Perin Davey (NSW, National Party, Shadow Minister for Water) Share this | Hansard source

Everyone knows that I'm not a very sporty person, but my children were gymnasts. They would have had no hope of competing against the Prime Minister's ability to backflip, forward somersault and finish with a triple pike without breaking a sweat. That's what we've seen here. We saw the nature positive bill go through the lower house, with the support of the teals—sorry; apparently they like being called 'community independents' today—and the Greens. We saw it listed for debate in the Senate. Then we saw it withdrawn from the listings, and we saw it brought back, to be debated this week. I was asked last week, when I was doing a TV interview: 'What is the opposition's position on this? Has the opposition changed their mind?' I said at the time, 'The only person that I'm aware of who's changed their mind on bringing this bill forward again for debate is the Prime Minister.' And—lo and behold!—he's changed his mind again.

Now, when it was listed last year, we heard from the Premier of Western Australia his opposition to the bill, calling out the immense damage this legislation would have on that state's mining based economy. Make no mistake—Western Australia would not be the only state impacted, but at least their Premier is honest enough to have called it out.

The new year must have been a really good one for the Prime Minister, because he forgot that he'd withdrawn the bill last year and it appeared on our Notice Paper again. To bring back this bill was a slap in the face for Western Australia. It showed that Western Australia had been held in total contempt by this government. I want to commend Mia Davies, the Nationals' candidate for the seat of Bullwinkel, for her tireless work in calling out not only this bill and the damage it would do to Western Australia but also this government's appalling live sheep export ban. So the bill was relisted, but the phones must have been burning with calls between Western Australia and the Lodge, because over the weekend the Prime Minister yet again shelved this bill. We heard today from Senator Chisholm that they've lodged a motion to withdraw this bill—to discharge it from the Notice Paper.

And yet they're not supporting this motion. Do you know why they're not supporting this motion? Because this motion also asked for a guarantee that the legislation as it stands will not be returned to parliament, and the Labor Party will not make that guarantee, because the Labor Party want to leave the door open to do another dirty deal with the Greens and to make an alignment with the teals—or community independents, or whatever you want to call them. If they are voted into a position where they can form a minority government, they will do dirty deals with the Greens and the teals and reintroduce this appalling bill, irrespective of the impact on the people and the economy of Western Australia and on the economy of Queensland, and, indeed, on the economy of New South Wales, where there are also large-scale mining applications in for things like critical minerals, which we'll need if we're going to see a net zero future. This government doesn't want to close the door of opportunity on a Green-teal minority deal. And that's what we are facing.

That is why the Labor Party are opposing this motion, which, in all other aspects, they support. It is because they know that they cannot get this bill through before any election, so they're willing to discharge it from the Notice Paper, but they're not willing to commit to not bringing back this bad bill that does nothing to improve our environmental laws and does everything to balloon the size of the bureaucracy even more and duplicate state agencies that are already in existence and are already there to do the job this bill is proposing a new bureaucracy to do.