Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for the Environment and Water. What actions is the government taking to address the decade of neglect of our environment, as highlighted in the State of the environment report?

Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment and Water) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank the member for Macquarie for that question. I was fortunate enough to visit her electorate just last week, where I met with New South Wales parks volunteers, the Blue Mountains Conservation Society and other members of her constituency who are passionately committed to better protection for the environment of the Blue Mountains and surrounds.

Last week, I released the State of the environment report. This is a report that is to be tabled every five years, keeping Australians up to date with the state of the environment. The previous government received this report in December last year. The minister at the time had it sitting on her desk in December last year. But she didn't release it in December. She didn't release it in January. She didn't release it in February, in March, nor in April, nor in May. I'll tell you the reason she didn't release it when she had it for six months: it's because this report tells a story of an environment in bad shape and getting worse in catastrophic ways in an accelerating decline. It tells the story that Australia has, for the first time, more introduced plant species than native plant species. Australia has lost more mammal species to extinction than any other continent. A habitat the size of Tasmania has been lost in the last couple of decades. Plastics are choking our oceans—up to 80,000 pieces of plastic in a square kilometre of ocean. The flow in the Murray-Darling river system in 2019 was the lowest on record. The Murray-Darling river system is under greater pressure than ever before.

Is it any wonder then that those opposite didn't want Australians to know this? And what did they do to turn it around? I'll tell you what—they did nothing to turn it around. Instead, they axed climate laws. They failed to fix the broken environmental laws that don't serve business and don't serve the Australian environment. They set recycling targets with no hope of meeting the targets and no plan to meet them. They cut the highly protected areas of marine parks in half. They halved the highly protected areas of marine parks, and they cut funding to the environment department by 40 per cent. We will change this with $1.2 billion to restore our Great Barrier Reef; a quarter of a billion dollars to protect threatened species; real action on climate change—one of the first acts of the new government—growing the national estate, protecting 30 per cent of our land and 30 per cent of our waters by 2030 at least; and actually delivering on the $276 million—promised by those opposite but never delivered—to protect Kakadu National Park. These are the commitments that we make that we will deliver after a decade of neglect from those opposite. (Time expired)