Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Climate Change and Water) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in opposition to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Bilateral Agreement Implementation) Bill 2014. We do that because this bill does nothing either for environmental protection or for biodiversity conservation, a theme that people have come now to expect from this government—doing nothing for environmental protection or biodiversity conservation.

Over the weekend, or very late last week, the Prime Minister, during his whirlwind tour on climate change politics in Europe and North America, described himself as a conservationist. This was a tour on which I hope the Prime Minister received a reality check about where his policy stands—where it sits in the context of a very fast-moving set of international developments on climate change policy. While in Canada, the Prime Minister tried to verbal, frankly, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, countries with very highly developed carbon trading policies, as members of some new 'coalition of the unwilling' led by the Prime Minister and the Canadian Prime Minister to seek to stymie international efforts to develop a strong, ambitious agreement around climate change at next year's Paris agreement. The New Zealand Prime Minister was very clear that he had not been consulted by the Australian Prime Minister on this so-called coalition of the unwilling. He was caught completely unawares, apparently, by the Prime Minister's statement in Canada. And the United Kingdom's response was to reiterate its strong commitment to taking strong and sensible action on climate change both domestically and as part of a growing coalition for change in the lead-in to the Paris negotiations next year.

But the Australian people judge Prime Ministers and all of us in this House on their actions, not on their words. So, no matter how many times the Prime Minister might describe himself as a conservationist, anyone who pays even cursory attention to this government's policies and this Prime Minister's actions knows that the contrary is true. Indeed, the Independent newspaper in the United Kingdom in February this year got it much more closely right than did the Prime Minister in his self-description. That newspaper, on 4 February, posed the question that has been on so many Australians' lips when it asked:

Is Tony Abbott's Australian administration the most hostile to his nation's environment in history?

That is a question that is on so many lips in Australia, particularly the lips of those Australians who hold our natural environment so dear.

This is not something of which the Prime Minister seems particularly ashamed—this growing reputation, not only domestically but internationally, that his administration, his government is the most hostile to Australia's extraordinary natural environment in Australian history. The only words this Prime Minister can conjure for his environment minister is to quote the number of mining developments the minister has approved. Now, that is indeed a role of the environment minister under the existing legislation, and Australia is a jurisdiction that is resources based. But the environment minister must be more than assistant minister for resources. The environment minister must be more than a minister who simply ticks off on mining developments. Surely this many months into the environment minister's tenure the Prime Minister could think of something that this government had done that actually involved protecting the environment, that actually involved conserving Australia's extraordinary biodiversity.

But there is not a single achievement. The only record this government has is a long, long record of winding back environmental protections. I am just going to mention a few to give some shape to the debate on this particular piece of legislation. We found in the budget, notwithstanding a very clear commitment from the environment minister and I think also now the Minister for Agriculture, that Landcare funding and Caring for our Country funding would be maintained in full by an incoming coalition government. In spite of that commitment, we found through the budget that Landcare funding had been slashed by a third. That is around $500 million lost by natural resource management bodies and landcare organisations who for years have been doing extraordinary expert work revegetating, cleaning up our waterways and dealing with the damage that has been done over past decades and centuries to Australia's environment. It is yet another broken promise from a government that has broken so many promises.

Very early on in its tenure, the new government came in to this place with no notice, as I recall it, and decided to delist the Murray-below-Darling area, an area that had been listed as a threatened ecological community following expert scientific advice from the threatened Species Scientific Committee, an application that had been before that committee for some years and had been the subject of public consultation, particularly in the Basin communities. The government came in to this place with no notice and simply delisted it, on the back of a pretty baseless scare campaign, frankly, stoked by the coalition in the Murray-Darling Basin communities.

This followed a decision that the new government initiated in this parliament to roll back the management plans of the world's largest system of marine reserves. It is proper that the largest system of marine reserves in the world be in Australia, an island nation with extraordinary ocean environmental assets from the Great Barrier Reef to the Coral Sea right around through the Southern Ocean and the Indian Ocean on the west and the Pacific Ocean on the east. This was an extraordinary piece of work that was, again, done over a very extended period of time with stakeholders, with communities. But, again, it elicited nothing more than a baseless scare campaign from the coalition. Communities on the coast of Queensland, for example, were told that their recreational fishing activities would be interrupted by these reserves, notwithstanding that the reserves in Queensland are hundreds of kilometres off the coast. But for this government this was yet another great notch on the belt for environmental protection.

This government has also been very clear about its views on clean energy. We saw the Prime Minister in his Stetson over the weekend in Houston, talking about the importance of affordable and reliable energy. No-one can disagree with the importance of affordable and reliable energy for households and for businesses in Australia or frankly anywhere else in the world. But you will never hear this Prime Minister used the words 'clean energy'. You will never hear this Prime Minister have a third pillar to Australia's energy policy that Australia's energy should not only be reliable and should not only be affordable for households and for businesses but should also, as far as possible, be clean. Instead, all you have seen from this government in its short tenure so far is attack, after attack, after attack on Australia's clean energy sector and, again, this is nothing short of a series of broken promises.

The Prime Minister and the Minister for the Environment were not willing and did not have the courage to go to the Australian people before the election and say, 'We don't support clean energy. We don't support the development of renewable energy in Australia. We want to tear down the renewable energy target. We want to abolish Australia's renewable energy agency.' They were not courageous enough to say that before the election. Indeed, what they did say, including in the election campaign, was that the renewable energy target—the large-scale generation target of 41,000 gigawatt hours by 2020—was a completely bipartisan position, extending the bipartisan nature of renewable energy policy in this country to four elections.

For four elections the two major parties in Australia have had the same policy on the renewable energy target. And so it was in September 2013 when, during the election campaign, this minister's parliamentary secretary reiterated the coalition's support for the renewable energy target at a Clean Energy Council conference during the actual campaign. What we have seen since is the Prime Minister and other ministers crab walk away from that commitment—yet another broken promise by this government that has broken so many promises.

This morning, we see in the newspaper that the backbench is no longer feeling at all constrained about its attacks on the clean energy policies of Australia; no longer feeling at all constrained about talking down this environment minister. They are quite happy to go on the record and contradict the environment minister and his statements on clean energy; contradict a clearly stated election policy of the coalition made in September 2013.

In addition to that, we have seen over the last couple of days—just to start to round out the debacle around clean energy policy under this government—the solar roofs debacle. Yet again, another—presumably a cabinet minister or someone in the finance part of the government—has leaked to the newspapers over the weekend against the environment minister, saying that he had no authority to go out and talk to the Australian community about their solar roofs policy. The so-called 'one million solar roofs policy' was going to cost $500 million. People had puzzled for months over where that money was coming from, after MYEFO—after the midyear economic and fiscal outlook. People wondered whether maybe ARENA, the renewable energy agency, was going to have to stump up the half a billion dollars because the Minister for the Environment kept reiterating, time and time again, that the 'one million solar roof households policy' was still government policy.

Now, over the weekend we had someone apologising for doing the Minister for the Environment over in the ERC and in cabinet. They said, 'Well, the minister had no authority to go out and talk to the people about this,' that this was a 2010 election commitment that they were not bound to implement after the 2013 election. The problem is that that ignores the fact that this minister had talked incessantly about this policy between 2010 and 2013. Indeed, he had talked incessantly about it after the September 2013 election campaign. So instead of $600 million supporting Australian low-income households to get PV solar panels on their roofs; instead of supporting solar towns and solar schools, also to be able to put PV solar on their roofs; and $600 million of commitments made time and time again by this minister, what do we get? We get $2 million; instead of $600 million we got $2 million.

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