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

I am very glad that question was asked. To ensure that all of these reforms are best practice you want to make sure that you go as far as possible in the world coming closer to the good standard of fisheries management that Australia has and the good standard of marine parks that Australia has. That is why it used to be bipartisan that we would have an involvement in the Coral Triangle initiative. That is why it used to be bipartisan that we would engage in the Earth Summit and the meeting of environment ministers that happens once every 10 years. It is not necessarily the summit itself; it is the bilateral meetings that you have on the one occasion when all the environment ministers of the world are in the same place. It should be bipartisan that you will have those negotiations country after country. Yet the exact same officials who were organising bilateral after bilateral, back to back—not the meetings on the beach that the member for Flinders said that he wanted to be able to attend when he was on TV on the weekend but the bilaterals where you advance the national interest—and meeting after meeting are now cancelling those meetings. The same pairing arrangements that caused the Leader of the Opposition to play 'chasings' in and out of the chamber and caused chaos on that other side mean that even this has to be turned into a political game. (Time expired)

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