Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The minister's answers to my questions about illegal logging fill me with despair, and I know the people of Australia share that despair with me—or, more than despair, anger, real anger: anger at the denial by this government and by the minister that there's an issue with protecting our precious wildlife from logging—the critically endangered Leadbeater's possums and greater gliders; and in Tasmania we've got critically endangered swift parrots, wedge-tailed eagles and Tasmanian devils. And the backbench are just laughing at the issue, laughing at illegal logging, and laughing at our precious wildlife hurtling towards extinction. The minister's claims that our laws protect the environment fly in the face of reality. They fly in the face of the Federal Court finding that logging is damaging and destroying habitat critical to the survival of the critically endangered Leadbeater's possum.

And so what are they going to do? Rather than taking action, rather than actually listening to the interim report that they commissioned from Graeme Samuel into our environment laws—who has told us that Australia's environment is in an unstable state of decline and under increasing threat and that our environment laws are ineffective—and rather than strengthening our laws, no, they've moved legislation in the House today that is taking a chainsaw to environment laws. It is going to hand over more powers to the states, who have proved themselves totally incapable of protecting our environment.

We need a government that's actually going to stand up for our environment, our precious forests and our precious wildlife that the people of Australia really want to see protected. And this government is not doing it. I say to the people of Australia: if you're as angry as me, then we need to take action, and we need to take it fast. We cannot let the government get away with it. We cannot just allow our wildlife to become extinct. This government needs to hear from you and it needs from hear from you loud and clear about this trashing of our environment laws. And if they don't listen then we need to get these environmental vandals out of office.

Question agreed to.