Mr CAMPBELL (7:42 PM) —I want to make it clear that I am a great supporter of development projects. I will be happy to give the government a list of development projects that would really benefit Australia. What I object to is what I call the cargo cult mentality which is very much in the fore with this rail link from Melbourne to Darwin. If you are going to embark on an expense of this sort, you really have to have your market sorted out beforehand, not afterwards. There is some belief that if you build the railway the business will follow. I believe that cannot happen.

What is really happening here is that the National Party and the Liberal Party, desperate to regain the country vote, are offering country people a myth, a chimera. People will say, `Oh, the government's looking at it and they think it is going to help.' It will not help. They are going to conduct a survey. The private sector will not undertake that without government guarantees or unless we give them access to large chunks of land, and that will certainly be opposed very strongly.

The other interesting thing is this: the great architect of this was Emeritus Professor Lance Endersbee. He is the man who did all the work on it. He is the man who did all the figures. He said himself that it should be subjected to all due process; it should be analysed for viability before announcements are made. The government has no intention of seeing this through to fruition. It is simply a stunt. If it does come to fruition, it will be an enormous burden on the taxpayer. The government knows that, but in the short term it can fool the people in rural Australia, who are in desperate need of assistance.

What people in rural Australia need is something done about commodity prices and finance, which brings me to the actions of our Treasurer (Mr Costello). It seems that neither our Treasurer nor One Nation have any idea how you operate two per cent finance. I am not necessarily advocating two per cent finance but to say it cannot be done is absolute nonsense. I notice today that the Victorian government is offering four per cent finance to farmers in Gippsland. That is two per cent above inflation, and I think that is quite justifiable.

But we will do it this way, and this policy was clearly taken from the policy of Australia First. We said that we would allocate out of the budget a sum of money to a body which we would set up as a new development bank. We would get a banking license and allow it to go out and use the same strategy other banks do to lend money. I believe that $100 million could very easily become a billion dollars. What is surprising about this? We are giving $1.2 billion to the Indigenous Land Fund. This money could be made available at basically any interest rate which the bank decided.

The original charter of the development bank was to invest in the good sense and hard work of the Australian people without full regard to security. Clearly it can be done. In 1970, Sir Robert Sparkes was advocating just this sort of thing for the rural sector. In the days of the Asian meltdown, our Treasurer told us that it would not affect Australia because he had got the fundamentals right in the Australian economy. When he stood at the dispatch box and said that, I thought to myself, `That is an extremely stupid thing to say'—and it was. Now he says that it is going to affect us, and he actually has the audacity to say that he has been telling everyone all along that it is going to affect us. That is not what he said initially—he said that it would not affect us at all.

A bank lending money to the rural sector at reasonable interest rates is very important. The administration cost of a loan is between one and two per cent. Obviously, if you are fractional reserve banking, you can make those loans available, and I suggest that if projects have a community value then it is good sense to make money available at that sort of interest rate to get the economy going. So much could be done in Australia if we did that sort of thing.

I would like to invoke Mr Greenspan. He has made it quite clear in some of his speeches that this sort of thing can be done, and he says that it is always a matter for judgment how far you go with it. That is the truth. If this money is put into constructive purposes, it can only benefit the nation. That is something that our Treasurer does not seem to understand, but I fear that there are lots of other things that he does not understand.

If you wanted to get produce into Asia quickly, it would be far more economical for the government to purchase or agree to the construction of two high-speed aluminium boats of double the present tonnage. That would get the produce to Asia in the same time as it would take using the proposed railway, without that enormous capital gamble. It would also benefit Tasmania and South Australia, two states which are premier in the world in this sort of construction, which are facing a very tight situation. (Time expired)