Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. Australia's biggest environmental organisation, the Australian Conservation Foundation, said that your gutting of environment laws with the coalition today is a sellout and 'means nature is more poorly protected at the end of the Albanese government's three-year term than it was at the start of it'. Prime Minister, was the environment better protected under Scott Morrison than you, and why has your government sold out the climate and environment?

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

I thank the member for Ryan for her question and for identifying her preference for Scott Morrison as Prime Minister compared with a Labor government that has put in place measures including the most serious climate change policy ever put in place by any Australian government in history—a 43 per cent target by 2030, with mechanisms to get there. We have the safeguard mechanism, the Capacity Investment Scheme, the Solar Sunshot program, Hydrogen Headstart, programs for batteries, programs for the National Reconstruction Fund to drive this through and programs for critical minerals and rare earths through our production tax credits, but they have the hide to come in here and mention Scott Morrison, who may well have been the environment minister as well. That is possible! But such contempt did he have for the environment that, when he was making himself Treasurer, finance minister, industry minister and everything else, he forgot to appoint himself as environment minister. That's how much contempt he had for the environment.

But we protected just on Saturday an extra 100 million hectares of Aussie ocean and bush. A program of some $250 million was announced by our environment minister in the budget to meet our commitment to protect 30 per cent of Australia's landmass by 2030. That is what we have done. We have quadrupled the size of Heard Island and McDonald Islands Marine Reserve—the biggest act of ocean conservation anywhere in the world in 2024. We've tripled the size of Macquarie Island Marine Park. We have blocked proposals like Clive Palmer's big Queensland coalmine. We have doubled funding to better look after national parks, including Kakadu and Uluru, and we're working with First Nations rangers to deliver that protection of the environment, taking account of 65,000 years of knowledge. Throughout our environment, we have invested $550 million to better protect our threatened plants and animals and to tackle the feral animals and weeds killing our native species.

When it comes to the urban environment, we've got our urban rivers program. We have a comprehensive plan and, what's more, a lot of it would have been implemented earlier if the Greens had just voted for it. (Time expired)