On Wednesday 3rd September 2025, I made a speech about deforestation
Transcript:
Ms WATSON-BROWN (Ryan) (18:45): Congratulations to us! Here in Australia, we are responsible for more deforestation than almost any other country on earth. And the Labor government wants to make it worse.
Australia is a major global deforestation—shame, shame, shame—rivalled only by Brazil and Indonesia. Every year, hundreds of thousands of hectares of Australia's unique forests and bushland are bulldozed. In Queensland alone, shamefully, analysis from the Wilderness Society shows that every four minutes threatened species habitat the scale of the Sydney Harbour Bridge area is bulldozed for beef. When allowed to thrive, Australia's precious forests and bushlands provide habitat for threatened species like the koala, the greater glider and the red goshawk and serve as water filters and carbon sinks. My electorate of Ryan is absolutely blessed with large areas of bushland, beautiful creekways and wildlife, and many active volunteer environmental groups working tirelessly, in a volunteering capacity, to preserve, nurture and restore our precious natural environments.
But, as usual, the Albanese government is kowtowing to vested interests and lobby groups to further trash nature protections. As usual, they're trying to rush a deal through without addressing the deforestation crisis, and it is a very serious crisis in Australia. The Albanese government must strengthen federal environmental protections and close damaging deforestation loopholes that have allowed this terrible destruction to go on for way too long.
A report released just today showed that Australia's natural environment contributes half a trillion dollars to our economy annually. That's as much as the mining and finance sectors combined. But this huge contribution to our economy is under threat from climate change, of course, and other environmental damage. The report recommends that the government adopt Greens policy to spend one per cent of GDP, which is around $3.4 billion, on protecting nature so that it can still be enjoyed by generations to come.
We also got shocking revelations this week about just how much environmental damage big corporations are getting away with under the current laws—yes, legally.