Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to join this address-in-reply debate. I understand Senator Abetz is otherwise engaged and is unable to make his speech first. The issue I want to respond to in the Governor-General’s address is climate change. The new Rudd government made a good start dealing with this. It is arguably one of the greatest threats to the world as we know it. Mr Rudd engaged in Kyoto to what was the great relief of citizens and scientists alike in this country. It was not difficult to ratify Kyoto and had it not been for Mr Howard’s determined but illogical position for almost a decade—in other words he said, ‘We’ll make our target, but we won’t ratify because that might harm our economy’—the outward expression of taking climate change seriously would not have been Mr Rudd’s to make. But more than 100 days on, the Rudd government is not looking as if it is in any sort of a hurry on this issue. Mr Rudd is demonstrating the same lack of logic: it appears that what is economically affordable is driving his response and to hell with setting a target that might stop the earth reaching temperature increases of two or three or four degrees. We certainly need a plan to stop irreversible climate change and, for sure, finding the most cost-effective way to achieve that is what we should be doing, but we must do it quickly.

The government says that coal must stay part of the mix regardless of the cost of geosequestering its pollution. Economic growth and population growth will doubtless go on being the cornerstone of this new government’s economic aims. Mr Rudd will not begin increasing the renewable energy target until some time in 2010 or 2011, even though there is more than a year’s worth of renewable energy certificates banked up just waiting for it to happen. As I understand it, he will ignore the fact that the science and the development of clever ways of generating renewable energy is heading off overseas where governments are a bit savvier, a bit better organised in getting their systems and their incentives in place to benefit from this work.

There is still no sign of a greenhouse trigger being put in the environment laws, as was proposed by the last government. This means that coal fired power stations and energy intensive desalination plants are being built without any oversight or approval required by the very government that has just made a commitment to the world to contain emissions. The 2020 target that we were all waiting for was on hold until the Garnaut report, but when Professor Garnaut delivered his interim report it apparently frightened the horses and Mr Rudd’s team backed off and said his would be one input into the decision-making process. Treasury, which is not known for its expertise in climate change modelling, is now doing that modelling. After years of ABARE’s dodgy anti-environment modelling, perhaps Treasury cannot be worse.

There is still no sign that we will get minimum energy standards any time soon for appliances, cars, air conditioners, industrial processes or office buildings. Freeways are still being built as if people can go on for the next century wasting fuel to push their car—a tonne or so of metal—to deliver one person typically from point A to point B. And those distances are getting longer and longer as cities like Melbourne now span more than 50 kilometres in width. In fact, Melbourne is far more sprawling than even London with its 7.2 million people. Indeed, London, with twice the population of Melbourne, generates fewer greenhouse emissions—just 8.5 million tonnes compared with 11 million tonnes as reported this morning in the Age. The Victorian government has given in to the goading of the former Howard government and it has decided to release vast new tracks of land for new housing, much of it no doubt two-storey McMansions that will not be designed to cope with summers that are hotter and drier than ever before. Melbourne is growing at an unbelievable 1,500 people a week—more cars on the road, more consumption, more greenhouse emissions. And Premier Brumby’s heart swelled with pride as he announced that Melbourne would surpass Sydney in population some time soon.

This growth is unsustainable, and yet governments around the country still do not get it. Brett Patterson says that the general view is that growth is unambiguously good. He says the ‘growth religion pervades every aspect of today’s society, from the neoclassical economist’s pulpit to the faithful masses. Politicians argue over whose policies will lead to the most growth, like different denominations bickering over whose doctrine is most holy.’

Global warming is much more serious than we thought even 12 or 24 months ago. We now know that nature has its limits. Victoria may have 500 years supply of brown coal left, but the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning the last 100 years worth of coal is already way too high. Our natural systems can no longer absorb this carbon. Our soils are losing carbon and natural nutrients because of our intensive farming and energy intensive fertiliser use. Soils that are dry lose their humus and, with it, the greenhouse gases they contain. We have taken far too much water from our river systems. We have overfished. We have overlogged. We have practically given native timber away. We produce more recyclable waste than we are prepared to recycle. There is not enough fresh water for Melbourne’s current population—at lease at the rate at which we waste it in this new climate of one-third less rainfall across Victoria.

Australia was ranked 49th out of 149 countries in the 2008 Environmental Performance Index. We got a mere 42.5 per cent for climate change—behind China, with 52.7 per cent, and India, with 57.9 per cent. Even the United States outdid us, with 56.1 per cent. It is as if we and our governments do not care or just do not want to know how serious the situation is. Fred Pearce, author of The Last Generation: How Nature Will Take Her Revenge for Man-made Climate Change, tells us that scientists have known for only a few years that they were wrong about ice sheets at the poles. They used to think it would take 10,000 years for melting at the surface of an ice sheet to penetrate down to the bottom. Now they know it takes about 10 seconds for the melt-water at the top to form lakes that drain down into the crevasses and reach the bottom, lubricating the join between rock and ice, so that the whole ice sheet starts to slide downhill towards the ocean. And that is exactly what has happened to Greenland glaciers and why sea level rise has gone from two millimetres a year in the early 1990s to more than three millimetres a year now.

In the late summer of 2007, an area of Arctic sea ice almost twice the size of Britain disappeared in a single week. The Greenland ice sheet was melting so fast that huge chunks of ice weighing several billion tonnes were breaking off and sliding into the sea, triggering minor earthquakes, according to the Earth Policy Institute in Washington. James Hansen of NASA says that sea level rises will be 10 times faster within a few years as Greenland destabilises. If Greenland melts, sea levels will rise by eight to 10 metres and hundreds of millions of people will be homeless.

The earth’s climate has been relatively stable and benign for 10,000 years, allowing humankind to grow and prosper, to industrialise, to build sophisticated cities and to exploit nature and hundreds of thousands of years’ worth of fossilised carbon. But it was not always the case. Eleven thousand years ago temperatures in the Arctic rose 16 degrees or more in a decade due to tiny wobbles in the Earth’s orbit, changing the heat balance of the planet by only a fraction as much as our emissions of greenhouse gases are doing today. Then, the sea level rose 20 metres in just 400 years, 20 times faster than today. Scientists are now telling us that the world could be returning to a world of climatic turbulence, where tipping points are constantly crossed, and that this has happened in the past when there have been abrupt movements of carbon between atmosphere and natural reservoirs such as rainforests and the oceans.

The British Met Office warns that the Amazon rainforest could die by mid-century, releasing its stored carbon from trees and soils into the air. This could trigger the sudden movement of carbon, which has caused violent climate change in the past. There are trillions of tonnes of methane trapped in permafrost and in sediments beneath the ocean which are likely to be released as ocean waters increase in temperature. This is exactly what happened 55 million years ago and resulted in the extinction of millions of species on earth. James Hansen says we have just 10 years to avert disaster. He may be out by five or even 10 years, but can we afford to wait and see?

Why are we waiting another four years to start emissions trading? Why are we putting off a trading system for energy efficiency? Why wait to extend a renewable energy trading system that is already in place and ready to go? And how can the government possibly say we will wait 10 or 15 years until we have a cost-effective system of capturing carbon from coal fired power and putting it underground out of harm’s way? This is just as ludicrous and pathetic as the last government’s plan to solve the problem with nuclear power—only that would take even longer to get going. A British minister for energy admitted recently that this technology might never become available.

The response of this government, like the last, to rising oil prices is to announce more tax perks for exploration instead of finding ways to use less oil, like better public transport and more fuel efficient vehicles than the monsters Australia’s auto industry currently makes. At some point we are going to have to stop burning fossil fuels, and the sooner we get used to that the better.

There is no point in turning coal into oil, extracting oil from tar sands or drilling for oil in deep oceans, because the result is the same—more carbon released into the atmosphere and more dangerous climate change. Energy supply must move as quickly as possible to renewables—hydrogen from solar thermal collectors; geothermal and wind for electricity; and fully electric, lighter weight vehicles. Fossil fuels must soon be left in the ground no matter what the demand for them may be. So let’s get ready with new systems and new infrastructure and new incentives to bring on the alternatives, so we won’t be caught short. If we can no longer export coal we should use our scientists to be world leaders in exporting clever alternatives. Give our scientists and developers the subsidies and the perverse incentives of around $10 billion a year that currently flow to coal and oil and see what they can do.

Minister Garrett launched Alice Springs as a solar city on Monday to enormous fanfare, but it is another trial. Please, Mr Garrett, tell us when we are going to stop practising and trialling. Why can’t we have a solar country? We already know how to install PV systems, smart meters and solar hot water systems—and we know how to do energy audits. What we don’t have are feed-in tariffs and other incentives to price carbon back in the ground, where it is safe. Reducing emissions is not rocket science and it is not as expensive as disastrous climate change. My message to Mr Rudd and to his intention in his first term of his office is: just do it. The results of not doing so, further procrastination, will be a disaster.

Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On 24 November last year we had a federal election and this country voted overwhelmingly to place in this parliament a new government, a Labor government under the prime ministership of Kevin Rudd. It was the fourth federal election that I had faced since being preselected as a senator for the Northern Territory but, of course, for me it was the most momentous election. Before I provide my contribution to this address-in-reply, I want to thank once again the people in the Northern Territory for providing their support to me in representing them in this chamber. I must say I take that responsibility extremely seriously. I have other Labor colleagues from other states here, but for people like me and Kate Lundy, who are the sole representatives for our constituencies in the Labor Party and now in government, it is quite a responsibility that I take most seriously, and I respect the choice of the people in the Northern Territory. I think it is also appropriate to place on record my thanks to the people in the Labor Party, to our many hundreds of volunteers and supporters throughout the Northern Territory and also, again, to my family who supported me not only during the election campaign but in the three years leading up to that.

Having said that, and having paid my respects to those people in the Territory who have worked so hard to ensure that we have had a change of government, let me say that we did see an excellent result for Labor in the Northern Territory in such a huge electoral area. If I turn to the AEC report of the overall vote, it actually rose for the Labor Party from the 2004 election when it was then a total of 38,204 voters or 41.4 per cent, to 46,532 voters or 46 per cent. So it went from 41.4 to 46 per cent, nearly a five per cent increase. This reflects the massive swing to Labor right across this country. Of that total in the Territory, we received 22,214 votes in the seat of Solomon and 24,491 votes in the seat of Lingiari.

This increase was due no doubt in part to the nationwide swing to Labor and in part to the many thousands of people in the Northern Territory who took stock, assessed what had been happening not only across the country but to them, to their families, their family budgets, their households, and to the people around them and the way they had been treated by the former government. They made a swing to a party that has looked forwards, not backwards, to a party that has shown energetic enthusiasm for wanting to change and drive the way this country moves in a different and renewed state. People put confidence in us and voted for us accordingly at the ballot boxes.

In the seats of Solomon and Lingiari we had worked particularly hard through the three years, listening to people about what was needed and what was wanted. The Tiger Brennan proposal, which is to extend the road through from Lingiari into the CBD of Palmerston, will be a major roadway and motorway now that connects rural Darwin to Palmerston and the CBD. It will greatly ease the flow of traffic between Darwin and Palmerston. It took the Labor Party to finally put together the costings to complete that project, which is what people were looking for. We will be opening a new super clinic in Palmerston, a most welcome move for the growing population of the area. It will mean, for instance, that Palmerston residents will be able to visit a local medical clinic that will provide comprehensive health care, not just GP services but allied health as well, and it will also go to easing the workload from the accident and emergency departments at Royal Darwin Hospital. In Lingiari there was a massive commitment to roads and infrastructure funding that had been so sadly neglected by the Howard government.

In Lingiari I made a huge effort to visit as many communities as I possibly could. I spent five of the six weeks on the road, making trips to Alice Springs and Central Australian communities, to Tennant Creek, Katherine, Nhulunbuy and Jabiru. What I can say to you, though, is that the support that the Labor Party achieved in the seat of Lingiari shows that, clearly, people were overwhelmingly, convincingly and comprehensively rejecting the policies of the former government in respect of Indigenous affairs. Not only did they not want to endorse in any way whatsoever the actions of the former Prime Minister, they also completely rejected out of hand the policies presented by the former minister for Indigenous affairs.

Let me just back that up by some of the statistics. I go to the community of Wadeye, which you may remember had achieved enormous attention from the former government. In that community the Labor Party returned a 92.43 per cent return on its polling booth. In fact, if you drill right down to the voters in that community, 684 Indigenous people voted for the Labor Party compared to just 56 for the coalition. At Gunbalunya we received 617 votes to only 41 to the former government. In Finke, at Aputula we received 314 votes to the former government’s 27. In fact, right across the seat of Lingiari we returned almost a 90 percentile range of support. Finally I want to go to my personal favourite, which is the return of the vote in the community of Yirrkala, where we obtained 260 votes to the Howard government achieving only four.

Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator McLucas interjecting—

Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, I am not kidding, Senator McLucas. We have four people at Yirrkala who decided that they wanted to endorse the actions of former Minister Brough and Prime Minister Howard. The Senate statistics for Lingiari showed a 51.83 per cent endorsement for the Labor Party and only a 35.01 per cent return to the Country Liberal Party. I will turn to just one other, Gapuwiyak, a community in north-east Arnhem Land where we obtained 1,304 votes to only 127 votes for the former government.

So what does that prove to us, as I stand here representing my constituents from the Northern Territory? We had the former government, who failed to listen to Indigenous people, who did not consult with them at all, who never took on board their major concerns and who intervened in such a massive way in their lives. While acknowledging the need to protect children and provide better policing and health services, the Labor Party committed to reviewing the Northern Territory intervention within 12 months in areas such as the taking over of land under the compulsory five-year leases. We committed to retaining the permit system, and we have already put legislation in the House of Representatives to honour that commitment which, of course, most Indigenous communities asked for. That move was strongly supported by the Northern Territory police as a safeguard against unwelcome visitors. We committed to bringing back CDEP, and already Minister Macklin has issued a moratorium on the further dismantling of this program. We acknowledge that some changes are needed to develop more jobs in remote areas, that real jobs will always be limited and that CDEP is the best form of an alternative to provide work.

At the outset, we heard that the intervention was about backing up the Little children are sacred report and about ensuring that children were safe and protected. I personally think I should and will call publicly for us to now clarify exactly what the intervention is achieving and what we want to achieve as we come up to the 12-month review. Up until February, we knew that 6,244 child health checks had been undertaken. In about 92 teams, 250 healthcare professionals have been to 49 communities and to 12 health camps. There has been an analysis undertaken of the first group of 4,900 children. We know that the major problems are dental services, followed by ear, nose and throat and, most likely, skin diseases. But I think a really interesting statistic that people ought to know about is the evidence of abuse that is out there. There have been children who have been referred to the Northern Territory Family and Community Services. It may well have been because they were experiencing poor growth, as we heard about during the most recent estimates proceedings, or because there was difficulty in establishing appropriate care circumstances for that child.

So how many have actually been referred to Family and Community Services for one reason or another? Of the children who have already been seen, it is 0.7 per cent. So we are talking about 0.7 per cent of 6,244, which is 50. So the dramas and the charades and the attention that was sought by the previous government in relation to child sexual abuse and child neglect, I believe, were severely overstated. I am not denying they are there, but when you have only 50 out of 6,244, we really need to redefine what we are trying to achieve through this intervention and exactly what goals we are trying to achieve. I think that the National Indigenous Times summed it up quite adequately when it stated:

The fact is, Aboriginal people still want the $1.3 billion spent in their communities, plus a lot more to make up the massive gaps—

massive gaps, I might add, that were incurred under the 11 long years of the Howard government—

in health, housing and education that have grown amid decades of appalling government neglect.

But they:

... don’t see why they have to give up their basic human rights in the process ...

And I think that the resounding results at the polling booths in the Northern Territory show that. Aboriginal people clearly rejected the methods of the intervention. Aboriginal people in the Northern Territory want consultation, not confrontation, and they want assistance, not insistence, by government. They want to be consulted and their views sought, and they want to own the way forward in relation to what needs to be achieved in Indigenous communities. If you are ever in any doubt about that, you just need to look at the support the Labor Party got during the federal election, booth by booth, across the Territory. Some of the most significant booths, where former Minister Brough had spent most of his time, overwhelmingly rejected not only him personally but his proposals.

Industrial relations was also a hot topic during the election campaign due to the former government’s radical reforms, which took away workers’ rights and placed them firmly in the power of employers. The sheer lack of power experienced by employees was clearly demonstrated by the National Jet Systems pilots in Darwin, Perth and Cairns during the campaign. In their original agreements, those pilots were entitled to receive an annual CPI increase. Management withheld the increase in order to pressure the pilots into signing up to reduced conditions through an AWA. Last year pilots based in Darwin were told they had to sign reduced condition AWAs or they would be made redundant. There was also the allegation that some pilots were required to sign in order to be entitled to a promotion. New pilots hired since the beginning of 2007 were required to sign an AWA, which we saw included a 20 per cent reduction on the existing pilot salary and a pay increase of only two per cent annually, regardless of CPI movement. They were also obligated to pay, in part, for their training and, if they left the company within three years, they were required to pay for their training in full, which cost about $30,000. These pilots were already some of the lowest paid pilots in the country. It was not just a case of simply moving to another company. There are limited jobs, particularly for pilots, available in the Northern Territory, and the industry requires that these pilots lose seniority when they move to another employer. That means a significant loss of income levels lasting several years.

Even just recently, after the change of government, with a mandate given by the Australian public to change the previous coalition government’s radical industrial relations reforms, came the ordeal experienced by the now famous Triton 11. The UK based company Gardline International sacked Australian workers aboard its Customs vessel, the Triton, whilst they were out at sea, and informed the workers that they would not have a job once they docked in Darwin. The company had intended to replace them with a non-unionised workforce on lesser pay. The crew fought for their working rights and, with the support of the community and the trade unions, were reinstated with a pay rise. So the industrial relations legislation as it currently stands must be changed. Australian workplace agreements put the balance of power firmly in the hands of the employer, and the fairness test, in all its toothless glory, has done little to restore fairness in the workplace. The Rudd government will restore fairness to the workplace and ensure both the employer and the employee are equal when it comes to their terms and conditions of work.

I want to acknowledge the Your Rights at Work campaign. This was instrumental in helping to bring down the previous government’s unjust industrial relations regime and legislation. The campaign team, along with their volunteers in the Northern Territory, particularly in the seat of Solomon, were active in raising public awareness about the unfairness of the coalition’s IR system, and their incredible efforts in the year leading up to the election did not go unnoticed. I want to personally thank Rebecca Want, who was later joined by Melissa Harrison and Bryan Wilkins. Those three people, along with their army of volunteers—from trade unions to workplace delegates to workers right across the board who were just aggrieved by the thought of the unbalanced nature of the system imposed by the Howard government—worked tirelessly for months on end, seven days a week, with community organisations and trade unions, talking to the public and keeping them informed.

Of course, I dare not mention the Your Rights at Work campaign without mentioning the chicken who played a pivotal role in highlighting the fact to the community in the Northern Territory that the previous member for the seat of Solomon had boasted so proudly that his hands were all over the Howard government’s IR legislation but had failed so dismally to actually stand up and debate it publicly in the lead-up to the election campaign and during the election campaign. You can understand why the Your Rights at Work campaign went to the trouble of ensuring that a chicken appeared at every place it possibly could to reinforce the nature of how, on one hand, people were proud to have introduced this legislation but, on the other, they backed away when it came to actually debating the impact it was having on workers. The campaign’s vocal opposition to Work Choices gave many employees on unfair AWAs the courage to come out and speak about their experiences. On the whole the community response was incredibly positive, and the support was demonstrated with an election day victory.

Finally, I want to pay tribute to a longstanding life member of the Labor Party in the Northern Territory, Alfred Ernest Chittock. Alf passed away on Christmas Day last year and was in his 90s when that happened. He was around to see the election of the Rudd Labor government, and I personally know that he was incredibly proud of that day. I think the fact that I mention him in this speech on the address-in-reply shows justice and compliments his love for and commitment to the Labor Party. He first moved to the Territory in 1949, after the end of the Second World War, and was instrumental in the affairs of Tennant Creek, becoming chairman of the town management board. He became the first mayor of Tennant Creek after the local government was established and was instrumental in setting up the Local Government Association of the Northern Territory.

He was involved in the Returned and Services League, the Red Cross, the Senior Citizens Club, the Lions Club, the Sporties Club and the Memo Club in Tennant Creek. In fact, if you want to find the epitome of what the heart of the Territory is about, you would look no further than Alf Chittock. I have to say that he was a great icon who will be greatly missed in Tennant Creek. He was a great champion of the Labor Party in Tennant, which I think was incredibly hard to do through his years. But I know that, as a former life member of the party and a great member of the party, he would have been proud of the election of the Rudd Labor government, and so it is this speech that I would like to dedicate to his memory and to his family. (Time expired)

Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As the spin of Rudd Labor starts to wear thinner and thinner, we are seeing a government without direction and without substance. No matter which area we look at, we see spin over substance. No longer being able to follow the Howard government’s agenda, they are now looking at over 100 committees and inquiries to give them some direction and some substance.

Mr Rudd, in the lead-up to the last election, promised everyone that they were his No. 1 priority. I thank my Senate colleague Simon Birmingham for his contribution to the public debate, in which he pointed out how often Mr Rudd said a certain group or a certain area of public policy was his No. 1 priority. Just listen to this:

... education ... will be the first priority ...

That was on 23 January last year.

Good economic management is my No. 1 priority.

That was on 11 July last year. Then we have:

Labor’s first priority is the defence and security of our nation ...

That was on 12 November last year. And so it goes on: ‘Inflationary pressures are our No. 1 priority,’ and, ‘Our first priority is to act on climate change,’ and, ‘Cooperative federalism—that’s No. 1 priority for me.’ The list goes on, but what we had was pure spin without commitment and without substance.

I have been advised that a very good test in determining the sincerity of a speaker on TV is to turn off the volume and observe their facial expressions. I invite the Australian people to do that to Mr Rudd, because one characteristic will prevail over all others, and that is insincerity, pure and simple. Nobody who is genuinely sincere could have gone round the country saying to the defence community, ‘You are our No. 1 priority,’ then saying to the environmental community, ‘Climate change is our No. 1 priority,’ then going to education and saying, ‘You’re our No. 1 priority,’ and then, in relation to the states, saying, ‘Cooperative federalism is the No. 1 priority for me.’ What that shows is a man who got away with spin, and spin he did. But after 100 days that spin is now beginning to wear very thin with the Australian people. Indeed, it is now becoming increasingly obvious that he cannot juggle all these No. 1 priorities that I have listed—and, indeed, time does not permit me to go through all of them.

I now move to Mr Rudd’s so-called razor gang, which is going to cut about $600 million out of federal expenditure. We are told that the reason for this is overexpenditure by the Howard government, the previous government. In a desperate attempt to trash the excellent economic credentials of the former Liberal government, Mr Rudd spins the line that we have to have this razor gang. The reality is that Mr Rudd went to the election promising overseas investors a substantial cut in their taxation obligations. He said to the Australian people that he could do that with a cost-neutral impact. When pushed, he said that it might blow out to $15 million. Thank goodness that Peter Costello introduced the Charter of Budget Honesty, because now, after the election, the Charter of Budget Honesty has exposed that this little exercise of cutting the taxation obligations of overseas investors will not be cost-neutral and will cost not $15 million but in excess of $400 million. So the first two-thirds of the cuts made by the razor gang are to cover the absolute debacle of his taxation promise to overseas investors.

What we have here is Mr Rudd yet again spinning and not telling us what the substance of these supposedly needed cuts is. The fact is he made a promise to people, either deliberately or in ignorance of what the consequences would be. If he deliberately did so, he ought be condemned. If he did so ignorantly, I would have thought that a man so strong on saying sorry might be able to say sorry to the Australian people for his error and come clean and say: ‘Look, I made a promise to overseas investors. I mucked up by the sum of $400 million. Therefore, I have to cut the services of Australian men and women to make up for that mistake, because I happen to believe that overseas investors are more important than Australian citizens.’ We will not hear that from Mr Rudd. But I tell those listening in, and Mr Rudd, that we will continue to remind Mr Rudd of that debacle and the fact that the first two-thirds of that razor gang proposal to cut $600 million are needed specifically to cover for his election mistake.

After all these extravagant statements about there not being enough money, we had enough money for a personal child carer for the Prime Minister at taxpayers’ expense—until it was exposed, and then he cut it off. We do have over $1 million for that Tree of Knowledge up in Queensland somewhere that the Labor Party venerate. It is a Labor Party icon. Surely the Labor Party should be paying for that. No way: the taxpayer can fund that, while the government is busy trying to cut the carers’ bonus, the pensioners’ bonus, the baby bonus, the superannuation co-contribution scheme—you name it. Mr Rudd is busy cutting them, allegedly because there is not enough money, but we have enough money for a Labor Party icon in Queensland.

Over the 100 days of the Rudd government thus far we have seen broken promise after broken promise. Indeed, Senator Crossin’s contribution just before my own was a complete and utter wind back of that which Mr Rudd promised in relation to the Northern Territory intervention. He went to the Australian people saying, ‘I stand dovetailed with the Prime Minister; I stand all fours with the Prime Minister on the need for this intervention.’ Yet Senator Crossin says that this is why, allegedly, the Indigenous community voted in a particular way. What Mr Rudd and the Labor Party did was to say to one part of Australia, ‘We stand firm with the Howard government on the Northern Territory intervention,’ and then send people like Senator Crossin into the Indigenous communities spreading another message: that Labor would wind back the intervention. There is another good example of the Rudd government spinning one line to mainstream Australia and backbenchers like Senator Crossin spinning another line to a particular interest group. The Australian people now quite rightly ask: which is the true Mr Rudd? Which is the real Mr Rudd? Some of us are not surprised because, during the election campaign, Mr Garrett exposed what Labor’s plan was: say that they agreed with everything that the then government was doing but after the election change things. That is what we are clearly seeing. Mr Garrett should not have had to eat humble pie during the election campaign. Instead, Mr Rudd should now be saying that in fact Mr Garrett told the truth and everybody else within the Labor Party did not.

We have agreed to limit our comments to 10 minutes, so in conclusion I simply say this: to the 47 per cent of Australians who supported the coalition at the last election, thank you. To those who changed their vote on the strength of Labor’s promises—which were largely to adopt the policies of the Liberal-National Party coalition—I say: we will keep Labor to their promises, especially in this chamber. They are already starting to unravel. As time progresses, we will see even more of that unravelling.

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to 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.