Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

One Nation opposes this motion. The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest single structure made by living organisms. The current reef is between 6,000 and 8,000 years of age. It stretches over an area of approximately 344,000 square kilometres. Our understanding of its history and its ebbs and flows over thousands of years is in its infancy. Claims that the reef is dead due to a natural atmospheric trace gas are a lie. Coral bleaching events are natural and re-occurring events that are the result of a temporary increase or decrease in ocean temperature and the lack of wind to mix the ocean waters, sometimes compounded with low sea levels. As with things natural, after bleaching the reef immediately starts to repair itself. The greatest threat to our Great Barrier Reef is activists and ignorant, uncaring politicians falsely using it as a poster child, because that leads to underfunding of real environmental programs like eradicating crown-of-thorns starfish. I remind the Greens that it is day 246— (Time expired)