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

Senator Sherry says it is a ‘fair suck of the sauce bottle’. I think that is another way of putting it. The government says it wants the Senate to come in here and pass these bills if some developer gets into trouble in the future but is not prepared to ask for some sort of restraint on that developer. Come off it! The Greens will deal with each situation on its merits. Let me forewarn the government that, if at some future time a developer gets into trouble and seeks a bailout important enough to rescue the workers who are employed by that development—and that is where we are concerned—but still wants to pocket multimillion dollar salaries under those circumstances, it will need to bring in a CEO salary cap for those developers.

We will always act in the interests of working Australians in a matter like this, but we are simply not going to, as the government intends to, accede to any developer who comes along on a fat, inflated, unfair, unwarranted, multimillion dollar—and, in some cases, tens of millions of dollars—development taking an amount of money off the people of Australia in circumstances where that developer will have failed and is calling on the public largess. This is the exact circumstance that worried Obama, where CEOs were being rewarded for failure. The government is saying to the Greens and, presumably, the opposition, ‘We want to guarantee in advance that you will reward CEOs who have led a development corporation into failure with a public guaranteed loan and with no requirement of a salary cap.’ The Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the minister are going to have to rethink that. Sure, in those circumstances, we will move to help the workers who are involved, but we are simply not going to throw away, as this government wants us to do, our responsibility to ensure that CEOs also pull in their belts under those circumstances.