Susan McDonald (Queensland, National Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome this notice of motion from Senator Whish-Wilson because it gives us an opportunity to have a real discussion, a real debate about what is happening in Australia and in the world, and to talk about practical measures, not ideology. If I can, I will start with the Great Barrier Reef. Once again, there's this hysterical kind of discussion. It's about only ever wanting to listen to one side of what they hear. The latest bleaching has shown that, of the 3,000 estimated reefs across the Great Barrier Reef, only 300 reefs have been surveyed. Not all areas have been surveyed; only shallow reefs have been surveyed, not deepwater ones. Not all of them have been bleached yet, if we were to listen to these hysterical words from a Tasmanian senator, this is a disaster.

In actual fact, we are coming off record coral cover over the last two years. This is something that the Greens don't want to acknowledge and won't acknowledge. Roger Beeden, the chief scientist at GBRMPA, in a press release this month, said:

It is important to note, that the heat stress has not been even across the Reef, and the coral bleaching observed is variable.

…   …   …

The Reef has demonstrated its capacity to recover from previous coral bleaching events …

And the AIMS report states that bleaching in 2021-22 did not result in widespread mortality. People must remember that bleaching doesn't automatically mean death. It's great to see this news, because the Great Barrier Reef is one of the best-managed reefs in the world.

I listened carefully to the last contribution. There was never any acknowledgement of the work done in the last term of government. There is the contribution, too—and this is something that Labor people will never talk about because they have overseen this in Queensland for the last 30 of 35 years—of the impact on the Great Barrier Reef of sewage in water streams. It is always farmers who are damaging the Great Barrier Reef. They pour all of their attention and effort into that, but they won't look at funding and supporting councils to improve their sewerage systems and do some practical measures.

What is happening on the Great Barrier Reef is not the hysterical crisis that the Greens would have you believe. I was just thinking back over my lifetime. We had 'the end of the world is nigh' due to pollution in the 1970s. Guess what? Human ingenuity and technology cleaned up the air. We had the hole in the ozone layer. That was going to kill us. Guess what? That's closed over. We've had global cooling, the ice ages and global warming. Everything is unprecedented and people are exhausted. They're exhausted from the hysteria and they're desperate to have balanced media coverage that provides an opportunity for humans to stay positive.

I am positive. I am positive that, over thousands of years, humans have innovated. Humans have improved on their condition. Humans are always able to come up with a solution, and I feel confident that we will continue to do that. That's what I tell my children, because I am positive about the future. I'm also positive about a future that has fossil fuels. It's shocking, isn't it? But I feel we have a moral imperative to continue to provide electricity, not just in this country but around the world.