Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Fremantle has always been a activist community. It's always been a place where people don't wait for problems or challenges to be solved elsewhere. They put forward answers and solutions and they campaign for those solutions to be applied. Sometimes that starts with the leadership and inspiration of a single person like Rebecca Prince-Ruiz, who created the change phenomenon that is Plastic Free July. This amazing work was recognised in last week's King's Birthday Honours with an Order of Australia.

Rebecca's work began in 2011, and the success of Plastic Free July in raising awareness about the terrible scourge of plastic pollution and providing a way for people to start reducing the plastic in their lives has grown to involve more than 100 million people in 190 countries. Globally, participants have avoided 2.1 billion tonnes of waste, including 300 million kilograms of plastic.

This week Rebecca and the Plastic Free July movement landed in Parliament House for an event on Monday organised by the Parliamentary Friends of Waste and Recycling—the members for Bennelong, Corangamite and Bass—and Rebecca has challenged all of us to be a part of Plastic Free July by pledging to no longer use disposable coffee cups in Parliament House, noting that last year 252,000 of these plastic lined and non-recyclable containers were wasted in this place.

On Tuesday we enjoyed another event with a strong Fremantle element as an extension of a long-running community campaign to save Ningaloo Reef, which has now returned to the unfinished business of protecting Exmouth Gulf. When World Heritage listing of Ningaloo was achieved, following a huge community effort in the early 2000s, the assessment acknowledged that the ideal boundaries of the protected area would include Exmouth Gulf, a stronghold for threatened species, like dugongs, turtles, dolphins and sawfish. Two of the Fremantle people who played key roles in that first Ningaloo campaign are working to lead the next stage of a vital environmental protection effort: Paul Gamblin, who is the Director of Protect Ningaloo for the Australian Marine Conservation Society, and Tim Winton, one of Australia's greatest storytellers and an unstinting activist in the cause of marine and coastal protection. A feature of the event was footage from the incredible documentary that Tim Winton has helped produce to showcase the importance of Exmouth Gulf as a feature of a remarkably precious three-part ecosystem, and I encourage all Australians to check it out on ABC iview.

The event was attended by the Minister for the Environment and Water and the Special Envoy for the Great Barrier Reef as another demonstration of the Albanese government's determination to make environmental protection and restoration a priority at a time when we know our biodiversity has been hammered and is under enormous pressure. As Tim Winton rightly says: 'I believe in patriotism, but patriotism doesn't always involve waving a flag or firing a gun. It means defending your home place.' That is what those of us advocating for Ningaloo have been doing. There is a lot of love of home and love of country in this show.

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