Senator the Hon Michaelia Cash
Shadow Attorney-General
Leader of the Opposition in the Senate
Senator for Western Australia
Op Ed – The West
The West Australian
21 April 2026
We have the resources to cut debt
Dig, drill and pay down the debt bill.
Those were Coalition leader Angus Taylor’s words to the Chamber of Minerals and Energy here in Perth, and they deserve to echo across every kitchen table, every mine site and every small business in this state.
Because for West Australians, this is not abstract economic theory. This is about whether your job is secure, whether your kids can afford a home, and whether the State that powers this nation actually gets treated with the respect it has earned.
The numbers tell a story that demands to be heard. WA is responsible for 40 per cent of all national exports.
The economic contribution per person in this State is 50 per cent higher than the national average.
The resources sector accounts for 45 per cent of WA’s entire economic activity.
Over the past decade, the sector has contributed $394 billion in royalties and company tax to the nation’s coffers.
This is the beating heart of our State. And Labor has been trying to stop it.
It is not a series of policy missteps. It is the predictable outcome of an ideology that views our resources sector as a problem to be managed rather than an asset to be backed.
Start with the Safeguard Mechanism, Labor’s great big carbon tax.
It is crushing Western Australian industry disproportionately — more than one-third of all safeguard facilities are right here in WA.
In just two years, it has cost Australian industry nearly $800 million, with much of that burden falling on this State.
The closures that followed are not coincidences.
Alcoa’s Kwinana alumina refinery is gone. BHP’s nickel operations in Kalgoorlie are suspended.
Then there is Labor’s environment legislation, the Environment Protection Reform Bill passed with Greens support last December.
The laws are, as Angus Taylor rightly described them, a disaster.
They have been written not to protect the environment in good faith, but to weaponise a green activist agenda against development.
They put environmental goals ahead of economic necessity and sovereign capability.
Oil, gas and coal projects are specifically excluded from streamlined approval pathways, a decision made months before the Middle East conflict exposed exactly how dangerously dependent Australia has become on global fuel supplies.
Labor has handed millions in taxpayer dollars to the Environmental Defenders Office, which is a body that has used that funding to pursue lawfare against projects including Woodside’s Scarborough offshore gas field, right here in WA.
A $100b investment pipeline is now at risk of stalling.
Dozens of iron ore, coal, gold, nickel, critical mineral and gas projects sit in limbo. This is not regulatory caution. This is sabotage by legislation.
There is another dimension to this that goes beyond WA’s borders.
Twenty years ago this week, Australia became debt-free. Peter Costello stood up and spoke about an intergenerational contract, our obligation not just to today’s taxpayers but to the Australians who come after us.
The Albanese Government has shredded that contract. Government spending is at a 40-year high outside the pandemic.
In the most recent financial year, spending grew four times faster than the economy. Australia is now hurtling towards $1 trillion in debt.
Every dollar of resources wealth that should have been used to pay down that debt has instead been squandered on Labor’s politically expedient agenda.
Every West Australian family is paying for this twice — today through inflation and 14 interest rate rises on Labor’s watch, and tomorrow through the debt that will burden the next generation.
What Angus Taylor announced in Perth is not a vague aspiration. It is a concrete, four-point plan that a Coalition government will implement.
Scrap the carbon tax. The Safeguard Mechanism will go. We are committed to removing crippling carbon imposts wherever we find them, on mining, manufacturing, electricity and beyond.
WA’s industries should be competing on their merits in global markets, not limping under the weight of a tax designed to please green activists.
Overhaul the environmental laws. We will reverse Labor’s EPBC changes that block oil, gas and coal projects from streamlined approvals.
Create national strategic priority projects. A Coalition government will introduce a new designation for projects of critical sovereign or national significance.
This means fast-tracked approvals on Commonwealth land and waters and stepping back from duplicative assessment processes on State land, trusting Western Australia to make decisions about Western Australia.
The Browse Basin gas project has been waiting eight years for Commonwealth approval. It contains 14.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and would boost Australia’s GDP by well over $100b over its life. That wait ends under a Coalition government.
Reinstate the Junior Minerals Exploration Incentive. Labor killed a program that had unlocked more than $1.1b in capital and $400m in exploration spending.
We will bring it back with $100m in funding, half quarantined for oil and gas, to seed the next generation of projects.
West Australians have always known that when this State rises, the nation rises with it.
A Coalition government will make sure all Australians know it, too. It is time to dig, to drill, and to pay down the debt bill, for WA, and for every Australian family counting on us to get it right.
Recent Comments