Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development, Local Government and Territories) Share this | Hansard source

Exactly—I'm not doing that voice, though. And it's a question that I'm asking today. Why is it so? Why do we have a mass fish kill in the Gulf of St Vincent in South Australia? Why is the environment suffering?

Labor's track record on the environment is merely virtue signalling, knee-jerk reactions and posturing, when the evidence is plain to see, rotting away on the Adelaide and regional South Australian beaches and ruining the local fishing industry, as the shadow minister pointed out. Let's face it: Labor are motivated by politics, not outcomes. When you want to see the fruit of Labor's approach to the environment, it smells suspiciously like rotting fish.

Let me take you upstream from the Murray mouth, which was gushing a couple of years ago with nutrient-rich floodwaters, which some say was a major contributor to the algal bloom event in the Gulf of St Vincent—a flood, I might say, that the experts said would never happen on that scale again. Based on that metric, Labor had been buying back water from the Murray-Darling Basin from our food producers and now have more water than they know what to do with.

Up in the Murray-Darling Basin, through the Gannawarra, Loddon and Northern Grampian shires, we have a different environmental threat: Labor's rampage towards political targets—I emphasise political, not environmental, targets—in the name of net zero. In the name of saving the planet, Labor are throwing the environment under a bus.

Government members interjecting—

You, on the opposite side of the chamber, may laugh, but the people in my electorate are absolutely not laughing. We've seen throughout my electorate and elsewhere in regional Australia farmers and local landowners, Indigenous people and local communities speaking up about the environmental devastation and scarring of the landscape due to wind turbines, transmission lines, blanket solar panels and flammable battery project all in the name of net zero. Watch the Minister for the Environment and Water's approach to the Port of Hastings' so-called Victorian Renewable Energy Terminal.

In my home state of Victorian, the Allan Labor government are so hell-bent on their net zero targets and so insistent on ignoring voices of common sense, even those within their own tent, that they want offshore wind. But they can't get it. I emphasise and remind the House that Victoria Labor's goal, if they cannot get offshore wind, is to take up to 70 per cent of Victoria's prime agricultural land to create an industrial wasteland of transmission lines, turbines and panels, all to 'save the planet'.

Mallee community members have come to me distressed about the destruction of their local environment and the risk posed to local threatened and endangered species by Labor's reckless energy plans. It's interesting that, when the consequences of Labor's bad policy start washing up on the beaches of a capital city, suddenly the media take notice. Well, kudos to Sky News, Peter Credlin, Chris Kenny, the Institute of Public Affairs, the Daily Telegraph and others who are giving our farmers, our landowners, our communities a face and a voice in metropolitan media.

I want to finish with 92-year-old Ellen Shepherd, from Horsham, who wrote to me overnight, having seen me on Kenny's program. She said net zero is 'tearing families apart'. She said:

It's tearing neighbours apart, destroying our wonderful farming land and in some states, turning huge swathes of bushland into dust bowls for hundreds of kilometres.

The city slickers, especially those of the Teal brand, don't know and don't care about the severity of these issues throughout this vast land. They live in cloud cuckoo land and get a few more thousand, if they require it, from their moneyman—Simon Holmes-a-Court. As he did for one particular Independent at the Tasmanian election I noticed.

She goes on:

I listened to Ken Henry at the NPC; the hypocrisy in some of these speeches takes my breath away. He adores Koalas, but doesn't see how they are affected in their habitat by the screaming bulldozers tearing their very living away from their lives in many parts—

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