Senator BROWN(10.50 a.m.) —The thrust of the legislation that the committee has been looking at is inherently important and acceptable to a great number of the Australian community. The point that Senator Patterson makes about disagreement over the link with the sale of Telstra totally overrides the thrust of this legislation itself. The government is predicating the good works that may come out of the proposed legislation on a totally different, unrelated matter—their wish to privatise Telstra. We cannot get away from that nexus that the government has made.

While ever it makes that nexus, it cannot claim that it is giving the environment the high consideration, the primary consideration, that the people of Australia repeatedly show they want through opinion polls and through their expression of concern for the environment in the going about of their day-to-day lives in this country.

Senator Patterson has commented on the near miraculous work being done in degraded areas of Australia by the good citizens. You have only to look at the Murray-Darling Basin to know what she is referring to. But at the same time, the same government is licensing the broadscale destruction of native forest ecosystems in the forested areas of Australia. So you have near miraculous repair work on the one hand but shameful, embarrassing environmental degradation being licensed by the government on the other hand.

There is an enormous inconsistency here. One cannot help but think that the government simply wants to ride on a false chimera of environmental goodness while it goes about the business of licensing the destruction of world heritage value forests, rainforests, national estate listed forests—forests which ought to be national park in New South Wales, Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania and potentially now, because of the government's woodchip policy, Queensland. While this committee has been sitting and drawing up this report, the government at the same time has been giving the go-ahead to the Hinchinbrook tourist resort, the mega-resort. This is totally inappropriate because of its impact on two World Heritage areas in central Queensland—namely, the Wet Tropics World Heritage area, and the Great Barrier Reef World Heritage area.

Just yesterday on the eve of this report being brought into this place, we received news that the Minister for the Environment, Senator Hill, who is unfortunately not here at the moment, had been dictated to by Mr Williams, the man behind that resort, and had gone to water. Here we have the country's chief environmentalist who, as I have said, is not present in the chamber, simply being dictated to, taking his queue from a mega-developer whose record on the environment is abhorrent; whose record, by the way, for respecting other people's points of view is abhorrent; and whose ability in endeavouring to quash other people's points I view is, I think, odious.

Yet we have that particular minister bringing forward this legislation trying to take kudos to cover up the fact that, beyond Hinchinbrook and forests, the government is also into a record expansion in uranium mining. It has legislation to come before this place to override Aboriginal sentiments on whether or not mines should go ahead on Aboriginal lands—and we know the Aboriginal people of this country have an extraordinary and unique record with their relationship to the environment and to the protection of the land.

Everything is going negative, as far as the environment is concerned in this country, under this government, at a rate we have not seen in recent decades. This is a government of environmental villainy; it is a government of environmental destruction. It puts the environment way down the list. All it is interested in is the quick dollar. The mega-developments get the nod. But the environment gets treated as some sort of patsy when this sort of legislation can be reported upon and a member of government can stand up and talk about near miraculous repair efforts. We will need more than miracles further down the line to repair the damage that is being done by this government.

It will cost future generations of Australians billions of dollars in trying to undo the damage being done to the forest environment, the wild environments around this country, the coastal environments—even the atmosphere we breathe in. This government is now notorious around the world for being at the back of the pack when it comes to trying to implement global measures to prevent the greenhouse gas phenomenon which is leading to global warming and to multi-trillion dollar expenses, as action—which will be too late next century—is taken to try to prevent the world from getting into even greater economic, environmental and social disruption as a result of the impact of our carelessness. At this end of the 20th century you would expect a government, representing the people of Australia with their enormous environmental awareness, to be leading the world instead of coming from behind.

The tragedy of this report is not what is in the report itself; it is what is behind it: the government treating the environment just as a patsy; the government paying lip-service to it; the government saying, `Yes, we'll do something about the environment, we'll give some funding to it'—and it is very modest funding at that—`provided we can sell off telecommunications in this country, provided we can sell off Telstra,' which is an entirely unrelated, unhitched subject to the environment. But what the government says is, `We are doctrinaire about selling off public utilities to the point that the environment has to take second string to that approach we have, which is that we want to put everything across to the private sector and divest ourselves of even the meagre powers that governments have these days in being able to try to rein in material ism and the impact it is having on the environment.'

It is not only the report itself that the Senate is being delivered today. It is also the political mischief behind that report of which we ought to be taking note.

Debate (on motion by Senator Eggleston) adjourned.