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

I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for the Nature Positive bills to be withdrawn from the Notice Paper, and for the Prime Minister to guarantee that this legislation will never be returned to the Parliament.

The reason this is an urgent matter for consideration in the Senate is that we need certainty, and we need a government that actually backs our private sector, backs investment and provides a certain environment for those who seek to invest in our community and country. But, at the moment, that is something sadly lacking. It's lacking because you cannot take this government at their word. Sadly, too many times over the course of the last 2½ years in this term of parliament, the term of this Labor government, we've seen where that word, that bond, that has been provided to the Australian people has been broken, and this is a prime example of that.

We had a promise from this Labor government that they would bring in new environmental approval laws to replace the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act 1999 by the end of 2023. Of course, we never received them. The one measly little piece of legislation we received was legislation to set up a new giant green bureaucracy—the Environment Protection Authority, or EPA. That's all we've had to show for three years of work behind closed doors and secretive consultations where nondisclosure agreements were signed by parties participating in this discussion and consultation. All we're talking about here is the environment—a public good that Australians should have some ownership over.

We've had no overhaul of the laws. The laws were never presented to parliament. What was presented was so bad that it had no friends in this place. The government were on their own. They weren't willing to work with us on amendments to the legislation. The last offer of suggested amendments we put to the government went unanswered. There were sensible suggestions like removing the water trigger—a great idea to ensure that investors would be able to come here with some certainty and not have another front of green 'lawfare' opened up on their projects—and being able to overturn that ridiculous decision on the Blayney gold mine and fix those laws that allowed that terrible situation to come about. Of course, all of those went unanswered. That meant the government had to try to do a deal with the Greens.

Let's think about the history of this. It was late last year, in Western Australia, and the Prime Minister had dragged his entire cabinet over to Perth to try to convince the mining industry that they had the mining industry's interests at heart—that they had their back. There was a lot of chatter over there, especially after the Western Australia Labor government tried to kill the economy through those silly cultural heritage laws which went too far, so Labor was very sensitive about the perceptions of Labor governments and the laws they were bringing in. So he took them over there, and he made it very clear in Western Australia on 2 September 2024 that the role of the EPA under their proposed laws would be scaled right back and it would have no teeth or capacity to do anything of real value, according to many. He also ruled out that there would ever be a deal with the Greens on this legislation. But coming back to the east coast of Australia, it's funny: the environment minister, Ms Plibersek, said that she was still negotiating with the Greens to get this legislation through parliament, just one week later. Who was running the show? Who is dictating the legislative agenda? Is it the Prime Minister or his environment minister?

It's interesting. We weren't aware that this was happening, but, when a deal couldn't be done at the end of last year, the Prime Minister said, 'No, we're not going to proceed.' What triggered that action by the Prime Minister was a secret deal done up between the Australian Labor Party and the Australian Greens party. We have proof of it here, in an email that was sent to the Greens environment spokesperson, Senator Hanson-Young, who I'm sure we'll hear from very soon, about the terms of the deal struck between the Australian Labor Party and the Greens to get this legislation through. It reads:

Dear Senator Hanson-Young

I write further to our recent discussions about the Nature Positive Bills currently before the Senate.

The Nature Positive Bills will deliver—

There are—one, two, three—four pages of blacked-out information. The email concludes:

I would be grateful for your confirmation that the Australian Greens will support the bills, including—

to guillotine them. They don't want Australians to know what secret, dodgy, dirty deal was done. This is why it is critically important this bill and everything related to it is expunged from the Notice Paper and does not ever come back to this parliament. It's bad for Australia, it's bad for jobs and it's bad for the environment.