Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I'll take that interjection from Senator Payman, who's been with us a year now. Senator Payman reflects on our time in government. I want to talk about the Great Barrier Reef, which is susceptible to the impacts of climate change which, as the point's been made by the Australian Greens, is generated by carbon emissions. Yesterday we had this galling claim from the minister for the environment and the Prime Minister that after 15 months in government they saved the reef. But I want us to look at the history. In 2012, under the Labor government—and I can't remember which Prime Minister was in power at that point—the UNESCO World Heritage Committee had the reef going onto the 'in danger' list. It was a coalition government that invested $2 billion to get us on the right path. If we want to talk about a decade—however you characterise it—let's get some proof into this and look at some evidence of our decade. It was just last year, in August 2022, that the Australian Institute of Marine Science demonstrated for their 36 years of record keeping the reef had record coral cover. That was last year. It was at its lowest under Labor in 2012. Guess what? They say: 'Forget the last decade.' They characterise it as 'waste' and 'neglect' and whatever other adjectives they've picked up from their night-time viewing of Utopia to apply to the coalition's last nine years. They say: 'Let's forget the science. Let's forget the empirical data.' They talk about legislating a target and say they've suddenly fixed the reef. They haven't. This is the bunkum in Labor's narrative. Their policies are falling apart. They will probably be forced over time to adopt a climate trigger. They'll probably be forced to by the Australian Greens in negotiations over their much delayed and seriously shaky environmental reforms, their Nature Positive Plan, which has no basis whatsoever.

Let's not forget that in the year 2005 the shadow environment and heritage minister, the Hon. Anthony Albanese, currently the Prime Minister, proposed exactly the same thing we're debating here today. So this is coming from a government that says one thing at a point in time, normally before an election, and then goes and does something very different after the election. You had the former shadow environment minister, now Prime Minister, saying that there was a 'glaring gap in matters of national environmental significance' on climate change and that the bill he introduced contemplating a climate trigger would 'enable major new projects to be assessed for their climate change impact as part of any environmental assessment process' and would ensure that new developments reflected best practice.

So the now Labor Prime Minister had a very similar bill to the one that Senator Hanson-Young has put before us. He now has the keys to the Lodge. He sits at the head of the table in cabinet. What's changed? I'm not sure anything has changed. I say to the people of Australia: don't trust them, because I reckon there is a chance that Senator Hanson-Young will get her way and will convince this crew here in a moment of weakness to adopt a climate trigger and bring about the economic Armageddon that we inevitably see under Labor-Green governments in this country. You've got it from the now Prime Minister and then shadow environment minister. You didn't get it from any Labor speaker in this debate, but that's the truth. The damage and the destruction, economically and environmentally, that will come from this arrangement—by 'this arrangement' I mean the Labor-Greens coalition and their bills to lock down development in this country only to send emissions and jobs offshore—will destroy this country. I look forward to further Labor contributions that might reference the cost-of-living crisis they are making worse.