Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025, National Environmental Protection Agency Bill 2025, Environment Information Australia Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (Customs Charges Imposition) Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (Excise Charges Imposition) Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (General Charges Imposition) Bill 2025, Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (Restoration Charge Imposition) Bill 2025
Mr McCORMACK (Riverina) (20:00): In my contribution just before the adjournment debate I referenced a book called Water Into Gold. The book, in the same chapter I referred to earlier, talks of Alfred Deakin. As we all know, he was a prime minister of this country three times over.
The book says, 'From the threshold of his brilliant career, Alfred Deakin looked far into the future and saw the bare and blinding desert transmuted, by industry and intelligence, into orchards and fields of waving grain.' One wonders what our pioneers would think of our country now, where we lock up vast tracts of arable farmland and leave them to pestilence.
One wonders what they would think if they saw some of the pristine farmland being carpet-bombed with wind turbines of a height of 260 metres—almost as tall as one Barangaroo Crown casino in Sydney. One wonders what they would think if they saw solar panels in factories as far as the eye can see. One project in particular, right beside Yass, was going to be bigger than the town itself.
Think of those World War I pioneers who went out to a veritable wilderness called Griffith and surrounds and turned a parched wasteland into one of the finest food bowls the world has ever known. They did it by using their hard work, their tenacity and the sweat of their endeavours. Indeed, one wonders how our food supply would be, but for that Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area.
The Environment Protection Reform Bill 2025 speaks to national security—or it should: national food security. I think one of the greatest moral challenges of our time—in fact, the greatest moral challenge—is to grow food to feed a hungry world. But this bill is not addressing that.
Labor's reforms were made out to be the solution to Australia's productivity problem—and we do have a productivity problem; we also have a planning problem. Yet the government is actually doing the opposite: they're making it harder, making it more costly and making it so that it will take longer for proponents to have applications processed. If that's what this bill does then the writers of the bill need to go back to the drawing board.
We've got hundreds upon hundreds of pages of legislation that we're supposed to be able to read, determine and decipher and then pass legislation in a matter of days. This is ridiculous. This is nonsense.