A year ago, the Greens successfully negotiated with this federal Labor government to introduce an environment protection agency into our national environment laws. What a great achievement for the Greens. The critical role of the EPA is to enforce the federal nature laws and protect the environment. It does this through issuing environment protection orders. About a year later, it finally issued its first environment protection order. It was last week. It was against a cattle farmer in Queensland who had illegally deforested private land, which was covered with native forest.

A year ago, when the EPA was established, Minister Murray Watt, the minister for the environment, said, 'EPOs are a new power that prevent serious environmental damage before it happens, rather than just taking action after the damage is done.' Well, wait for this: the EPO was only made after this farmer had cleared 1,700 hectares of land. This property was already illegally clearing land 10 years ago. It should have been monitored more closely. It should have been on the EPA's radar, like a repeat offender of theft is on the radar of the cops. We cannot have an environmental watchdog that only watches on as hectares upon hectares of native forest are cleared to graze beef cattle. We need our environmental watchdog to have some teeth. The Greens negotiated in good faith to get the national EPA established, and now the federal Labor government, which is responsible for running it, hasn't done its job.

In the past financial year, as the Australian Conservation Foundation has recently revealed, over 32,000 hectares of private land was cleared across 150 properties, mostly for agricultural purposes. That is only a small sample of the true figure. The true total across the country is in the order of magnitudes more. Every tree felled and every shrub torn out releases carbon into our atmosphere, choking us. It also robs koalas and black cockatoos of their homes. Clearing land also wreaks havoc on our waterways and, when it rains, results in three times as much sediment washing off fields and into our oceans. The clearing at the cattle station I mentioned before will lead to 1,000 more tonnes of sediment being washed into the Great Barrier Reef.

Cattle farming is one of the main drivers of illegal deforestation in Australia. Despite promising to remove deforestation linked beef from their supply chains by 2025, the big corporations running our supermarkets have not done so. McDonald's, one of the largest buyers of Australian beef, says it will shift its supply chain to deforestation-free meat by 2030. That is far too late. The next time you are about to order a Big Mac, think about what it costs, not just the overly inflated price tag but the koalas and the black cockatoos, the dugongs and the corals that will suffer as a result. Reflect and decide if you are still loving it.