Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to talk on the topic of greenwashing—a word that should have been made the word of the year. It is everywhere. It's in the products that we buy as consumers, it's in the rhetoric we hear from governments and, of course, it's in the annual reports of big corporations. It is literally everywhere.

The reason greenwashing is so prevalent is that Australians and people right around the world know we desperately have to start looking after our environment before we've lost things for good, they know we need to start reducing pollution before our atmosphere and planet are well and truly choked and they know we need to act. They want to be able to use their consumer power to do it, they want to be able to buy products that are genuinely environmentally friendly, they want to back companies that are doing the right thing in terms of sustainability and they want to make sure their governments hear their cries for action when it comes to climate change and protecting the environment.

Consider the spin of what's going on with the Middle Arm project in the Northern Territory—deleting the word 'petrochemicals' on the government's own website to pretend that that project is, indeed, environmentally friendly, when, of course, we know that it's not. Greenwashing is a scourge and it needs to be stopped and it needs to be confronted. Governments needs to act. The ACCC and ASIC both have inquiries into this issue, and I commend them for that. But when will we start to see the regulatory teeth delivered to make sure consumers, voters and people right across the country know they can trust the information that's coming not just from corporations and not just from businesses but from the very government themselves?