Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers from the Minister representing the Minister for Home Affairs (Senator Watt) to questions without notice asked today by Senator Cox, relating to the Middle Arm Sustainable Development Precinct, and me, relating to asylum seekers.

It's been almost a decade since people were first exiled to Manus Island and Nauru, and we should never forget that they were exiled there by a Labor government. Now, nearly a decade later, Labor is back in power, but what is Labor actually doing to address the crisis and the human rights' calamity of the humanitarian nightmare that it actually started nearly a decade ago? You know what the answer is to that? Nothing; Labor is doing nothing to address it. It's been a decade of murder, rape, child sex abuse, armed assault, the deliberate destruction of countless lives and the deliberate denial of the necessities of life—food, drinking water, electricity, medical support. This has been a foul chapter in our country's story—a dark chapter, a bloody chapter, in our country's story—and it's time we wrote the ending to that chapter. But this is a bipartisan policy of cruelty.

The people left in Papua New Guinea and Nauru are like the corpses that used to be impaled on the walls of medieval cities to send a message to other desperate people that they should not try to enter. They are human billboards, exploited by the Labor and Liberal parties. What is the Labor Party, the government of the day, doing about this? Absolutely nothing except continuing the cruelty. They continue to wash their hands of the people who are in Papua New Guinea, and they continue to abandon the people of Nauru. It's not good enough. This country is a better country than this, and the government must do better.

Dorinda Cox (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question to Minister Watt was very, very clear about Middle Arm, the sustainable precinct in Darwin Harbour. There was $1.9 billion—we heard just right here in this chamber—given through the equity funds. You heard me talk about the fossil fuels and the 75 per cent of emissions that would be released through the Northern Territory on this one project.

The name of it suggests that it is a clean energy project. Well, that's 'greenwashing' we know, and actually it's greenwashing that's been government endorsed. They are removing words like 'petrochemicals' from websites in the Northern Territory. The minister couldn't even answer whether they actually had any hand in that, yet, when you go onto the website, it's very clear that they're in partnership—the federal government and the Northern Territory government.

There's been lots of conversations. But they cop some flack, because they go off to COP27 and their minister talks about how great it's been that they co-chaired the global climate fund and are helping other nations but they're not helping First Nations people. Larrakia people, in the Darwin Harbour area, have rejected this actual project. The lack of consultation is unbelievable, and yet this government will not even the answer about the public information that appears on this website that, miraculously, just disappeared weeks ago, and the Minister says, 'Oh, I don't know about that information.' He should maybe have look at the paper one day and see where that information is, because, clearly, they may be asleep at the wheel, just like the last government were.

This project was all part of the gas-fired recovery from COVID. Then we talk about the mangrove alliance. Well, here's Minister Plibersek from the other place, coming out in a joint statement with Minister Bowen, talking about signing up to the Global Mangrove Alliance to protect and restore, and increase mangroves absorbing more carbon to 20 per cent by 2030. Well, you can't do that while you're opening up fossil fuel projects in the same precinct. You cannot do that. You are not going store any carbon doing that.

Question agreed to.