Graham Perrett (Moreton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the motion put forward by the member for Dawson, a motion that I feel very strongly about speaking against. The member for Dawson says that:

… ongoing 'green' lawfare is holding Queensland families to ransom and jeopardising Australia's reputation as a place to do business.

When the member for Dawson says 'green lawfare', what he is referring to is an Australian environmental group using the Australian judicial system, as they are quite entitled to do, to challenge a decision that the group believes will endanger Australia's environmental assets. Not just anyone or any group can bring these challenges; the relevant legislation restricts which groups can make an application. They must show that at any time within the previous two years they have engaged in a series of environmental conservation or research activities in Australia or an Australian external territory. Conservation groups do not get any monetary benefit from a successful challenge, and challenges do cost money. They are acting purely to preserve our environment; but it is stressful, it is costly and it is expensive.

Let's look at the legislation that enables these environmental groups to bring such legal challenges. The Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999—or the EPBC Act—was brought in by that bastion of left-wing policy, the Howard government. The objects of the Howard legislation include:

… to provide for the protection of the environment, especially those aspects of the environment that are matters of national environmental significance; and to promote ecologically sustainable development through the conservation and ecologically sustainable use of natural resources.

To achieve these objects, the act does various things, including promoting a partnership approach to environmental protection and biodiversity conservation through the involvement of the community in management planning. These are commendable objectives and it is hard to see how anyone, 15 years later, would criticise them; but that is what we have seen the member for Dawson do. Obviously, anyone who is sensible and values our precious environment would support the Howard legislation.

It was abundantly clear that the Abbott government did not value the Australian environment. The former Prime Minister Abbott, before he was taken out in the middle of the night, waged a savage attack on the environment from the moment he took office. Foreign Policy, a respected international magazine, referred to the then Prime Minister Abbott as 'the Australian environment's worst nightmare'. We have seen echoes of that today in the speech by the member for Dawson, where he talked about 'climate change alarmism', yet again doing that dog whistling suggestion that climate change is not real.

The Abbott government's record is horrendous. I remember particularly that moment on 25 June; I remember the photograph by Alex Ellinghausen of the members for Flinders, Fisher, Higgins, Sturt and Dickson celebrating at the end of the price on carbon like the weird sisters from Macbeth. I think that photo might be on their walls now as a form of celebration, but I am sure that within a decade that photograph will become a wanted poster as we track down those who did so much to sabotage a responsible response to the environment.

We also saw the Abbott government rush through environmental approvals as soon as they took office. They disallowed the endangered community listing of the River Murray from the Darling River to the sea; they reproclaimed the world's largest marine reserve system so that the managements plans that were in place would have no effect; they ripped funding from the Environmental Defender's Office, the office that allows concerned Australians to challenge environmental approval decisions; and they went backwards on climate change, making Australia a laughing stock by winning five 'fossil' awards at the climate change talks in Warsaw.

We have seen net emissions go up under the environment minister and him somehow arguing that black is white and white is black because it was a good thing that emissions went up. They asked UNESCO to delist 74,000 hectares of World Heritage forest in Tasmania, making Australia only the third country after Oman and Tanzania to try to abandon one of its own World Heritage sites. This is in our time, in the time of the 44th Parliament—unbelievable.

And now, under new leadership but with the same policies—with the same goods to retail—we see the member for Wentworth talking a lot about his commitment to action on climate change, but the reality is that it is all talk. It is hot air only. The Abbott anti-climate-science agenda is still in full swing. It holds him completely in his thrall. What is that saying? The rabbit is always sure it is mesmerising the anaconda—at least until it is eaten. Just last week the member for Wentworth signed off on hundreds of CSIRO job losses, all but ending climate research at the CSIRO. Malcolm Turnbull's government has slashed the CSIRO's budget by $115 million. One in five employees at the CSIRO will lose their job—one in five. This is the biggest loss of jobs in the CSIRO's proud history.

This is particularly interesting given the terms of the motion put forward by the member for Dawson, a motion that notes that if the conservation group were successful in their challenge to the approval for the Adani Carmichael mine it may result in:

… rather than protecting the environment, the replacement of the Galilee Basin’s lower emission coal by higher emission coal from other countries could instead cause an increase in global emissions …

But with the CSIRO's workforce depleted we may never know, because there will be no-one to track the emissions. The director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science says that these job cuts at the CSIRO will result in a catastrophic reduction in our capacity to assess present and future climate change. And when you are the driest continent—when you are the continent that has fantastic farmers who rely on this information—you are really shooting yourself in the foot. Under the Turn-bot or Abb-bull or Abbott-Turnbull government, almost 1,400 CSIRO employees have been sacked.

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