Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Minister for Health) Share this | Hansard source

I'm just warming up. What happened on our watch? The reef was taken off the World Heritage watchlist. And what did the head of the World Heritage Committee say? They said that Australia, under our watch, was a role model to the world—Minister Maria Bohmer of Germany—as to how to manage a world heritage property. Why would that be? Because we inherited five major dredge disposal projects in that reef, and we ended them all. We banned capital dredge disposal in the barrier reef, which had been a practice for over 100 years and right through the Greens partnership with the ALP—silence, inaction and passivity on behalf of not just the Greens but their beloved ALP. These two parties are tied at the hip, and they are environmental frauds. Do you hear that? Environmental frauds! They had their chance. They had six long, painful years and did nothing.

We went a lot further though. We put $210 million into the Reef Trust. We're part of a $2 billion investment in the reef over the coming 10 years and this Prime Minister announced a billion-dollar Reef Fund in the lead-up to the election, which has now been put in place. That's what we did. That's why the World Heritage Committee took Australia off the watchlist for our management of the reef on our watch. But they put the reef on the watchlist under Labor and under the Greens. At the end of the day, Labor and the Greens are environmental frauds, and they failed on the reef.

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