Luke Howarth (Petrie, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise with pleasure to speak on the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Standing) Bill 2015. I do so because I love the environment and I also love jobs—jobs for my electorate and right around this country.

I want to start by stressing that unemployment in my electorate is, quite frankly, higher than I want it to be. Youth unemployment for the area is also too high. Every day since the last election, our government has been working to ensure that small and large businesses have the environment—no pun intended—that they need to grow and prosper, because we on this side of the House know that it is the private sector businesses that create jobs.

But for some reason some people want to get in the way of jobs and to annihilate any possibility of our country moving forward. The opposition often talk about jobs as well. This helps address the problem, I believe. This bill is a sensible move by the government to ban so-called green activists from using our court system to delay or sabotage key resource developments. We are removing section 487 of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. At the moment, section 487 extends the meaning of the term 'person aggrieved' in the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977. Section 487 states:

An individual is taken to be a person aggrieved by the decision, failure or conduct if:

(a) the individual is an Australian citizen or ordinarily resident in Australia or an external Territory …

So basically you have to be an Australian citizen. It goes on:

(b) at any time in the 2 years immediately before the decision, failure or conduct, the individual has engaged in a series of activities in Australia or an external Territory for protection or conservation of, or research into, the environment.

This definition is shockingly broad. It basically means, for instance, that a 20-year-old young man who has been working on a Green Army project in New South Wales could launch judicial proceedings against a coalmine in Queensland. That is what it basically says: if they are an Australian citizen and they have been working within the environment, doing research or helping the environment in some way that is in no way linked to, say, a coalmine or aquaculture farm in Queensland or whatever the project is, they can proceed with judicial proceedings. So no wonder section 487 has been exploited by politically motivated groups to such an extent that they might as well be throwing grenades at the faces of hardworking Australians. They may as well be doing that.

These are groups of the same calibre as Greenpeace, which was recently caught out falsifying a photo—and when I say 'falsifying' I mean lying—of the Great Barrier Reef to try to get people on board with their financial campaign. For those of you that do not know about that, Greenpeace recently had photos of a reef that they were trying to pass off as the Great Barrier Reef on billboards throughout subways in London, saying: 'Support the reef. Save the reef now. Donate today.' Greenpeace raised who knows how many hundreds of thousands out of that campaign, and what was it? The photo was in fact not of our Great Barrier Reef. The photo was in fact of a reef in the Philippines that had been destroyed by a cyclone, and Greenpeace was trying to pass it off as some sort of coral bleaching or global warming on our reef. It is just absolutely disgraceful.

People in these organisations have no qualms about lying to the kind-hearted Australians who donate money to their causes with genuine concern for the environment. It is these people who are wasting hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars—dollars that taxpayers pay to the government through income tax, company tax and so forth—in our court system, delaying vital economic projects. They pretend to stand for the environment, yet they are really haters of humanity. That is what they are. They somehow justify what they are doing by saying it is going to save us all and without them we would all be stuffed. The fact is that they have absolutely no care for people, for jobs or for our future as a country. To quote the Greenpeace Australia report Stopping the Australian coal export boom:

Our strategy is to 'disrupt and delay' key projects and infrastructure while gradually eroding public and political support for the industry …

That is what they have set out to do. Well, there is political support for coalmines in Queensland, on this side of House, because we know that they create jobs. There is political support for uranium mines in Western Australia, on this side of the House, because we know that every week China is opening up new nuclear power plants that are free of carbon emissions and we have a product that they need. We know that these create jobs. So there is support here on this side of the House, whether it is for coalmining, uranium mining, iron ore mining or perhaps for aquaculture.

We had the member for Melbourne get up earlier today in this place, and all he could go on about was how coal is bad and that we need to switch to renewables. Well that is great. I support renewables too. I have solar on my roof at home and we want to see more solar. We have recently negotiated to ensure that the RET is at an acceptable level so that people's power bills do not go up and that we can achieve it and that we can be involved with town planning to make sure it is laid out properly. So whether it is for aquaculture or solar, or a coalmine that supports people in India that do not have electricity—and keep in mind: our coal is much cleaner than coal from other places—there is support on this side. The member for Melbourne got up and all he talked about was renewable energy and that coal is bad. It had nothing to do with the bill. We are talking about projects and about jobs, because the best thing that we can do is to ensure that Australians, when they get up on a Monday morning, have somewhere to go to work. That is the point.

This delaying tactic by Greenpeace, who say:

Our strategy is to 'disrupt and delay' key projects and infrastructure while gradually eroding public and political support for the industry …

is killing jobs. There are people in my electorate who are desperate to work, right now, and I am happy to stand up here and be counted, and to say: 'I am happy to speak on this bill.' This small change will help jobs, not just in my electorate, but right through the country. Yet we have Labor opposing it again. Labor are opposed to creating jobs, just like they are with the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement. They are opposed to jobs again. This is a sensible change. We are a country with a population that continues to grow. We bring in refugees—and these people need jobs as well. I would urge the opposition and the Independents, in this place and the other place, to support this bill. It is a sensible change, it really is.

I want to say, of course, that not every environmental organisation acts in this way. At a local level, I have had a great time working with conservation groups in the Petrie electorate, like the Mango Hill and North Lakes Environment Group and the Redcliffe Environmental Forum, with the wonderful projects that they have done, with our Green Army, on the ground. I will not go into everything they have done; I have spoken on that issue before. They have done a lot of good for the environment in our local community. Environmental protection does not have to be a war on progress. Developers, projects and conservationists can work well together—they can.

In my electorate we are rolling out some massive infrastructure. The federal government has invested $583 million into the Moreton Bay Rail Link. I also think of the koala monitoring program that is happening there right now which is pioneering the chlamydia vaccine; that has only been able to go ahead because of this construction. The rail link also takes into account the abundance of fauna in the area; there are underpasses for animals to get under it. You know what has been killing koalas in the area? It is not the rail link itself, but the wild dogs. On Monday this week we had endangered species day. It is the wild dogs, the wild cats and those illegal immigrant animals, the cane toads, that kill our snakes and other reptiles. That is what causes a lot of the issues.

I love the environment and I have been lucky enough to caravan right around our great country. I have been to the top of Queensland and up to Thursday Island. I have travelled down to Tasmania and spent a couple of months down in Tassie. None of the boys from Tassie are here today, but it is a wonderful state. I have driven across the Nullarbor, towing my caravan, and have seen the whales out there in the bight. It is a beautiful area. I spent a couple of months in Western Australia, going from Perth up to Broome, and have been to Darwin and Kakadu and the islands north. You know what? I love our environment. I love our freshwater ecosystems. I love fish and the little native turtles. I love all that.

Mr Brendan O'Connor interjecting—

Freshwater fish. I love that—I love the environment. I have three sons and I want to make sure our environment is protected so I can go there in the future with them, but I also believe that we can protect our environment and provide jobs for the millions of Australians that want to work and the hundreds of thousands of Australians that are currently out of work. That is why I am behind this bill.

With the current process, a company—whether it is developing an aquaculture farm, a coalmine or whatever—has an environmental impact assessment that has to look in detail at all of the issues. There is then a public consultation process, for at least one month, for people to make public consultations. It then comes back to the department and of course the minister signs it off. Often the minister has to sign off on it, but so does the state minister. I know they are looking at one-stop shops and things, but right now the state government and the federal government have to agree. There are protections, in place right now, for the environment. Only when this bill passes the House can we be certain that this will improve in some way.

The member for Hunter spoke earlier today in this debate. He spoke about the Shenhua coalmine—and so did the member for Wills—saying that somehow farmers would not be allowed to put in a legitimate claim if section 487 was repealed. Well that is just not true. Farmers have never relied on section 487. The repeal of this section will not affect a farmer's ability to appeal decisions made under national environmental law. What it will do is to remove the ability of extreme groups, as I mentioned before, and of individuals who are nowhere near the project, to hold up—and, as Greenpeace stated before, delay and disrupt, and add a whole lot of cost to—these projects. That is what it will do. So that is why I support this bill. I would encourage others in the House to support it as well, because at the end of the day we can protect our environment and we can also provide jobs.

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