Louise Miller-Frost (Boothby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm really pleased to speak on yet another environment bill, the Nature Positive (Environment Protection Australia) Bill 2024, and the associated bills, brought here by the Minister for the Environment and Water and the Albanese Labor government, because the environment matters to this government and the environment matters to my constituents in Boothby—whether it's our native forests and scrubland in the hills of Boothby, the urban rivers and catchments that spread across the plains down to the coast, the beautiful beaches, the magnificent cliff faces or the marine environment. The environment is where we live, work and play. It supports our unique native wildlife, providing habitats and food. It supports industry and the economy. It supports the community and our way of life.

Most importantly, the environment has value in and of itself. Our environment is precious and needs to be protected. This would seem to be self-evident, but we know that the last government, the Liberal-National government, did not protect the environment. What they did instead, as they did with so many things, was simply hide the report card away from the Australian people. Rather than actually work to fix the issues they had been made aware of with the degradation of the environment, they instead worked to hide the evidence. The former minister, now the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, received the five-yearly State of the environment report before Christmas 2021 but chose to keep it hidden, locked away, until after the federal election. This is fundamentally an antidemocratic action. Democracy is based on individual voters making rational decisions based on information as to what they believe will be the best policies and representation for themselves. But on the state of the environment, as in so many other areas, the record of those opposite is they hid information from the voters. They hid their shame, and they tried to deceive Australian voters.

We now know, because when Labor was first elected Minister Plibersek released the State of the environment report—and it was a catalogue of horrors. It showed just how much damage a decade of Liberal Party and National Party neglect did to our environment. The report said the Australian environment is in very bad shape and getting worse. It found Australia has lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent. For the first time Australia has more foreign plant species than native. Habitat the size of Tasmania has been cleared. Plastics are choking our oceans—up to 80,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre. And flow in most Murray-Darling rivers has reached record low levels. And it wasn't just neglect; there were actual deliberate acts to endanger and degrade the environment. Under the Liberals and Nationals, our environment fared so badly. In the last decade, on top of climate denialism, they ignored the Samuel review into our environment laws, sabotaged the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, set recycling targets with no plan to actually achieve them, cut highly protected areas of marine parks in half, cut funding to the environment department by 40 per cent. And, of course, we know their record on climate change denialism. Peter Dutton laughed about rising sea levels in the Pacific.

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