Environment: Christmas Island Shrew

We’re very happy on this side that the beard’s gone. Australia is the best country in the world, with the most iconic flora and fauna. Our ecosystem is unique and must be protected, but it seems to be going backwards under this government.

Australia’s only shrew the Christmas Island shrew, has been added to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s red list of extinct species this month. This marks Australia’s 39th extinction—a sobering and tragic statistic. This government has stood idly by as this mouse sized mammal has gone extinct. The former environment minister, the member for Sydney, committed to preventing extinctions under this Albanese Labor government. Now we have seen yet another failure—another broken promise from this government that is all talk and no action when it comes to preserving our native species.

The list of this government’s failures continues to grow. This extinction is a stain on our tragic environmental record, because Australia leads the world in mammal extinctions and ranks second—second—for loss of biodiversity. The environmental credentials this government claims to have were all washed up during the harmful algal bloom in South Australia. Now we can rightly say their so-called environmental credentials are completely and utterly extinct. It looks like the Prime Minister’s Mr Fixit can’t fix this one.