Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2007-2008 and cognate bills. I would like to commence by reflecting somewhat broadly on this government and this government’s actions, its policies and practices, its convictions and its sometimes frightening extremism, which are, to varying extents, evident in the bills before us, just as they have been evident throughout the last decade.

This government is happy to be remembered for what it has been seen to do and thereby what it is known to be. We have seen the Howard government actively support industrial warfare, complete with attack dogs and balaclavas, on the waterfront in 1998; maliciously demonise drowning refugees escaping a sinking ship as inhumane blackmailers and terrorists; and oversee a scandal of $300 million that went to a dictator’s war chest just months before our troops were sent into battle. It has taken our nation to war but left its justification for that—to be selected from multiple options as needed—until after the fact. We are still waiting for those weapons of mass destruction to be found. I have yet to hear if any have been found.

We have also seen this government deprive Australians of our rights—physically deporting Australian citizens, throwing out of this country people who, like you and me, were citizens and had every right to be here. Not that long ago, 200-odd people were detained unlawfully, and 26 of those people were Australian citizens. We have heard nothing on this because hush money was offered—an out-of-court settlement—and it has not become a big scandal. But they are the facts. The other big issue is the Work Choices regime, which has made this nation the only one in the world to legislate against citizens’ internationally recognised rights to collectively bargain and associate freely. That is a human right, one of the internationally recognised rights all around the world.

This is a repressive government. It represses the rights of ordinary working Australians. It did it in 1998, just as it is doing it now. It is repressing their rights just as it has repressed the proper function of democratic expression of views and debate within this parliament. We saw the gagging of debate only this morning. With the government’s gagging of debate in the parliament on selling Telstra, the mandateless and extreme Work Choices, or any of the many other bills on which debate has been guillotined over the last three years since it assumed total power through its majority in the Senate, no-one can say that this government has stood up for the democratic principles to which governments usually aspire—quite the contrary.

Just as the Howard government is uninterested in notions of democratic government within this place, it is contemptuous of by far the majority of the Australian public. Just look at its current advertising binge and the justification for it. Is that value for taxpayers’ money? I do not think so, and no-one would agree that it is. The government has shovelled over $10 million into the slot machine called political desperation, and it will waste twice that before the year is out. Today at question time we saw that there will be another advertising blitz to try and convince all Australians how great nuclear power stations are going to be in our suburbs.

Then the government wonder why people are questioning their future regarding running the country. They are questioning what is happening out there, what people think. They honestly do not have a clue. In the past, of course, they have gotten out of political trouble each and every time. That is quite an achievement, considering. After saying no Australian worker would be worse off under the Howard government, they sent in the Rottweilers and the balaclavas in 1998. After they said there would ‘never, ever’ be a GST, we have definitely copped the GST. There was the ‘no university degree over $100,000’ pledge. The government ignored David Hicks for years and years and then brought him home only when the polls demanded it. They expressed outrage at Labor’s proposal of a broadband rollout with the use of the Future Fund, but now they want to bleed its proceeds for university building maintenance.

The government has been fraudulently talking up this year’s budget initiative on an issue that is very close to my heart: dental care. On inspection it is clear that that initiative will do nothing to relieve the pain and suffering of 650,000 Australians waiting for dental care today. The average waiting list is three to four years and most of those people waiting are elderly and frail and they deserve the care they need. In one of its first acts in 1996 this government abolished the Commonwealth dental scheme. We saw some window-dressing about people with chronic illnesses with dental problems that might have an impact on that chronic illness. That will do nothing for an 80-year-old who is waiting for dentures but does not have a chronic illness. They will still be waiting next year and the year after. Or most probably they will pass away before they get to the top of the list. These people, as I have said many times, have worked all their lives. They have paid their taxes and they deserve better in their twilight years. That is what a government’s job is: to ensure that we look after those people that have built the foundation of this nation. But, instead of giving them some relief in those twilight years, we are making life harder for them.

Again, I go back to the half-completed Work Choices regime. Perhaps it is not extreme enough for this government. So what will happen if they form government again? Will we see stage 2? That will come, believe me. Then there is their global warming scepticism, carbon trading white-anting, and decreasing the proportion of renewable energy generation. But now they are on board as self-described realists. The community reaction has been correct in saying, ‘Not good enough and we do not believe you.’ For whatever selection of reasons, the community has substantially lost the ability to take anything this government says seriously. When the Prime Minister announced his notional or partial retreat from his extreme Work Choices agenda, he wanted the community to believe that it was only the people’s impression of Work Choices that he was addressing. He stated that Work Choices was fine and that people in the marginal electorates around the country were wrong in finding it frightening. It was those big, bad, nasty unions that were frightening them. The Australian public was right, and they are right in finding Work Choices frightening.

This government alleviates people’s fears by discounting their concern and then assuring them that their fears are without foundation. But then it flags a Clayton’s legislative retreat, as we saw on Work Choices, matching unfounded fear with ineffective symbolism. The PM says it is only in the people’s minds, but then proposes legislation to notionally fix a problem he says he knows does not exist, as we saw with Work Choices. With this government, it is only the impression that counts. Facts only get in the way of ideological zeal, so it is better not to know, not even to ask.

When it comes to the cost of not decreasing carbon emissions within Australia, they do not want to know, they do not ask the question. They appear more than happy that our emissions are set to soar by 27 per cent by 2020. They refuse to consider the cost of action within the context that is relative to the cost of inaction. This makes all of their projections of economic fire and brimstone baseless and meaningless, because we all know the cost to the economy of inaction on climate change will be far worse than action.

The Howard government heap contempt on Labor’s concern with global warming and our concern for our nation, our rivers and farms, our fisheries and tourist attractions. The government are not concerned. They say that reducing greenhouse gases will destroy the country, but they do not for a moment consider the destruction of our agricultural industry, for instance, in a future with very different rainfall and weather patterns. When it comes to their back-of-the-envelope plan on the survival of the Murray-Darling Basin, they do not even ask Treasury for an assessment, guidance or an opinion. They promise a certain amount of money over a decade and then think people will consider them great leaders and visionaries, and a hardworking productive government. But they do not bother with the detail because it is only the impression, the smoke and mirrors, that counts with this government. They are not concerned with value-adding on any plan because they are satisfied with only making the statement that they have a plan followed by a number with a lot of zeroes after it. And the zeroes are meaningless, of course, as the money is not spent.

The government said that the Living Murray Initiative tender had $200 million for purchasing water from on-farm efficiency savings, delivering 200 gigalitres, but they have spent only $765,000—around one-third of one per cent—delivering about one-fifth of one per cent of the desired water. It is time and opportunity wasted but they are happy that it sounded good at the time. On the $10 billion promise to the national water irrigation plan, less than half of one per cent of that $10 billion will be spent in the next financial year. After three years, the government will have spent only 11 per cent of the funds allocated. With the way things are looking, they may never even get that far. They soon may not even have a plan to talk about. So we will be left with this government on our hands—a government that do not believe the reality of scientific global warming and who are only marginally implementing the National Water Initiative. We will be left with a deteriorating agricultural sector, even worse export performances, impoverished regional communities and worsening weather and water flows for decades to come.

Maybe the government should ask those who were put on AWAs in the first month of the regime—those who, almost to a person, lost at least one protected award condition—about their concerns—or the 64 per cent who lost leave loadings, the 63 per cent who lost penalty rates, the 52 per cent who lost shiftwork loadings or the 16 per cent who lost every single award condition. Perhaps these people could inform the government that their concerns are real. They are not illusionary. But the Prime Minister’s mind-reading trick no longer entertains and no longer brings home or saves his bacon. The figures were a mistake by the government. The figures are not inaccurate, but the very idea of having any figure on the negative impact of Work Choices on Australian families is clearly against this government’s policy. This government’s policy is not to know and certainly not to ask, so they stopped collecting evidence of Work Choices ripping away award conditions—problem solved. Without recent evidence, public concern can be written off as a union-invoked illusion.

Paying Saddam Hussein $300-plus million right before sending in our troops is, again, the same illusion, the same reasoning. ‘We didn’t know,’ the government say, ‘It’s got nothing to do with us.’ Another example is the torture at Abu Ghraib prison. The government say, ‘We’ve heard nothing; we see nothing; we know nothing,’ even with Colonel Mike Kelly of the Australian Army sending back reports.

With such attention to detail, such regard for the facts and such effort on implementation, it is little wonder that we have come to the point where we are ranked 20th out of the OECD countries for our investment in public infrastructure as a proportion of GDP and our exports have fallen to an all-time low as a share of GDP. We are ranked 18th within the OECD on overall education investment and, since 1995, public investment in tertiary education has gone backwards by seven per cent, while other OECD countries have, on average, increased their funding by 48 per cent. Australian productivity growth averaging 3.2 per cent in the mid-1990s fell to 2.2 per cent at the turn of the decade. It is forecast by the government to be just 1.5 per cent for the current decade but is now expected to come in at a whopping big zero in 2006-07. We are ranked 25th within the OECD for prime age male participation in our workforce and 23rd for the participation of women of child-bearing age. Bringing all this home, Australian families are paying a record proportion of their disposable incomes on mortgage interest repayments—53 per cent more than when interest rates peaked in September 1989—and this government says that the Australian public relies on them for future prosperity!

They also say that the next federal Labor government will do this and that, threatening more fire and brimstone. We do not know, however, that another term in office with the likes of Mr Howard, Mr Abbott and Mr Costello, irrespective of which of these will be leader, will clearly result in over one million Australians awaiting dental care, with rotting gums, broken teeth and painful dentures; Australian troops remaining in Iraq for another half a decade, with no solutions; a great number of kids never developing a long-term, skilled career; and decreasing living standards amongst an increasing number and proportion of low- to middle-income families. Even further, we will see the relegation of the Australian dream of homeownership for the next generation to the realm of fantasy. Of course, there will be a nuclear industry with a nuclear power station in every neighbourhood.

One thing I want to focus on is the budget’s attention to the developing situation of global warming or, more specifically, the Prime Minister’s peculiar view of the benefits of setting targets in relation to greenhouse gas emission reductions. The government seem very happy to use numbers and projections regarding many areas of national activity, be it Australian technical colleges, numbers of skilled people entering Australia per year or the hardware and capacity of our defence forces. While the Prime Minister and the government are happy to entertain projections of the number of nuclear reactors they have already concluded they intend to see operating around the country—and this was well before they even considered investigating the prospect of a national carbon trading scheme that will be essential to making nuclear power generation even notionally cost-effective—they refuse to consider targets for greenhouse gas emissions. They also refuse to consider raising the mandatory renewable energy target above its token level set for the next 13 years. They refuse to consider an Australian future that has any real share of energy generation produced by sources other than those of coal fired power stations and nuclear power.

The Prime Minister says that it would be economically irresponsible to set any target in relation to greenhouse gas emissions. But is it irresponsible for the thousands of jobs which rely on the health and attractiveness of the Great Barrier Reef, the tens of thousands of jobs which rely on our fishing industry, and the hundreds of thousands of jobs that rely on the productive capacity of our agricultural lands? The Prime Minister says that to have a target in relation to greenhouse gases is economically irresponsible. I say not to have a target is economically irresponsible. The truth of the matter is that the Prime Minister does have a target in relation to greenhouse gases. Mr Howard’s target regarding greenhouse gases is that of current projections: a 27 per cent increase in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. He professes that this target—a target based on no action, no responsibility and no concern whatsoever for the hundreds of thousands of jobs at risk from climate change and changing weather patterns—is the only target that can be considered economically responsible.

This government is hoping to hoodwink the Australian public, posing as an administration that shares the community’s concerns regarding global warming and dangerous climate change but refusing to establish any position on the desirability or otherwise of any concentration of carbon dioxide equivalent gases in our atmosphere, refusing to establish a position that will invoke responsibility for action against the scourge they simply refuse to acknowledge as reality.

Their reluctance to become positively involved in the global response to climate change—and we cannot include here their prior presence on international panels—betrays this government as belonging well and truly to a different age. They are out of date, out of relevance and out of time. The Prime Minister and his government have developed a mantra that they are continually using in defence of their obsession with coal and nuclear power generation, and that is ‘renewable energy sources cannot be used for base load power’. He even says that it is based on broad scientific consensus. Mr Howard said in this place on 28 February this year:

... there are really only two workable sources of energy for power stations for baseload power in this country: one of them is fossil fuels; the other is nuclear power. That is a fact. It is scientific knowledge; it is unarguable scientific knowledge.

While this government and their most vocal supporters ridicule science offered up regarding global warming, and go so far as to discount the considered and highly conservative opinions of thousands of scientists from around the world in saying that climate change is the biggest con in recent history, they seem almost desperate to defer to scientific opinion that they say discredits renewable energy as able to offer only a marginal contribution to our power needs at best.

The Prime Minister does, I would hope, acknowledge that total power generation is likely to be a mix of power sources, including hydro—as it has for many years; wind—as it currently is, increasingly; and solar—again increasingly. Toward the baseload debate, I would like to add perspectives offered by Australian scientists and columnists who address the myths that underlie Mr Howard’s refusal to consider renewable energy as a valuable and potentially highly significant proportion of our total future energy mix. The selection of myths include: (1) since wind power is an intermittent source, it cannot replace coal fired power unless it has expensive dedicated long-term storage; (2) because of wind power’s intermittency it has no value in meeting peak demands; and (3) to maintain a steady state of voltage and frequency requires much additional expense.

Some 25 years ago, CSIRO and ANU scientists used Monte Carlo computer simulations, numerical models and mathematical models of electricity grids containing various amounts of wind power capacity. Their conclusions have been subsequently confirmed and built upon by several overseas authors. They concluded that any given quantity of wind power generating capacity can be factored into baseload power capacity, whether it be one per cent, 10 per cent or 70 per cent—as is currently happening in Western Australia and other places around the world. Coal fired power stations, wind turbines or hydro systems are not all running at all times. The Australian national electricity grid network mandate— (Time expired)

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