Prime Minister Tony Abbott's green "sabotage" charge is a highly-irresponsible failure to defend Australia's system of law and order, environmentalist and former Greens leader Bob Brown said in Melbourne today. It is the PM who is sabotaging Australia's future, Brown said.

Addressing 300 teenagers at a conference on social responsibility, Brown said that they were living through the most ecologically illiterate and irresponsible Prime Ministership in modern Australian history. "Mr Abbott's Minister for the Environment has bungled the Adani coal mine process and the court found him out. The Prime Minister is driving a trenchantly anti-environmental course highlighted by his re-iteration just last month that loggers are Australia's genuine environmentalists. Abbott's anti-green mantra is based on fabrication and illusion about the real environmental crises and economic options facing Australia and the planet."

The Adani coal mine project threatens the extinction of species, an injection of billions more tonnes of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and damage to both Aboriginal and European heritage in the Galilee Basin in Central Queensland.

"I challenge Abbott to justify this in real terms - he is wrong on the environment, wrong on his claim of 10,000 jobs and wrong in saying the mine is needed to give 100 million poor Indians electricity. This is the PM who is proud to have cut billions of dollars out of Australia's already-low overseas aid budget. His claims are as duplicitous as they are simply wrong.

Brown said that Abbott's measure of Hunt's success in terms of billions of dollars of developments ticked off by the minister, rather than any environmental advance for Australia, underscored the bankruptcy of his thinking.


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