Australian Greens Senator for NSW and Spokesperson for Animal Welfare, Dr Mehreen Faruqi, has successfully established a Senate inquiry into a national horse traceability register. As it stands, very little is known about the fate of the tens of thousands of horses bred each year.

The Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee will run the inquiry and submissions will open soon.

The terms of reference for the inquiry are:

Just a few weeks ago, I was out at Menindee to see firsthand the Murray-Darling Basin in ecosystem collapse. The Darling River, the Barka, is dying. The Murray-Darling Basin Plan isn't working and the government tells us: 'Everything is fine. Nothing to see here.' I saw stagnant rivers, cracked, dry earth and locals red hot with anger at the federal government and the New South Wales Liberal-National government for their role in the slow death of the Murray-Darling Basin.

The Greens always have and always will stand for publicly owned and operated and publicly funded vocational training colleges and TAFEs. The two major parties have used vocational training and TAFE as a political football for way too long. We have had enough. Through their bipartisan commitment to so-called contestability funding, public TAFE has been gutted. The closure of these two colleges by the Queensland Labor government should be condemned.

I brought this motion forward to draw the parliament's and the minister's attention to this important issue. Changes to the subsidy to the hourly rate of in-home child care now means that high-needs families are unable to get the child care they need to attend medical appointments, receive respite and go to work. Service providers are leaving the industry and carers are losing their jobs. As noted in the motion, we should recognise that although there are problems with the in-home childcare program some families with complex needs are facing a childcare crisis as a result of the changes.

Hundreds of homes have started to drop off the National Rental Affordability Scheme, NRAS, with the number of homes swelling to thousands next year. This means many vulnerable people, including families on low incomes, will be left without support and will face homelessness. We are facing a cliff in the housing crisis. Social housing hasn't increased since the turn of the century, despite the rise in homelessness and the rising numbers of those in housing stress. Rental support needs to continue. What we really need is a massive federal investment in building new social housing.

The Liberal National Government has shamefully stopped the Senate from delivering vital water back to the Murray Darling Basin today.

MEDIA ALERT

Australian Greens Disability Rights spokesperson Senator Jordon Steele-John will join representatives from an alliance of disability, consumer and media organisations, researchers and audio description providers to advocate for the introduction of audio description on Australian television.

Senator Steele-John will today introduce the Broadcasting Services Amendment (Audio Description) Bill 2018 to the Senate, which if passed would enable equal access to television for the 385,000 people in Australia who are blind or have low vision.

Australia needs to step up its efforts to protect vulnerable and endangered species, including insects, to combat mass extinction and set an example for the rest of the world, the Greens say.

Resopnding to the Morrison Government's announcement on DV and family violence today, Greens spokesperson for women, Senator Larissa Waters said:

"Six months into the job, the Prime Minister has finally mentioned domestic violence. However the paltry amount of funding announced shows he still doesn’t understand the seriousness of the issue and still hasn’t realised that the real terror threat and national security crisis is against women in their homes.