Tim Wilson (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

On one level, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Board of Management Functions) Bill 2025 is straightforward. On another level, it tells a far more compelling story of the enduring connection to country, of land and purpose, of Indigenous Australians and of our modern management. Every nation has a story. Some are born in revolution; others are born in conquest. Some, like ours, are born in the quiet but profound weaving of traditions old and new into a single tapestry of purpose.

In Australia we are blessed not with one creation story but with many. The oldest continuous culture in the world, our First Nations people, give us the Dreaming—a spiritual and moral framework that grounds land, law and life in sacred connection. It speaks of custodianship, of songlines etched into the earth and the soul and of belonging, not as ownership but as obligation. As a nation also built on other traditions, including the Enlightenment and the values of Judaeo-Christian tradition, we carry the stories of Genesis and the covenant of God, who calls humanity not to dominion but to stewardship and who asks not for sacrifice but for righteousness and justice.

You could look at the Dreaming and the Book of Genesis and see that they're worlds apart. But, if you look closely, you can see that they speak to eternal truths. Land is not just geography; it is sacred. Time is not just linear; it is also moral. People are not just individuals; they are community. What we see in this legislation is the embodiment of the moral and legal framework of those enduring traditions lived out in what we seek to govern for this country. Yes, it is the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Amendment (Board of Management Functions) Bill 2025, but what we're actually talking about is how we care for our land. How do we make sure that those who have custodianship of it in an enduring way continue to care, to have ownership and responsibility and to use it for the betterment of future generations?

Every day, we start in this parliament with a number of things, one of which is the acknowledgement of the traditional owners, and there is also, of course, a prayer. We do so because we understand that continuing connection and enduring purpose of country, in different ways to different people, but we understand our stewardship, our custodianship and our responsibility. It's so important that we get the framework of law around that custodianship right. But, in addition to that, it's so important that we also get our sense of responsibility as individuals and as community right.

I'm bit of a radical on some of these things. I believe very strongly in property rights, not just in contemporary or modern concepts of fee simple but even in some issues around the rights of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to be able to utilise their land for economic development. In a former professional life as Australia's human rights commissioner, I worked with the then social justice commissioner Mick Gooda on the important work of reform around native title to enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders to use their land for economic development. When we talk about the great issues that confront our First Nations people today, so many of the challenges come from the disruption of connection to country, not just the physical separation but the separation from culture, connection and place, but then also ownership of land and the capacity to use it, ultimately, for economic development to improve their material wellbeing. That cascades on to their economic advancement, to being able to support families and, of course, community and create the nucleus of economic advancement for the wellbeing of people. The more we seek to get that framework of law right, the more we create the operating environment for families and communities to thrive.

Unfortunately, I don't think we've been as courageous as we need to be on these issues. We've done great work between both sides of this chamber at different points in our history, but there is a long way to go. My hope is that we get to see more work done in this space and that we sometimes step beyond the traditional comforts that have dominated these discussions. That will mean having some challenging conversations in this place—to stand up and say the direct connection of Indigenous people to their land to use for economic development will be a material pathway to improvement and advancement, not just addressing their economic welfare but their social welfare as well. That, in many ways, is one of the things that disappoints me most out of the failed referendum a couple of years ago. I wasn't in this parliament to discuss those topics, and I will have something to say about that in this parliament yet, because I consider it to be one of the greatest moral failings in this nation's history, by this government, and I really mean that. We took the social solidarity of our most marginalised communities, put it to a ballot paper knowingly and had this government burn it to a crisp. In the absence of that, the burden and responsibility on this government to address and redress the issues that are left behind, that still remain unaddressed, and the wounds that need to be healed is so great.

When we look at this bill, it is, in one sense, a simple administrative kind of rollover. But it is also an opportunity for rebirth, if we have courageous leadership, to stand up and do the right thing. Of course, this bill does have embodied in it an opportunity. It has an opportunity in it such that this government can turn around and say, 'These plans can be delivered to manage these national parks, to put them in a better position to be stewarded better by custodians for future generations.' We can turn around and call people to a greater sense of obligation and action so that our natural assets are handed down to future generations in a way that we have not always lived up to with our greatest expectations in the past. We can look at this bill and say it's an opportunity for rebirth, for a relationship with traditional owners, and say how we can be better as a nation in addressing their concerns and also calling them to a greater sense of responsibility to the land that they are custodians to. Of course, we can also make sure that we look to each other and say, 'There is a great project for this country that we all need to be part of the journey of.'

There is important work from this bill yet to be done. Too often in the space of the journey towards a greater reconciliation so that this nation can have one destiny and one future together—and we still have a way to go on that; there's no argument about that—and have that one sense of unity, destiny and purpose, we need more than the talking points and the signalling that we have had from this government to date. We need a sense of moral commitment as a people towards a shared destiny. What we've seen too often is that Labor has promised much but delivered little. We have seen this across lots of different areas of policy, but there has never been a time—sadly, I say—where it felt like this country had ever been more divided. This is not just something that relates to the issues in the context of this bill but that relates to the context of the soul of the country, where we've had more and more Australians turning against each other rather than to each other.

At the end of the day it's incumbent on everybody in this place, but particularly those who have the great privilege of sitting on those benches opposite, to call our country to that greater sense of purpose and to stand up for the type of country we want to be—to lead, to call people to a greater sense of moral purpose about who we are to and to stare into the future with a sense of clarity, direction and leadership so that we do so as a people without fear. I'm not going to try and suggest that this legislation alone is going to solve that problem. It isn't. But, in the way that this government is conducting itself, it isn't rising to that challenge.

I've spoken many times about the great gift this government has been afforded. This government has been afforded a supermajority on a scale that has rarely been seen in this nation's history. When you are gifted such enormous privilege, responsibility and trust, you have a responsibility as a government to use that trust—yes, with caution—but, more importantly, to help steer the future direction of this country in a way that your children and grandchildren would be proud of: to use it to define the future of the country and to build Australia's future. It is very hard to say at this point, at this time, that this government is doing anything other than squandering that opportunity.

We have a government that lacks a sense of clarity and purpose about who they are and what they want to do. They might have fallen over the line and they're seeking to figure that out, and they still have a couple of years to decide that sense of purpose. But the nation are looking on, and they're wondering when it is that the government are going to stand up. No matter how many times they carry on in question time, it isn't being realised in their legislative agenda or the policy agenda they're seeking to drive.

But one of the things they can do is redress the damage that they did in the last term of this parliament, because, when it comes down to it, after the election of 2022 when the Prime Minister stood up on election night and made a commitment to have a referendum on an Indigenous voice in the Constitution, what he did was set an aspiration for so many Australians—whatever your view on the issue was—that the government would achieve something for our country that would change the character of the country in a way that would enable some people's dreams and visions to be realised.

What we saw, through a mixture of a failure of leadership, an arrogance and an unwillingness to listen to the human consequences of the proposals that he was entertaining, was that, over time, support progressively declined. At that point, that was the moment where the Prime Minister had the moral responsibility to turn around and say to the Australian people, 'I don't think that this can go ahead because I don't think it'll get up.' That's what a leader does, because he doesn't govern for just one section of the community; he governs for the entirety of the Australian community. But, instead of being a leader, standing up for the type of country we want to be and steering a nation through difficult times, the Prime Minister went full throttle ahead because he saw it as essential to his own political survival and his own political achievement, and in the process he did huge damage to the social solidarity and reconciliation for this country to come together.

Now, I'm not the best person to speak about that; I'm the first person to say that. It's the silence of so many Indigenous Australians who still don't talk about these issues and still don't know what their place is on our national stage as a legacy of that. The scars are not healed, and it is up to this government to show the leadership to fix them. My hope is that they rise to that challenge, because it's not going to be done just through government expenditure—that would be part of it, of course. It always must be part of making sure that good work is done. It is a part of making sure that property can be used in a way that can enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to use the full value of their assets to recognise the important role of culture and languages as part of the enduring connection not just to land but to celebrating history, culture and achievement, and as part of the connection into the future of our country and weaving it in as part of the enduring connection and culture of our country. But it's to actually recognise, and start to understand that there's a need to recognise, the damage that was done as well.

This bill will no doubt go through this parliament, because there's an important administrative matter to address, but it is not the end of either the conversation on the substantive issues that are raised by it or the broader conversation on what we need to do as a country. It will go through. My hope is that it will go through in a way that raises the legitimate issues that need to be addressed and that this government will rise to that challenge.

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