Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to make a few comments on the Climate Change Authority (Abolition) Bill 2013 but, before doing that, I want to refer to some things that the previous speaker, Senator Ludlam, mentioned. I am not quite sure what it has to do with the Climate Change Authority bill, but he seemed to be warning us that Sri Lanka is a bad place to be and that it is a bad international citizen. It begs the question: why did your leader go for a much-publicised holiday to Sri Lanka? I think she publicly made some very favourable comments about Sri Lanka. That is not really relevant to the bill, but it simply shows again the hypocrisy of the Greens political party. On one hand they criticise Sri Lanka; on the other hand, the leader of the Greens political party goes there for a holiday and speaks glowingly about it. How can anyone in Australia take any notice of what the Greens might say?

The Climate Change Authority was set up by the Labor government, with the support of the Greens, as 'an independent advisory climate change body'. I suspect that all of the board members of the Climate Change Authority are clever people, probably committed to their own views, but you can just look at them and see how independent the authority is. One of the members of the authority is Mr Bernie Fraser, former Reserve Bank Chairman. You do not need to be a keen student of Australian politics to understand that Mr Fraser has always been of a left-wing inclination.

Another board member is a Professor Quiggin, from my state of Queensland. He is obviously quite an intelligent man; he is a professor at the University of Queensland. But I have never heard him say anything or write any document that is not supporting the Labor Party. I am sorry—I have seen him do stuff where he does not support the Labor Party but only because he is supporting the Greens party. This is the sort of independent advice you get on climate change. I could go through a few of the other board members. We have also got Ms Heather Ridout. How many boards was she appointed to by the Gillard government? How many times did she get up and publicly praise the Gillard government? No doubt these are very good and able people, but to put them on as an advisory body that is supposedly giving independent advice is just a joke. That in itself is a reason to get rid of this allegedly independent advisory body.

Professor Hamilton is another board member. Again I am sure he is a very good person, quite bright, but he set up the Australia Institute. Ask anyone what the Australia Institute is about. It is there to promote the views of the very left of Australian politics, represented in this place by the Greens and the Australian Labor Party. So 'independent' climate change authority it is not and never has been.

That authority costs Australian taxpayers something like $8 million a year. That is not a big amount in the scheme of things. We almost pay that amount each day in interest on the borrowings from the Labor-Greens government that occurred over the last six years. The interest that we pay on the debt that was run up irresponsibly by the Labor government, supported by the Greens, is costing us something like a couple of million dollars a day. So I guess $8 million for the Climate Change Authority is not a big amount, but every amount counts. When you have a financial crisis, as we do in this country, when you have a country that is heading towards owing something like $500 billion to foreign lenders, then every little bit of a saving that you can make is important.

Most senators will recall that when the Howard government left office we had some $60 billion in credit, plus $60 billion put aside for a rainy day. Within a couple of years, that $60 billion in credit had disappeared under the profligacy of the Labor-Greens government and, worse than that, we had borrowed over $100 billion from foreign lenders. Now we are on a trajectory towards a debt of almost $600 billion. Just calculate—you do not need to get out your calculator—$600 billion and put interest at anywhere between two and six per cent, whatever you like, and work out what that sort of mismanagement is costing our country at the present time.