Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

RMACK () (): After listening to the member for Corangamite I should feel so relieved, because everything that the Labor Party seem to think that they, not the Australian people, have inherited is going to be fixed! They're not going to waste a day, we hear.

I take issue with the member for Corangamite, because a lot was done under the previous government. There were practical solutions such as Landcare. Around $1 billion was allocated to Landcare for the period between 2018 and 2023. That money is going to go to solutions on the ground, not stripping miners of their jobs or stripping away water through buybacks from farmers. When you enter Griffith, there's a billboard that proudly declares, 'Riverina winemakers —one in four glasses of wine made here.' That's not just one in four glasses for the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area; that's one in four glasses of Australian wine produced in and around Griffith. How do they produce that wine? They produce it because they get valuable water from the Murray-Darling, which is then used to grow all manner of things, let alone vineyards.

The point I make here is that I well recall, on Friday 29 October 2012, then Prime Minister Julia Gillard standing on the wharf at Goolwa and declaring that an additional 450 gigalitres of water were going to go to the environment—all well and good. We all need the environment, and farmers get a bad rap. They are the best environmentalists in all the world. Make no mistake: they have to be. They have to protect land and water. They have to make sure that their future is going to be secure. I get just a little bit tired of listening, as we have in this debate, to people such as the member for Warringah—and good luck to her. I know she's trying to best represent her people who sent her here, as we all do. But, when you get an electorate of 68 square kilometres, like the division of Warringah—

An opposition member: Tiny.

Tiny—extremely tiny. But the member for Warringah is trying to tell Australians, particularly regional Australians, how they should live their lives when they are doing the hard yards when it comes to making sure that we've got such things as solar farms and those dreaded wind turbines and that all of the environmental advantages that we're going to do to lower emissions are being done. The burden is being carried by regional Australians.

I listened to the member for Macquarie. Yes, I commend those people who saved that forest. I do. Far be it from me. I appreciate that he gets a bad reputation sometimes, but the work that Matt Kean did with the Wollemi pines in the last lot of bushfires, those dreadful Black Summer bushfires, saved those dinosaur trees, as they're called. It was a great effort by the New South Wales coalition government to make sure that they protected those trees, but the Sugar Pines Walk at Tumbarumba was, indeed, largely destroyed by those fires.

I take umbrage with what was being declared as though this was the first-ever fire that happened in Australia. We've had terrible fires before. Nobody likes fires. Nobody likes fires at all, but they do happen, unfortunately. When members opposite come in here and try to seek political advantage by declaring that this happened on our watch because of the policies we were putting in place, I call that nonsense, because it is a nonsense. Whilst they can say that all will be alright now because we've got a Labor-Greens government in play in Canberra—well, good luck, because you're going to have more droughts, you're going to have more floods, and you're going to have more fires. It's not just because of climate change; it's a natural event that occurs in Australia. If you don't believe me, read Core of My Heart, from 1904, by Dorothea Mackellar. It has happened since time began, and it will continue to happen.

I appreciate the member for North Sydney mentioning the thylacine. On the topic of bringing back the thylacine. there is a podcast out saying that science is going to reproduce the Tassie tiger, last seen in 1936. I commend that to her. I appreciate the member for Fremantle coming into this place, putting in place the State of the environment report and making out that nothing happened under the coalition government. There was record funding. The Great Barrier Reef is in good shape now. Murray-Darling—got along with a lot of good there. We will continue to do that, and we will continue to prosecute the opposition and to make sure they too can have as good a record as we had.

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