I've spent my life fighting against the logging of our native forests, but there is another, equally destructive activity occurring in our oceans. Fifty-nine licence holders have been granted access to nearly two-thirds of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, where they drag 190 tonnes of coral to shore every year. You can say that coral reefs are the native forests of the ocean. Like native-forest logging, removal of coral is called 'harvesting', but, instead of blades and diggers, these harvesters use hammers and chisels to rip corals from our reef. Remember, corals are living creatures. Like in wood-chipping our native forests for exports, about 85 per cent of these corals are sold overseas. The corals that remain on the Great Barrier Reef are resilient. They have had to be. They've survived bleaching, cyclones and floods and persistent agricultural pollution. It is nonsensical to allow our wild, resilient corals to be shipped off to stock aquariums overseas when at the same time this Labor government is reaching into the taxpayer's pocket to spend $200 million on tank-grown, heat-tolerant corals to replace the ones that are lost to mass bleaching events. Much like timber plantations can transition us away from native-forest logging, onshore aquaculture can do the same for coral being sold for aquariums.

These precious places belong to us all, and the responsibility for protecting the place that is the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park belongs to this federal Labor government. It needs to protect it and stop plundering this precious place for the profits of a few.

The Albanese government's recent backflips on public policy reveal why it is now considered to be the worst since the Whitlam government. Among the biggest backflips was Labor's most recent retreat from its proposal to slash Commonwealth disaster-recovery funding. Labor wanted to replace the longstanding arrangement—where Canberra contributes up to 75 per cent of eligible disaster recovery costs—with an incredibly unfair fifty-fifty split. For Queensland, as Australia's most disaster-prone state, it would have been devastating. It would have shifted enormous costs onto remote councils, communities and ratepayers already struggling to recover from floods and cyclones. But Queensland councils refused to surrender. All 77 councils joined the fight. They stood together. They kept the pressure on Canberra and refused to accept a policy that would punish communities and leave them worse off.

I congratulate those councils, their mayors and councillors, and the Local Government Association of Queensland. They demonstrated what local leadership can achieve, particularly given that their local Labor MPs were completely missing in action. Why weren't they fighting with the same determination? Instead, these councils were exposed, first-hand, to the worst of Labor's Canberra-focused, autocratic and anti-regions approach to lawmaking.

Labor was forced into another retreat recently over the Australian Tax Office's plans to stop accepting credit card payments, which was put on hold after an outcry from small business. Then there was Labor's extraordinary attempt to impose a $5,000 annual threshold on veterans' allied health treatments. After fierce opposition from veterans and their advocates, Labor abandoned that proposal too. Australians are sick of these attacks and Labor's half-hearted attempts to make— (Time expired)