Matt Burnell (Spence, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'll take your interjection, Member for Dawson—apart from running a scaremongering campaign based on the idea that, on that side of the chamber, you know farmers and, on this side of the chamber, we don't know farmers—'You're bad; we're good.' Newsflash, buddy: without a productive, safe, positive environment, our farmlands don't work, and I know that because I spent quite a lot of my youth growing up on family farms. I was also lucky that my father spent quite a long time with the Victorian Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. I had a firsthand experience of going with him on 'Take your kid to work' days. I got to see what happens when we don't take care of our environment. Soil degradation and higher salinity levels make farming harder and production drops off. It is important that we take care of our environment because, without our environment, we don't have anywhere to live and, as the member for Dawson likes to rightly point out, we can't grow crops. Yes, we need to feed the nation, but we also need lands that support that production of food and, importantly, we need an environment that is supported by good policy to ensure that that land remains productive and safe for generations to come.

That's what the Nature Positive (Environment Protection Australia) Bill 2024 and the related bills essentially go towards. It's about setting a framework where you can look to the future and know with a high level of certainty that we are going to have an environment that is habitable, that is productive for food production and where farmers are profitable. This is not about shutting down farming; this is about working with farmers, working with our agricultural sector, working with our environment. It's about having a positive environment so that we can work positively with farmers and people to live in harmony. I really have to say that the member for Dawson needs to pull his head out of his proverbial and see the sunlight. We constantly hear this rhetoric about wind towers taking up land that we can't farm on. Actually, the truth is that you can still farm around your wind towers.

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