Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

To the Prime Minister: 50 per cent of Australia's GDP is reliant on nature, yet the bill that your government is ramming through today will further weaken environmental protections by creating an exemption to national nature laws for a polluting industry. It will reduce accountability and risk pushing the World Heritage valued maugean skate to extinction. With your government and you as PM already breaking the 2022 election promise to strengthen nature laws, do you accept that there can be no trust this election in commitments on protecting the environment?

Anthony Albanese (Grayndler, Australian Labor Party, Prime Minister) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Warringah for her question. But let's be very clear about what happened with our environmental laws. We went to an election in 2022 saying we would have a national environmental protection authority. That legislation passed this House and sat over there in the Senate for month after month after month while crossbenchers tried to connect it up with a whole range of other issues that were not related to the legislation that was there. Publicly they did it. This isn't any secret here; that is what they said. They said, 'unless you take action to stop all forestry and unless you do a whole range of things' that they wanted connected to that legislation, they would not pass it. And then, when the legislation was eventually before the Senate, the crossbenchers, including Fatima Payman, who was elected as a Labor senator but ratted on the Labor Party to sit on the crossbench, made it clear that, having received under about 0.1 per cent of the vote, she would oppose that legislation, along with other crossbench members. So be careful what you vote for when you vote Independent because you never know what you will get.

What you know from us is we will stand up for the environment. The Greens political party held up that legislation and refused to vote for it month after month after month. If they had wanted to vote for it, they could have at any time. Not only did they not vote for it; there were deferrals, just like there were over housing legislation, just like there were over so many issues. They were standing in a corner and pretending that they had no responsibility. We have 25 votes in the Senate out of 76. I suggest, if people want Labor government legislation, they vote Labor in both houses when it comes to the election coming up.