Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

Document No. 10 is the 2008-09 report of the Natural Heritage Trust of Australia, which senators will recall was an initiative of the Howard government and which, in brief, succeeded in putting the proceeds of the sale of Telstra into good environmental projects around Australia.

In the NHT, as I refer to it, there were a number of grants in that year for parts of North Queensland and Northern Australia. What we as a government wanted to do was make sure that the natural heritage of those areas was supported. It was supported through NRM groups, where people who lived on the land—in the case of the gulf and Cape York, Indigenous people, cattleman, graziers and community dwellers—could do things cleverly, allowing for production to come off that land.

All the good work that the Natural Heritage Trust did do and could have done more of was abrogated when the Queensland government for purely political reasons introduced the wild rivers legislation. The way in which the wild rivers legislation was introduced into Queensland is well known: there is a coffee shop in South Brisbane where the Greens got in representatives of the Australian Labor Party state government and said to them, 'Look, if you want our preferences for the next election, you'll lock down Cape York.' So the Bligh government, never known for its—