Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The former speaker has told of when he first heard of the Nature Positive Plan. I first heard about it the night before the last election. It was the night before the last election that the Labor Party announced this policy. It was on the evening of the election. It's a little bit suspicious. There's something a little bit off about announcing a major policy like that. The Labor Party is right that it will be a big change to how things happen in this country, and they announced it just hours before people began to vote. If it was such a good policy, why wouldn't they announce it weeks before and give people a chance to consider it?

A lot of people vote early, so a lot of people had already voted by the time the Labor Party announced this policy. They announced it the night before the election. Why might that be? One suspicion of course would be that, at the election the next day, the Labor Party needed the Greens voters to preference them. That's the only way they win. The only way they win is to have Greens voters across the country preference the Labor Party and get Labor Party people elected, because in lots of seats, the Labor Party don't get enough votes to get elected. In fact the Labor Party primary vote at the last election was the lowest the Labor Party had ever received since 1910! And they actually won the election. They got just a third of the votes from the Australian people directly. Indirectly, they were able to govern through the preferences of the Greens.

I've got a lot to say about my Greens colleagues, but they're no fools, and they would have asked for something for their preferences. They would have asked for something to say, 'We're going to give the power for the Labor Party to govern, to become ministers and to be in this place.' They would definitely have asked for something. Maybe—just maybe—what they asked for was a nature-positive plan. That's why it was announced on the night before the election. It was because the Labor Party were a bit embarrassed about it, and they didn't want a scare campaign. They didn't want the truth. A truth campaign is what it would have been. They didn't want a truth campaign to be out there in parts of Western Australia and in Queensland where this is important to my constituents, so they dropped it on the night before the election. That's probably what happened.

The previous speaker, my friend and colleague Senator Brockman, spoke about the deals the Labor Party do in this place. We might be just hours from finishing this parliamentary term, and the thing that the Australian public should be wary of in the next few weeks and months is the deals that the Labor Party will do outside this place, because, once again, before the next election there is no doubt the Labor Party will have to enter preference discussions with the Greens, with teals and with crossbenchers. Unlike the deals in this place, we may not have any transparency or know what's going on there. We may not have any idea what they're agreeing to to get those preferences, and the Australian people might be completely in the dark once again if there's a drop on the night before the election of some major policy change that affects this country. This policy was clearly announced without thought and consideration. Otherwise, it would have passed by now. They've had three years to do this. As I said, they promised it three years ago on the night before the election, and they haven't delivered it. They haven't delivered it because it is a complete dog's breakfast of a policy that the whole mining industry is opposed to and that large parts of the country that rely on good, strong industries like mining and agriculture don't want to see. There is very little support for it out there.

The scary thing despite that and despite the fact that this massive increase in red tape on the business sector of this country has been stopped in this parliamentary term—it won't happen now for sure—is we may very well get this because there's a very good chance that the Labor Party won't just be needing the preferences at the election; they'll be needing the actual votes of members of the other place after the election to form government and to keep confidence. They may have to form a minority government. That is a real risk. That's why the teals went along to have drinks at the Lodge. Was it last night or the night before?