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

Last night we received the second decision in just a fortnight from the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO to reflect on this government's environmental record and it is high time for this House to debate what has emerged in nine short months to be an appalling record on our protection of the natural environment. Recently—and I think I had occasion to say this this morning—the Prime Minister in his new habit of modest self-deprecation, talking about himself, started to describe himself as a conservationist. Up there with his self-description as the best friend pensioners have ever had and the best friend that Medicare ever had, he started to talk about himself as a conservationist.

He road-tested this new self-deprecating moniker in Canada. We had occasion earlier this morning to talk about his trip to Canada and to other places to test the temperature of other nations as we build to the Paris Conference on Climate Change next year. As I said, he luxuriated in the warm embrace of the Canadian Prime Minister in a bout of climate scepticism and, after that experience, he let it be known quietly to Australian journalists that he was going to build a coalition. He was going to set about building a coalition of the unwilling to start to fight the Americans, the Chinese, the French, the Brits, the Germans, the Koreans, all those other nations who had indicated an intention, domestically and internationally to start to build the mood for change, to start to build momentum for climate action.

So confident was the Prime Minister that he would be able to do this, that he even let it be known to these Australian journalists who the members of this coalition for the unwilling would be. He let it be known that New Zealand will join and that United Kingdom would join. The problem was of course that he did not actually go and consult with the UK Prime Minister or the New Zealand Prime Minister, and the New Zealand Prime Minister had to admit only hours later that he was caught completely unawares about this new coalition of the unwilling announced by Prime Minister Abbott to Australian journalists in the warm embrace of the Canadian Prime Minister. The New Zealand Prime Minister confirmed that they were still committed to taking strong action on climate change in New Zealand domestically, and to being a responsible partner in the lead-up to the Paris conference. The UK Prime Minister and his spokespeople also confirmed and touted their strong record—a Tory government this is, Madam Speaker—on climate change domestically, within Europe and internationally.

After seeing this road testing, this new moniker of conservationist over in Canada and here, I think, in parliament as well, the Australian people could see clearly what was what. The Australian people are wise people and they judge their leaders and their politicians on their actions not on words, and this Prime Minister is no more a conservationist than John Howard was a Communist. The United Kingdom Independent newspaper got much closer to the truth earlier this year when in February they asked a question on the lips of so many Australians. On 4 February they asked:

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

This question has been on the lips of so many Australians for the last nine months.

It must be said that the last nine months have been nine months of unwinding environmental protections and unwinding programs that are targeted at the conservation of Australia's beautiful natural environment and extraordinary biodiversity. In Australia it must be said, a continent with a beautiful natural environment but extraordinary natural resources as well, there is often a fine line between being the Minister for the Environment and being the Assistant Minister for Resources. For too long over this nine-month period this minister, this Prime Minister and this government have been way, way on the wrong side of that fine line.

I have had occasion to talk about a number of the decisions that this government has made in these nine short months and I want to go through a few of them before I address the one that was reflected in the decision of the World Heritage Committee last night. Very quickly, the government decided to delist the Murray below Darling as a Threatened Ecological Community, a decision that had been based on the advice of the Threatened Species Scientific Committee that had been working on this matter for some years, a decision based on a groundless scare campaign that had been run in the Murray-Darling Basin.

They have also decided in the budget to cut almost $500 million from the Landcare program, a program that results from the merger of the old Landcare program and Caring for Our Country, two programs that deliver extraordinary outcomes particularly to Australia's land sector through revegetation and a whole range of other programs led by farmers and conservationists across our continent. This cut has been made in spite of a clear promise made last year that the Landcare budget would not be cut.

We have seen the rolling back of management plans for the world's largest system of marine reserves, an extraordinary reform driven, as so many of these reforms were over the last few years, by my friend the Manager of Opposition Business, and, again, the decision has been based on the most groundless scare campaign. All around the country, and particularly in Queensland, we saw these scare campaigns about the interruption that these reserves would have to recreational fishing, notwithstanding that off the Queensland coast these reserves were several hundred kilometres away.

Again, we have seen so many different ways in which this government in nine short months has started to attack clean energy programs. We saw again from the member for Higgins over the course of the last 24 or 36 hours, the brazenness, the openness with which backbenchers are now quite happy to talk down the very clear commitments that the minister, his parliamentary secretary, other spokespeople within the coalition parties made in the lead-in to the election campaign about the bipartisan nature of the core components of Australia's clean energy program. Quite openly the backbenchers do not even bother to background journalists anymore. They quite openly and brazenly talk down the government's quite clear commitments made before the election campaign to continue Australia's proud record on clean energy. And I do not have time to address the debacle that is the solar roofs plan.

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