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

I am pleased to participate in this debate on this matter of public importance and bring a sense of reality and common sense to an issue that has been concerning Australians for a long time. I will say at the outset that I was pleased to hear the rhetoric from the previous speaker, Senator Thorp, from the government benches. If only that rhetoric were moved into reality, then I would have to say that it would be perhaps one thing on which I agreed with the Labor government. I will give some credit to the Labor government—and this is a rare thing for me to do. I have to say, as the Howard government we did try to bring together the state and federal environment rules so that there was one assessment process. Unfortunately, we had not achieved that at the time we left government. So I am pleased that at least the Labor Party is paying the rhetoric. I am delighted that at COAG the federal government will be meeting with a series of what are now sensibly governed states who have a real interest in the environment but also a real interest in reducing red and green tape.

I am always proud to come to debates on the environment by reminding the parliament that every serious environmental measure for the betterment of Australia has been introduced by Liberal governments. The first ever minister for the environment came from a Liberal government. When you go back through history and look, for example, at the Great Barrier Reef and Fraser Island, you see that most of the serious environmental advancements, such as the EPBC Act, were made under Liberal governments. As I always said to my good friend Robert Hill, who introduced the EPBC Act, it is an act that is good in the hands of a sensible, responsible, reasonable and balanced minister, but if you put it in the hands of someone like Tony Burke you have real problems—and haven't my predictions turned out to be true.

Unfortunately, the Labor Party's decisions on the environment are dependent on whether they will retain the support of the Greens in the lower house, where they need that one vote for Ms Gillard to remain as Prime Minister, with all the power that the Prime Minister exercises. You will recall that, before the last election, in the greatest rebuff to the voters' trust in the Australian political system, Ms Gillard promised solemnly never to introduce a carbon tax under the government she led. It is no wonder now that Australians simply do not believe anything our current Prime Minister says.

I go back to where I started my contribution. The Liberal and National parties are the parties in the Australian political system that have been the cause of every serious environmental advancement in this country. Once upon a time we had the best managed sustainable forests. That meant that the forestry companies went through and cleared the undergrowth and the fuel. They had tracks through every forest. On site, they had not only capable men and women but also resources to put out any fire that started. The Greens came along and shut down forestry, shut down these tracks and shut down employment opportunities. More importantly, they shut down those people who could address wildfires as they started. As Senator Williams often says, the Black Saturday fires in Victoria occurred because of the huge fuel build-up in the national parks. Fifty per cent of the fires on Black Saturday came from national parks.

The Greens and the Labor Party love setting up national parks but they never put any money into them; they never put any money into properly managing them. They have become havens for feral animals, weeds and fuel that is tinder dry and ready to explode. I understand more damage has been done to Australia's biodiversity by these wildfires, which happened because the Greens will not let any fuel be removed from our native or other forests—

Senator Siewert interjecting—

You only need five tonnes per hectare of fuel, a 40-degree day and a 50-kilometre wind and a fire becomes uncontrollable. And talk about the koalas—what koalas are left after those sorts of wildfires? It is you, the Greens political party, that cause the death of so many koalas and of so much else of our very special biodiversity that makes Australia great. And you want to blame someone—and I do; I point to the corner where the Greens sit with all their misguided logic on the environment.

Far be it from me to support the Labor Party on this, but giving environmental control to one authority, using the environmental laws of both the Commonwealth and a particular state, is a marvellous thing to do. I can give you any number of examples, and I will give you just a few. There is a cassava farm up in Home Hill, near where I live. They spent literally millions of dollars to get state government approval. Everything is ready to go. Once the state government has given its approval, they have to then try and get this lot that presently control the government in Canberra to go and oversee it and do exactly the same thing that the state government—in this case, a Labor state government—had already done.

There is another instance up where I come from, with the Guthalungra prawn farm. Do not hold me to the figures, but they are close enough to be accurate. The proponents spent something like $10 million getting state government approval for the farm. Having gone through the most stringent process, they then come down to Canberra and have this idiot mob here—who are held in office by the Greens and therefore susceptible to every whim of the Greens—put a whole new set of assessments, delays, costs and conditions on them. They get to $20 million to introduce a prawn farm that provides food not only for Australia but for the starving millions around the world that the Greens pretend on occasion they are concerned about. This green tape, this duplication, stops the production of food in Australia.

The Greens hate dams. The Labor Party, being as gutless as they are, also hate dams because they need the Greens support to keep this government in power or to get preferences. We have this Northern Australia Land and Water Taskforce which, in its original configuration, under Senator Heffernan, looked at dams. The government changed and the membership of that committee changed. They brought out a report and, when they were challenged about how weak it was, said, 'Oh, we were told by the government we could not look at dams.'

This shows how neither the Greens nor the Labor Party have the courage to look at the real issues confronting Australia. Sure, animals are important, and if these parties believed they were important they would do something about the fuel loads in the forests so that the koalas would not be killed. That is why we are losing our koalas.

But the Greens do not seem to worry about people—they do not seem to worry about Australians who need jobs or about people around the world who are starving and need Australia's food. The Greens are not interested in people; all they talk about is biodiversity, and they are really the cause of the destruction of most of Australia's biodiversity.

Regrettably, time is not going to allow me to make a lot of the other points that I wanted to make. But I say to the Labor government that the rhetoric on getting a streamlined approach to environmental assessments is good. It does not mean reducing your standards, and it does not mean ignoring any Commonwealth or state environmental law. It means getting a better process and getting rid of an enormous amount of green tape and having not only the science and the environment but also development jobs and—most importantly—food as well.