Steph Hodgins-May (Victoria, Australian Greens) | Link to this | Hansard source

Australia has just made a deadly call. Despite irrefutable evidence linking toxic paraquat to Parkinson's disease, despite warnings from some of Australia's leading neurologists and despite more than 70 countries banning it, Australians will keep being exposed to this deadly chemical. This should sound the alarm bell for all of us. Our chemical safety system is supposed to protect people, not chemical company profits.

So what evidence was used to justify keeping paraquat on the market? Many of the studies relied on by the regulator were funded or supplied by the companies that make paraquat, while leading Parkinson's experts say that their concerns were largely ignored. When there's credible evidence that a chemical could cause a devastating disease, we shouldn't wait until more Australians get sick before acting. Chemical companies should have to prove that their products are safe. Instead, we're taking risks with people's lives.

Think about this: China manufactures paraquat, but it has banned it for domestic use. The European Union has banned paraquat. The United Kingdom has banned it. More than 70 countries have decided that it is not safe domestically for their communities and for their farmers. Yet Australia is saying: 'She'll be right. Carry on. Let's rip.' It is not good enough. Farmers shouldn't be asked to gamble with their health. They deserve support to use safer alternatives that protect their livelihoods, their families and their land.

There's a cluster of people with Parkinson's disease near my home town of Newlyn. As a fifth-generation farmer, I know that Australian farmers are some of the most innovative people in the world, and they do not need dangerous chemicals to succeed; they need governments willing to back them. Protecting public health takes political courage. It means standing up to powerful corporate interests and listening to independent science and the people living with the consequences. No company's profits are worth gambling with the lives of Australia's workers, farmers and families.

Labor are rolling out the red carpet to AI data centres, and they are failing to answer the most basic question: who benefits from all of this? Across Australia, communities are saying the same thing: stop making decisions about us without us. AI data centres use enormous amounts of water and electricity. They'll change local communities for decades. Yet Australians are being told to trust the process and a set of unenforceable expectations. Whose water will data centres use? Whose energy will data centres rely on? Who carries the environmental impacts? When the profits start flowing, what community benefit is there? Do local communities profit, or is it just the multinational tech giants? And then there's our data. Australians shouldn't have to worry about why we're inviting some of the world's biggest tech corporations to own and control the infrastructure that will increasingly store and process our personal information. This isn't about being anti technology; it is about being pro community, pro democracy and pro common sense.

Communities are demanding proper planning, real consultation and strong environmental protections before these projects go ahead. Last week, I was in an event in Sydenham, where a data centre the size of 175 MCGs is proposed to be built. The local community are rightly anxious and concerned about what this means for them. Around the world, communities are fighting AI data centres. They are fighting for stronger safeguards, and Australia should learn from those mistakes; it should not repeat them. We have no excuse. We have seen the template. We have seen these campaigns in other jurisdictions. The Greens are calling for a moratorium on all data centres until we have safeguards in place around water, around energy consumption, around our environment, around our communities and, of course, around what is happening to our data—who owns it, who controls it and what they are doing with it.

I want to thank the community of Sydenham in Melbourne's inner west. I want to say thank you for turning up and turning out. We have an opportunity. We need to be as loud as we possibly can because local councils are being silenced. They're being steamrolled, so our voices need to be louder than ever. We need to make sure that community voices are leading this debate, that they're not being steamrolled. And Labor has a simple choice to make: will it keep putting billion-dollar tech companies first or will it finally put Australia's communities first? (Time expired)