Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Throsby for the question. Labor is the party of responsible spending and quality investments in the future. This disciplined approach is central to our five-point plan to fight inflation. We have already begun cutting wasteful spending from the previous era, and we are identifying further substantial cuts beyond the $10 billion of savings we have already announced. But, under the member for Wentworth and the Liberals, across a range of programs it was raining money—literally! When Australian families needed restraint from their government and downward pressure on inflation, the member for Wentworth in particular was treating the public purse with disdain. We know that, a few weeks before the last federal election, he was advised reluctantly by his department to spend at most $2 million investigating supposed rain-making technologies.

This supposed environmental project, called ATLANT, being promoted by a newly formed company called Australian Rain Corporation, was presented to the National Water Commission in August last year, just three months before the federal election. The ATLANT technology, you will be pleased to learn, Mr Speaker, proposed creating a high density of negative ions at ground level, on the assumption that this cloud of ions would float into the atmosphere and enhance cloud formation and therefore rainfall. Unfortunately for the commercial backers of this scheme, evidence presented to the commission cast a serious scientific cloud over their claims. To quote from the scientific review of this negative ion technology:

In our view there is not convincing evidence that the ATLANT technology operates as believed by its proponents, and independent scientific measurements quite a long time ago cast doubt in particular upon the reality of the vertical ion wind.

I have to say that, as a lay scientist I am inclined to agree with that view. They went on to say:

Despite explicit questioning, we have not seen any experimental evidence to support the ATLANT viewpoint. Since this is the presumed way in which the technology operates, this is an important omission.

In addition, the company relied on untranslated documents in the Russian language to back their case! Despite these reservations and a considerable language barrier, and no doubt under some ministerial pressure, the commission reluctantly agreed to conduct further trials and recommended Commonwealth funding of $2 million for this purpose. I would have thought $2 million was a stretch, but the former minister for the environment knew better. He overrode the $2 million and instead sought prime ministerial approval of $10 million of taxpayers’ money to be spent on this project—a ministerial tick-off of $10 million two days into the last federal election. This was a 500 per cent increase in funding for a pet project at ministerial whim. It was simply reckless spending. And with inflation at a 16-year high it shatters whatever claims to competency this opposition and this member have.

The member for Wentworth told working families that they were ‘overdramatising’ rate rises. It reminds me of one of my favourite songs, with a slight pun in it: ‘That was a fraction too much fiction.’ The member for Wentworth was a cabinet minister in a government that gave families interest rate rise after interest rate rise in three years—

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