Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Hansard source

It's been a very strange day here in the Australian parliament, of course. We've seen the really unedifying spectacle of a Prime Minister coming into the chamber to say that he will not be taking any action in relation to a minister with a criminal investigation hanging over his head. I think that most Australians would be quite gobsmacked that the Prime Minister—who is responsible for ministerial standards—is taking this quite remarkable step of saying: 'Nothing to see here. There might be a New South Wales police strike force—Strike Force Garrad—investigating this minister, but I'm just going to take no action whatsoever.' I think that's weak, and I think it's a real indictment of this government. There are a couple of things I think you need to have in order to be Prime Minister: you've got to have guts and you've got to have principles. And this Prime Minister has just demonstrated that he has neither. So it's an odd day to be standing up to give a speech in the address-in-reply debate, because, traditionally, the address-in-reply debate is an opportunity to reflect on the election and the term ahead. Here we are, six months or so into the term, and Australians are rightly looking at this government and saying: 'Well, what do you stand for? If you don't stand for integrity, if you don't stand for upholding standards, what actually does this government stand for?'

It's fair to say, particularly at the moment, given some of the very concerning and serious weather we've been facing and some of the stresses in our communities that we've been facing, that Australians are worried and they're looking for leadership. The droughts and the bushfires we've recently experienced have left communities reeling. Australians from the bush to the city are anxious about what those conditions mean for the future, especially given the widespread acknowledgement that climate change will mean the severity and frequency of wild weather will increase. And that's not just my view. If you read the drought coordinator's report that the government recently released quite belatedly—the drought coordinator's report was provided to them several months ago, but they released it only a couple of weeks ago—the drought coordinator talks squarely about the importance of climate change in the changing patterns of weather and in the increased severity and frequency of drought in Australia. And that's one of the reasons why he says that we need to have a national drought strategy. It's not just ad hoc announcements from the Commonwealth. He lays out a very clear road map for putting together a drought strategy. Our side of politics has been reaching out to the government to say, 'Let's get together, let's work across the parliament—bipartisan, non-partisan, get together people from the crossbench as well—to work on how we can come up with a national drought strategy based on the very solid grounding that the drought coordinator has provided.'

After years of neglect under the Liberals and Nationals, it's very clear that serious environmental damage is now threatening our unique, Australian way of life. Environmental destruction, from the bush to the beach and beyond, is putting hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk—in tourism, in agriculture and in natural resources. And Australians will not stand by and watch while the koala, the platypus and other species are put at risk. We won't let the reef be devastated. We won't let our rivers dry up or our oceans fill with plastic pollution without a fight.

I'm sure, Deputy Speaker Gillespie, like so many Australians, you've been watching with concern the plight of the koalas in the bushfire season we've just had. Today, of course, we've had the very sad news that Lewis—the koala that became famous because he was saved by a woman who took off her shirt, ran into a fire and wrapped him up to get him out safely—has died from the injuries that he suffered in that bushfire. Of course that's one animal of one species in one location, but Australians are seeing this as emblematic of concerns that we have about animal life, biodiversity and the environment.

Labor will stand shoulder to shoulder with our fellow Australians to save our precious natural environment and our Australian way of life, just like we did when facing the great environmental challenges of the past. Labor will always put science and on-the-ground local knowledge at the heart of decision-making. I will return to some of the issues in my portfolio shortly, but first I'd like to make some remarks about my electorate and my constituents.

Representing the south side is a very great honour, and it's also a very great pleasure. It's a wonderful electorate that I have in Griffith. It's a beautiful place along the river in Brisbane. It has some of the country's best icons like the Gabba, the Story Bridge and the South Bank. It has amazing restaurants, amazing culture and, most importantly, amazing people. And I'm so grateful that my community re-elected me in May this year. Working hard for my community is a privilege, and I feel the weight of that privilege every single day. I will continue to be a strong voice for the south side.

Locally, the community faces a range of issues: overdevelopment, traffic congestion, the pressures on public transport, the pressures on bicycle infrastructure—the need for all of those things that can make our city work better. They're all related. Also related is the increasing pressure on schools, on local parks and on local health services by the increasing population density in my electorate of Griffith. I want to call on the government right now, in developing the South East Queensland City Deal, to make sure that these issues—which really are posing serious challenges to the lifestyles of people living in the inner south—are taken into account.

In a similar vein, I want to talk about the Bulimba Barracks. In a way it's an overdevelopment question, because there's been a fight about what should happen with the land, but it's also a question about whether the government is paying enough attention to our area. There've been some deeply concerning issues that have emerged at the Bulimba Barracks. The barracks has a proud history in our community. It represents service, it represents honour and it stands as a living memory of the sacrifice that Australians from far and wide have made for our great country, but, instead of treating this site with the reverence it deserves, the government has been very slow to respond to findings of contamination—including PFAS. As people would know, the federal government has been working on the sale of the barracks for its entire time in office. The site has now been sold to overseas developers, and the sale will be settled in five or six months time. Our local southside Labor team—me, state MP Di Farmer, local councillor Kara Cook and former councillor Shayne Sutton—fought the federal government's approach to this site from the start, demanding a fair go and also a real say for our community. From the moment it went on the chopping block, we fought tooth and nail, side by side with our community, to get a master plan for the site, because without one this sale would have led to terrible outcomes for the community. It's a peninsula area. The roads in and out are already congested. It's really important that there isn't rampant overdevelopment on the site. We got the master plan, which will mean less of a development footprint and less of a traffic burden, but we've had an ongoing struggle to get the government to face up to the contamination issues at the site. Those issues were reported to the government more than a year ago, in August 2018, but it seems to have taken no remedial action since that time—one of the ministers confirmed as much in a letter to me recently—and nor is there any real indication that the government will take any action between now and when the sale is settled in five or six months time.

As I said, PFAS is present on the barracks site. It's a chemical capable of causing cancer, according to many jurisdictions around the world. It's been found to be present on a lot of Defence sites around Australia. The former Prime Minister announced a package of measures to, allegedly, investigate it and clean it up. There's no evidence that that's been done in our community at the barracks site. It's a disgrace. It's been reported that up to 40,000 people are joining a class action in Australia against PFAS contamination, spearheaded by Erin Brockovich—I'm sure you remember the movie, Deputy Speaker. In relation to the contamination that's been found on this particular site, about 200 of the site's neighbours in Bulimba have signed my online petition, calling on the government to rectify the contaminants on the site. The government has sat on its hands, despite my calls for some action in relation to PFAS. It's outrageous to think that the federal government can abrogate its responsibility to ensure a proper and thorough clean-up of a site that has been contaminated over generations, particularly when there is potential for run-off from the site, from the contaminants on the land. Also, the government's own documents are telling it that there are contaminants sitting in sediment in stormwater drains that run to the Brisbane River. It's just not good enough.

Speaking of things not being good enough, I want to mention the government's neglect of another Defence related property: the former Red Cross Hall, a property owned by the Commonwealth, which is right across the road from a veterans' hospital, Greenslopes Private Hospital—

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