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February 14th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda The Liberal National Party will not support any plans to bring in foreign labour to work in Queensland mines, leader Campbell Newman says.
His promise comes after Immigration Minister Chris Bowen confirmed several mining companies want to use a temporary migration initiative called the Enterprise Migration Agreements (EMA) to bring foreign workers to the country.
Indian company the Adani Group has bought the sprawling Moray Downs cattle station, north of Emerald, to mine and plans to build a new town to support its operations.
An Adani spokesperson said it had not applied to the federal government for special visas to fill jobs with overseas workers.
But CFMEU spokesman Steve Pierce said Adani should provide a written guarantee it would train Australians for the job.
“We hear enough rhetoric from big business all the time but we never see any iron-clad guarantee,” Mr Pierce told AAP.
Mr Newman said his party would not back plans to fly in foreign workers.
“I’m here to say today – line in the sand – the LNP will not support this sort of thing,” he told reporters in Townsville on Tuesday.
“We need to build up rural and regional Queensland. We need to invest in infrastructure. We need to create a sense of community in new towns to support the minerals and resources boom.
“Flying in foreign workers on jumbo jets is completely unacceptable.”
An Adani spokesperson said the company would employ Australians before it sourced workers from overseas.
“Australian workers will always be the first preference for Adani,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
“We have always maintained that Adani Mining will exhaust all available work sources for projects within Australia before using overseas workers.”
A spokesperson for Mr Bowen said that so far only one EMA had been submitted but he confirmed his department was in discussions with several other projects.
The spokesperson declined to give any names due to commercial-in-confidence reasons.
Projects must have a capital expenditure of $2 billion or more and a peak workforce of 1500 workers to be eligible for EMAs.
The Adani Group is also promising to build a new airstrip for fly-in, fly-out workers and new rail and port facilities in Queensland to help it export its coal, predominantly to India.
The construction of the project is expected to cost some $6 billion.
Premier Anna Bligh said the government would consider the proposal but said she would prefer to see jobs go to native workers.
“They (jobs) should go to Queenslanders first, and then they should go to Australians who want to become Queenslanders and move here with their families and only as a last resort should anything else be considered,” she told reporters in Brisbane.
Ms Bligh said the plans were still at an embryonic stage.
“What you see in the media today are the plans that they have, those plans have not been approved, they have not been fully assessed,” she said.
Ms Bligh said 24,000 people had gone to job exhibitions since Christmas, looking at the resource sector, saying that Queenslanders were “hungry” to work in mining.
Federal Queensland MP Bob Katter said the move would take jobs from Australians and undermine the nation’s wage structure.
“Please excuse me in believing that they want to look after the world’s poor,” Mr Katter told reporters in Canberra.
“If they do they can start with employing our first Australian brothers – 10,000 in north Queensland without jobs as I talk.”
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