Keith Pitt (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

As I was saying, if you are one of the thousands of Australians who are up at three in the morning providing catering services to those men and women who start early and finish late, whether on site or in transit, making takeaway breakfasts and lunch packs, cleaning on-site accommodation or cleaning hotels, this change is for you. If you are the teachers, the nurses and the doctors working in regional Australia, helping the people working in regional Australia, this change is for you.

If you are the union members of any stripe, I say to you this: the Labor Party are interested in your membership fees; they are not interested in your long-term employment. If they were, they would be supporting this change, because the Greens have publicly stated:

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

So, every time you see a political ad from the Greens, it is not about the environment. If it were, they would be talking about matters which are doing enormous damage to our flora and fauna: the feral cats that are wiping out entire species; the feral dogs that are destroying livestock for fun, not for food; the feral pigs that are eating to extinction our sea turtle eggs and hatchlings and, in my region, the loggerhead turtles. They are turtles which nest in only two locations in the world, one of them Mon Repos beach, right in the middle of my electorate.

We on this side of the House are the ones improving the environment. It is this government that is allocating money to control feral pigs, to control feral cats and to control wild dogs. When the Greens speak about the Great Barrier Reef or Queensland ports, know that they speak with a forked tongue, because the Greens' aim—the Greens' only aim—is to ensure that Australians do not have a job. That is because the Greens' goal is to destroy industry. The Greens' goal is to close Queensland ports. And they will do anything, say anything and spend anything to ensure that investment in this great nation stops.

We must end the economic vandalism of the Greens, and we must end it now. I commend the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Standing) Bill 2015 to the House.

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