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

Back over here in reality, I think it's important to put a few facts on the record about what we've just heard—eloquently, I might add—from our friends in the Australian Greens. I think Senator McKim has missed his calling, frankly. He'd be a great fiction writer in a life outside of this parliament—loggers in the night, collusion between major political parties. If you were to believe what you just heard, you could walk outside this chamber and find smouldering stumps and the dead carcasses of animals littering everything everywhere, but the reality is that that is not the case. Nothing of what we've just heard is the case.

I might just put on record that the coalition thinks the nature positive bills that somehow form the substance of that—I don't know how you'd describe what was just provided to the chamber—are a dog. The bills are a dog. Yet—do you know what?—we're trying to do our part, as part of this democratic process, to make the bills better. I have a feeling we're going to struggle to get there, because really, as Senator Hanson-Young rightly called out, all this is doing is providing a very expensive legislated way of giving a new logo to the same people—although there are 2,300 more of them, would you believe. The Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water has had its numbers swell by a further 2,300, with not one of those people out there saving koalas from mad property developers; they're here in Canberra propping up the Public Service's contribution to the economy. Those people are not going to be doing anything more.

I might remind the chamber that it was this government that promised we'd have new environmental laws in the parliament by the end of last year—2023. We're well into 2024 and we have nothing before us in the way of new laws. We do, though, have a law to set up a new bureaucracy which will do diddly squat to protect the environment, and it will do nothing to protect economic activity and jobs.

Again, back over here in reality we're worried about this thing called the cost-of-living crisis. Not one of the previous speakers touched on that. And we need to give credence to the problems being faced by Australian households and businesses. But again, over here, the people who don't represent people in our regions, the people who don't care about jobs in the country—in the mines, on salmon farms, in forests—don't care: lock it up, shut it down, and it doesn't make a damned difference to them and the people who support them. But I'll tell you what, it rips the guts out of our economy.

Balance is key. No-one wants to destroy the environment. But if you listen to the fictitious contributions made by the Australian Greens, it's as though, for giggles on the weekend, coalition and Labor senators fire up their chainsaws and go around forests cutting down trees. We don't! We want to protect the environment as well, but we want to do it in a balanced way that protects the economy. We know mining is essential, because without it you can't build towers for wind turbines, you can't extract the critical minerals for your photovoltaic panels for your solar farms and you can't erect massive power lines that go through beautiful forests; you can't do any of that stuff. But hey, look, we could rip it out of Third World countries, developing countries. That's what these people do.

On forestry, I might add that we do forestry better here than anywhere else in the world does, if you forget the ridiculous contribution fuelled by something that I don't know is legal. The Australian Greens have failed to point out where in the world forestry is done better than here, apart from countries that don't cut down a single tree. The Greens' alternative, of course, is that instead of using the native timbers that we use for beautiful things like this Senate chamber it would be better to rip off the Congo Basin. In their mind, if you can't see it, it doesn't matter. But the by-product of their policy approach is that Australian jobs go out the door, as do regional communities that, frankly, responsible parties of government care about—some more than others, I might say, with the exception of a few. We would never let that happen.

So, with the froth and bubble, the hyperbole that you hear down there—none of it based on fact—we want to have an inquiry into this bill, because, as I said, as it stands today it is a dog. It is a rebranding of a bureaucracy, with a lot more bureaucrats. Hopefully we can make things better, but that sow's ear does not look like it's going to turn into a silk purse anytime soon.