Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens demanded an end to the 150-plus year tradition of cattle grazing in Victoria's alpine high country and the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities caved in. Now, graziers are not permitted to take their cattle—which used to do a fantastic job of eating the grass, which would otherwise become a fire hazard—into national parks. These parks will in time become a tinderbox and the tragic fires that blackened Victoria in the recent past, taking lives and destroying properties, will sadly reoccur, all for the sake of giving in to the Greens, who would have this country return to pre-First-Fleet conditions, given the chance.

The Greens want all the water in the Murray-Darling to flow down the system and out to sea, without giving farmers a chance to grow the food to feed this nation, and a good many more as well. This is a dangerous party with radical ideas. It is not an environmental party. It has a social agenda to change the shape of how our nation, certainly regional Australia, does things.

There are significant faults with the member for Melbourne's proposal. I do believe that the government is kidding itself if it honestly believes that China is not continuing to build dirty coal-fired power stations. The government is delusional if it accepts that. Australia has enormous reserves of coal, and the emissions of our power stations are low compared with those of China, which has one of the world's fastest growing economies and no plans to introduce a carbon tax.

Australia's energy needs will only grow into the future, providing of course that the carbon tax and Labor do not virtually shut down our manufacturing and mining sectors. The Greens' obsession with renewable investment is not backed up with results. Wind turbines, in most areas, do not do the job they are purported to do and are credited with. Often they are a con, something that is certainly a visual impact but little in the way of power creation. They often are physically damaging and are psychologically damaging for those unfortunate enough to live close by.

If the Gillard-Brown government wants to spend an investment that has been set aside by the coalition to help this nation it ought to be ensuring that the $5.8 billion budgeted for water-saving infrastructure in the Murray-Darling starts to hit the ground. Such a move would also have positive environmental implications. The water such investment would save would go a long way towards fixing the perceived problems in the Murray-Darling.

At present we are more than half-way through the consultation period on a bad draft, which would devastate regional communities. For what? All for the sake of wetlands regenerated by recent flooding, and those wetlands have always dried off in times of drought. We have a plan based on a disastrous decade-long drought, yet there are ridiculous and wasteful calls for over-bank watering of wetlands, which have lasted millennia due to the continual cycle of drought and flooding rains.

The Greens are not to be trusted with their demands on the government, and getting Labor to reinvest HRL Ltd's $100 million grant is a reckless idea in itself. This is a government that cannot handle money. Its fiscal record is a litany of waste and over-runs. Having Labor transfer grant money and put it into another scheme hatched by the Greens is asking for another school halls fiasco or a pink batts disaster. How anyone can trust Labor and the Greens to deliver any good? People cannot. The sooner we have an election the better. (Time expired)

Debate adjourned.

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