David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Today is Threatened Species Day, a day to remember that we live on the most incredible continent, a megadiverse country with unique flora and fauna—that is not doing well. We are a world leader when it comes to mammal extinctions. We have environmental laws that are broken, that do not work, and we have a chronic underfunding of environmental programs and threatened species programs.

Today we saw an event held here in Parliament House with some of those threatened species. Rightly, we saw dozens of members of the Senate and the House go take their photos with these animals, but a photo is not going to save them. We can't escape the fact that parliament for decades has failed our environment, has failed threatened species. Consecutive governments have overseen the destruction of their habitat and have not updated our environmental laws to actually look after the environment. Consecutive governments have certainly not funded threatened species to the point where there actually are no longer threatened. We've seen things just go from endangered to critically endangered at an alarming rate.

I call on the Albanese government to step up when it comes to environmental law reform and to step up when it comes to funding for threatened species so that we don't see more extinctions in this country.