection. There are a whole lot of other things we’ll be doing that haven’t already been mooted and those have been announced by Libby Mettam, our leader, back in June, and we’re really proud to stand by a record on reducing red tape in this sector.

SM: I guess the scary thing is we start to lose companies to projects overseas, don’t we? So how can we attract more investment locally?

NT: Well, you know, that comes back to the original conversation around that issue about record investment. Investors will only invest if they feel there is a pathway through a reasonable time. People don’t have lazy capital. You can’t put money in there and say we’re gonna put in several billion dollars to a project and we have all these uncertainties. Aboriginal heritage in the state… there’s so much new uncertainty built in that the amendments for that failed legislation by the Labour government allowing for new information to be part of the process which can actually stop a project after it’s been approved. That is unacceptable, there has to be constraints on that and there are absolutely no constraints. People wanna know that they can get those land approvals, and those downstream processing opportunities in the sector as well. People don’t want the sword of Damocles hanging over their heads in relation to nature. That’s why I work very closely with my Federal counter, Jonathan Dunning – the future Environment Minister at the Federal level – and we are going to work very closely together to make sure our Federal legislation, the work we do between the state and the Federal government, we’re working closely together get those bilateral agreements and back in place, which is governments allowed drop away, so that we can get those approvals through in time, so investors could be certain once they get an approval, once they go through that process – and that process should be time-limited – they can then get on with the job and invest with confidence that they’re gonna have a future outcome.

SM: Now, of course, the Labor Party has such dominance since 2021. What does the Liberal Party need to achieve this time around to be able to make a difference?

NT: We’re out to win it. We’re we’re fighting, Libby Mettam’s doing a terrific job at the moment. I’ve never seen a leader of a party work so hard as Libby Mettam and I do commend her for her work rate, that’s just terrific. And we’ve got a great batch of candidates, you know, every single one of them is up to win. We know that there are a lot of undecided voters and whilst the polls will say a certain thing, the polls will say we’re doing really well, but maybe not quite good enough, there are so many people who haven’t made up their minds and I’m hoping, you know, talking about this today, if you’re in the mining industry, you I can’t see any case of voting for the Labor Party. They introduced an appalling piece of legislation that was gonna shut down the industry, especially exploration. If you’re involved in exploration, you are involved in prospecting, you’re involved in any of that early work, and [you’re a] smaller mining company, you were going to be shut down by that cultural heritage legislation. They only revoked that because of the work the opposition did. And of course, the farming community got absolutely motivated once they saw the regulations and it was terrific work that we did all together to see that removed. And that’s the DNA of the Labor Party, they do not support the industry as a principal and you could not get a better friend of the industry than the Liberal Party of Western Australia.

SM: Now Neil, I realised that you’ve been serving mining and pastoral in WA, your office is in Broome, but I just want to talk to you about the other sectors as well because our investors on HotCopper are interested in sectors outside materials like biotech, IT, real estate. What other policies does the Liberal Party have in its back pocket?

NT: We have talked to a lot of people and of course, we know that those sectors that support the industry are really important as well. There’s not enough industrial land, I am the Shadow Minister for Lands, and I can assure your listeners today that the day I become Minister, I’m going to be getting every approval that has not yet been made, every application and going through it with the directors general from that department to make sure that we can just fast track some of the things I’ve been talking, for example, to companies like FMG [Fortescue Ltd (ASX:FMG)] that are trying to get land to do that renewable energy project and develop the industrial development up there in Port Hedland. They just can’t get through the system. We haven’t done the work on native title. The state needs to do more work and the state needs to take more risks as well and start to underwrite some of these risks. So the industry can get going, we really need to have a much more can-do attitude in West Australia, particularly around the land access side. We also need to support our downstream process in industry, it is an absolute travesty we’re seeing in the energy sector with the lack of reliable energy in Western Australia; we have a policy in relation to providing 300 megawatts of additional gas-fired power to Perth and making sure that Cornana precinct has an affordable power and reliable power going forward. So we can continue to give confidence to minerals processors like Alcoa and like the BHP nickel project which has been put on hold. These decisions don’t get made in a day, to be clear. The problem is we have a real challenge in WA because people are not confident, they’re not confident that they can go ahead and do that heavy energy-intensive processing that we need to make sure that we have those battery precursors that are produced in WA for our future economy. So it’s vital we’ve got the energy policy. We’re gonna work on lands. We’re going to reduce red tape. Weed it out there so that we can get out of the way and make sure the private sector can get going and deliver for our future generations.

SM: If we can have a look now at our cost of living crisis, and I note that the Labor Party is offering $10,000 in incentives for tradies to come to WA, but isn’t that just exacerbating the problem we already have, that we don’t have enough housing?

NT: The industry needs the people, we need to people. We can’t just rely on fly-in, fly-out people flying in and out of NSW or even New Zealand. I’ve been on the plane a few times and met a few traders are flying in from New Zealand. We need the people, we’ve got a very big sector here. We are a world-class mineral sector, we could be and we’re not because of the restrictions of this government, we could actually have a lot more gas and oil production out of West Australia and we’ve just been holding that up as well. But we need the people here to do the projects we need, the people for the investment, but we just have to make sure we can grow fast enough. And that’s my job as Minister for Planning, we’ll be making sure there’s enough land available that we get our planning system going again, we get our housing system going again so we can deliver for the people we need for our mining sector.

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