Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities) Share this | Hansard source

If they do not even want to say that national parks are really special, they should at least be seen as being special enough that they are not appropriate sites for grazing. One of the interjections that came across earlier referred to the heritage concepts of grazing in the Alpine National Park. Make no mistake: we are not talking about a situation where you had drovers on horseback taking the cattle up the slopes. The cattle were dropped off in a truck—the cattle were sent there and unloaded from the back of a truck. What is going on there is a treatment of a national park which every Australian other than a handful of people on that side of the chamber knows is the wrong way to treat a national park. If we can learn nothing else from this episode, whether or not we end up in a situation of the Victorian government having breached federal environmental law, every Australian knows at least this: when you get a change of government away from Labor in this country you get a worse environmental outcome.

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