Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I begin by congratulating the Rudd government on three measures that have been much appreciated by the Australian people in the wake of the election win last year. The first of those was the ratification of the Kyoto protocol. It was hugely popular. It was remiss of the Howard government not to have ratified the protocol, having signed it back in 1997. It made Australians feel like we are back again as part of the world community in tackling what is arguably the greatest human-made threat to life on this planet in all of history.

The second thing was the apology to the stolen generations of Australia’s Indigenous people. Everywhere I go people are laudatory of the Prime Minister’s speech and the government’s action in making such a simple but profoundly moving and important acknowledgement of a vast wrong done to the first Australians and in delivering an apology on behalf of the Australian people. We Greens moved, as you will remember, for just compensation to the stolen generations. That was not supported by any other party in the Senate. But it is a matter that will now need to be addressed.

Thirdly, and maybe more enduring, was the welcome to country. It was a fantastic start to this parliament. I expect it will start parliaments in this great country of ours a hundred if not 500 years from now, with first Australians welcoming parliamentarians onto what has been and always will be the Aboriginal people’s land. It will redignify our relationship with the first peoples of Australia, from whom we have all gained so much.

That said, there is a long way to go. In recent days the government has indicated that there will be no increase in the pensions for the two million Australians who are living on or below the poverty line but have given this country great service. And there will be no increase in the carer allowance for some 400,000 or more Australians who put so much time and effort into looking after kith and kin and other Australians who are not as fortunate as most of us but require and deserve special care and should be getting much more support from the whole of the Australian population. The only way that that can be equitably distributed is through the collection of taxes and the proper apportionment of money to carers. We Greens will continue to argue, as we did in the election campaign, for an extra $200 a week for those who are caring for fellow Australians, as well as a minimum increase of $30 a week—it should properly be nearer $100 a week—for the pensioners who have served this country so well.

Instead of that, there is a $31 billion tax cut over three years in the offing because former Prime Minister Howard raised this in the election campaign. Prime Minister Rudd took it up because the press gallery here—the doyens of comment in this country—insisted he had to do something in that first week of the election campaign. As subsequent polls have shown, it would have been much more popular to have insisted that that $30-plus billion go into the welfare of this country, into infrastructure and into making this country, which has had a growing gap between rich and poor under the Howard government, a fairer country to live in again. The first tranche of tax cuts, just in this coming budget, would be more that enough to give that $30 a week increase to the pensioners of Australia. I think the Prime Minister and the government are making a studied error by not saying this to the Australian people. Polls show that 60 to 80 per cent of people prefer that the tax cuts go into nation building, superannuation or welfare rather than the current formula, which will see a minority of wealthy Australians getting a majority of the largesse.

We will continue to campaign for a fairer Australia by campaigning for these inflationary tax cuts—and we are the only party contributing here that will do this—to be spent on building this country instead of going to an inevitable increase in interest rates, which again is going to hurt poor and average Australians much more than those at the big end of income distribution in this country.

Very soon a decision will be made on the $2 billion Gunns mega pulp mill in Tasmania. The ANZ Bank is the primary focus of the financing, if it is to come through. Indications are that it may well do so, even in a time of economic stringency. The final decision will rest with the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett, consequent upon some very limited findings being delivered from the Chief Scientist of this country in the coming couple of months. Let me reiterate: this pulp mill is an environmental disaster that will destroy a further 200,000 hectares—that is 200,000 football fields—of life-filled forest ecosystems in Tasmania. It is unnecessary and it produces no products that are essential to this country or that cannot be replaced. In fact, the product will be exported. It is totally remiss of our nation to be destroying these forests by deliberation—let alone the honourable minister, Peter Garrett—in 2008.

The Rudd government, however, has already committed to expending tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money in subsidising this giant private investment. How bad is that? Prime Minister Rudd was in Tasmania a couple of weeks ago recommitting to over $100 million in transport infrastructure—that is roads and rail—which was required by Gunns to facilitate the logging of these killed and destroyed forests for its pulp mill in the Tamar Valley. To boot, there are some millions of dollars directly going to the job-shedding logging industry. This is a mill that is going to threaten the livelihoods of thousands of Tasmanians who work in the agricultural industries, the fishing industry and the tourism and hospitality industry. It cuts right across the interests of small business in Tasmania. It is the Greens, rather than the two big parties, who are, politically, looking into the future to see that this cuts right across Tasmania’s prosperity for the future.

I think the coalition in opposition ought to revisit this matter and, more urgently, the Rudd government ought to look independently at the economic ramifications of publicly funding this pulp mill. Without this public largesse from state and federal governments, the pulp mill would not go ahead. This is socialising an economically unwise proposal because there are vested interests which have sway—and the logging industry is here in this parliament again today, lobbying—because they have an open door to ministerial offices that is not readily available, because of the exigencies of business and life, to small business, to environmentalists or to other interests which would put forward a much better set of proposals for Tasmania’s future than that of this giant, destructive pulp mill.

What about really addressing climate change? My fellow senator and spokesperson on climate change, Christine Milne, in the run-up to the election brought forward the Greens policy, which was to retrofit Australia’s seven to eight million households, starting with the poorest households, with solar power, solar energy, solar hot water systems and insulation. That would immediately cut power bills by some hundreds of dollars each year. That in turn allows some of that fall in power bills to go back to government to repay the cost of the infrastructure that is required. So over a 20-year period you have, at ultimately no cost to government, a massive move forward in cutting greenhouse gases because you are obviating the need to burn coal to supply poorly fitted households in Australia. At the same time you would both boost renewable energy technology in this country and add tens of thousands of jobs in Australia both to the domestic industry and to what would ultimately become a highly-boosted export industry using Australian technology.

Dr Mills from Sydney University has, as we know, gone to California to establish one of the world’s biggest solar power stations, which will supply electricity to the equivalent of 32,000 households. That is about not just the supply of power but all the on-costs of energy that go into the different power alternatives. In other words, you obviate the need to burn fossil fuels to that amount. Should we not have done that in Australia? Should we not be doing that in Australia? Is this not the direction for Australia to be taking instead of boosting the coal industry, as the Rudd government seems so keen to do, following in the footsteps of the Howard government?

Education spending in Australia needs to increase by $5 billion per annum just for us to be equivalent to the bottom of the OECD top 10. Most Australians would think that governments in this country were funding education at a world’s best level, but it is far from it. If we are to have the skilling and the economic prosperity and if we are to have the nous to be world leaders in the future, we need world’s best education funding—particularly in the public education system, where 70 per cent of children go. Articles in metropolitan newspapers, including most recently in the last few days in the Sydney Morning Herald, point to the parlous situation of public education, which is being expected to pick up all the difficulties that education is faced with in the country without the funding that the private education system has had.

We say again that, instead of these massive tax cuts to benefit the, in the main, already rich, we should put some of that money into education and the educationalists who are going to skill this country for the future it needs so that it can lead the world—a world which is going to need leadership in this age of climate change; of terrorism; of potential bird flu or other pandemics; of mass migrations of seven billion people, which is about to become 10 billion by mid-century; of increasing potential for food shortages and of huge human problems.

At the end of this we have to take a lead in democracy. You do not export democracy; you advocate it. We need to move to a global democracy—one person, one vote, one value—in this century. Australians in the international arena need to be leading a world which so badly needs to be cohesive, to see itself as a single global community and to be able to chart a future which is secure for coming generations rather than the present future, which is threatened in so many ways. There is a challenge for the Rudd government. The Greens will be putting forward the alternatives where the Rudd government fails and will be challenging the Rudd government where it fails to change much from the last 10 or 12 wasted years in Australian politics, where Australia failed to become the world leader that it should be.

I would like also to recommit the Greens to our campaign to ensure that the work now being done for Indigenous Australia is not only kept up but also done in consultation with first Australians and that it has as a primary goal closing the gap which sees Indigenous Australians dying, on average, 17 years before the rest of us. How can that be? How can we be a just Australia or a fair Australia while such a damning statistic looks us straight in the eye? I wish the Rudd government well. I assure Prime Minister Rudd that the Greens will be adding greatly to the debate in this place to ensure we do get a fairer Australia in the years ahead.

Debate interrupted.