Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

It's a delight to follow Senator Polley, I can tell you! I always enjoy listening to what Senator Polley has to say. That apparently was the government's best defence of what is one of the most outrageous policies this government has.

We asked in question time why this government continues to fund that outrageously ridiculous organisation, the Environmental Defenders Office. The answer we got from the minister was, 'It's because we made an election promise.' They said it in that serious and sensitive tone that was taken today, because they didn't want to be needled on it, because they know it is a bad decision. They just wanted to point to an election commitment. Now, let's not pay any attention to all of the other promises they made before the election. The promise to take $275 off every power bill for every household across the country isn't a promise they're going to honour at all, I can tell you, but regardless of what the EDO does the government will fund them for eternity.

Let's revisit what the EDO has done. They're at the heart of many bad decisions in this country and many of the appeals we find in our courts of law around job-creating, resource-providing, economy-driving projects. Mining, forestry, fishing—you name it; the EDO are in there doing their darnedest to prevent these projects from getting up, and they will go to any lengths. We've already heard about the Santos Barossa case, where Justice Natalie Charlesworth eviscerated the EDO and they were caught flat-footed. They'd fabricated evidence. They'd coached witnesses. We now have written evidence about what was happening here. So-called academics were working in concert with the EDO to figure out where they should put a serpent on a map to affect the outcome. They didn't want to rely on science. They didn't want to reply on anthropology. They just wanted to confect evidence to get the outcome they wanted. That is an outrageous breach of any standard required of a legal professional.

The minister, in defending this appalling, job-destroying organisation and Labor's taxpayer-funding of this organisation, said that there was a review done. Yes, there was a review done, and some conditions put in place, but it has changed nothing. That same group, which did exactly what I've just described in the Santos case, has been the instigator of the uncertainty facing the salmon industry in Tasmania. I'm disappointed Senator Polley isn't here to hear me talk about this. I'm sure she agrees with me that this organisation is jeopardising the jobs of 5,000 Tasmanians through confected evidence, making things up. The government blindly defends this organisation, and the money has no end date on it, either, for what it's worth; it just continues to flow. I asked at estimates: when will this funding run out? Never, it turns out.

It's not just that. We heard Senator Colbeck talk about McPhillamys goldmine in Blayney, which we saw the EDO at the heart of as well. Eight hundred jobs, in this case, and a billion dollars of economic activity are gone, including hundreds of millions of dollars in royalties revenue for the state of New South Wales, which goes into hospitals, schools and roads. That's all gone, courtesy of the EDO.

This Labor government says: 'We want to have a future made in Australia. We want to see more things done here. We want better paying jobs for Australians. We want to value-add. We want to grow the economy.' But they will fund an organisation that, at its core, opposes these projects and does what it can to stop them, tripping up applications, frustrating the course of these assessments and approvals, causing unnecessary job losses and delaying good projects from going ahead. There is no justification for what this government is doing. I'll be very surprised if they recommit to funding the EDO. If they do, it means that they have learnt nothing about what is important to Australian workers and why we need to do what we can.

Reform the laws all you like around environmental approvals. It doesn't matter what you do when it comes to the laws. If you're funding organisations that are activists in the courtroom and simply want to frustrate and stop jobs from being created through these projects, then you are not going to get projects approved and jobs created. It just makes no sense to me. It rather makes me think that the Labor Environment Action Network have control when it comes to these decisions. It's an appalling decision, one that must be revisited. The fact that they blindly commit to ongoing funding of the EDO is beyond belief.