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

If you want to know what this schedule of this particular bill that we are debating today means, you just need to have a look at who asked for it. It was asked for, begged for, by some of the country's biggest gas cartel CEOs, including the head of Santos. Santos has just been in a long battle with the traditional owners in the north of the country because they want to not just wreck their traditional sea country but, of course, continue to make the climate crisis worse. If you want to know the truth about this amendment, look at who is putting it forward. It has been snuck into a bill that is virtually irrelevant to the topic of cutting this consultation. It has been snuck in by the resources minister, even though it is directly related to the Minister for the Environment's job and role.

This bill is a gag on First Nations people. This bill allows for the trashing and bypassing of environmental laws, and it is about fast tracking big climate-wrecking gas projects. The CEOs of the biggest gas companies in the country want it. The traditional owners in the areas where these companies want to build these gas projects oppose it. And the minister in charge of it is the minister who is doing the bidding of the big fossil fuel industries, not the minister whose job it is to protect the environment. If you want to know what is really going on, they are the facts.

This government now have a broken promise on this. They first promised the Australian people that they would listen and consult with First Nations people in these types of issues and would give them a voice. They also promised that they would strengthen and fix our environmental laws. These new schedules in this bill break those promises. The government also promised to take urgent climate action and to take the climate crisis seriously, and all this bill will do—these sneaky changes, fast-tracking the approval, bypassing environmental laws for the gas cartel—is drive the climate crisis to become much worse and supercharge pollution. (Time expired)