Elizabeth Watson-Brown (Ryan, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

There is one week left before parliament dissolves, and this is how the Labor government wants to spend it—not on expanding free GP visits, cutting student debt or things that will actually help the citizens of Australia but teaming up with the Liberal and National parties to rush through environment-wrecking 'reforms', special carve-outs for multinational corporations in the salmon industry, making it, by the way, easier to approve new coal and gas.

I hope everyone watching this remembers the priorities of the major parties. Are they working for the people who elected them? They're clearly working for the corporations that fund their campaigns, and they're relying on people being too distracted—so hammered and so busy trying to scrape enough cash together to see the doctor or pay the rent or just survive—to actually notice. Well, we're noticing. Labor's hoping that you didn't notice this bill. Under the cover of the budget they've just introduced some of the most environmentally destructive laws I've seen in this place, and, sadly, there have been a lot of them. As the ACF said just today, this actually means that our environment laws are weaker than they were when Labor took office. They're weaker than under the coalition. The Prime Minister has done a deal—this happens way too often—with the Leader of the Opposition and the coalition to ram these destructive laws through in this last sitting week of the 47th Parliament. They think they can get away with it. They think they can do this under the cover of darkness. No—we're not going to let them.

Australians deserve political leaders who keep their promises. Labor promised to protect our environment, and they were actually elected on that promise. Clearly, that's a hollow promise now. They have just capitulated, yet again, to industry. This is for the second time in as many months. Last month they withdrew their proposed EPA at the behest of the Western Australian mining lobby; it just took a phone call from the Western Australian Premier. That EPA, which in reality was only going to enforce existing laws, was hardly a radical proposal.

This time, they're bowing to the salmon-farming industry, an industry that's polluting our waterways and sending an ancient species to extinction—a foreign owned industry that, by the way, pays no tax. Is this really what Australians want—to be taken for a ride, yet again, by for-profit industries that have the government and their coalition cronies by the you-know-whats?

It's not just salmon. These laws have far-reaching consequences beyond the salmon industry, creating massive loopholes for other environmentally damaging industries—loopholes big enough to drive a coal truck through. These loopholes for the other environmentally damaging industries allow coal and gas to proliferate, to keep on polluting. This is a trojan horse for that, and we should all be alarmed.

Here are some facts about the foreign owned corporations—toxic, polluting multinationals—Labor and the coalition are bending over backwards for and buddying up with to protect with this bill. So-called Tassal, Tasmanian Salmon, is not in fact owned by Tasmanians. It's controlled by foreign owned corporations. It was acquired by Canadian salmon producer Cooke Aquaculture in 2022. Cooke is not pure. Cooke has a history of environmental controversies. In 2017 hundreds of thousands of fish escaped one of its net pens in Washington state. This escape caused such significant environmental damage that Washington not only ceased Cooke's operations but also banned the entire industry there. In fact, net pen farming has been banned across all of the west coast of the US and Canada. Cooke is currently the subject of a lawsuit in Maine, where it operates 13 locations. The lawsuit alleges at least 735 violations of the US Clean Water Act over the last five years, including discharging 'blood, sea lice, disease, and undisclosed chemicals from delousing boats and barges', exceeding limits on effluents and nutrient buildup, and reporting violations.

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