Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is six months since the member for Wentworth, Mr Malcolm Turnbull, became Prime Minister—and hasn't that been the world's longest disappointment? It is absolutely clear that the hard-Right, conservative rump of the Liberal and National parties still runs this government and that our Prime Minister has been prepared to sell out any socially progressive belief he may have had in order to hold onto the gig.

We still have refugees and children in detention. We are locking people up and breaking them, and this Prime Minister thinks that that policy is a good thing. The Prime Minister has kept Mr Tony Abbott's climate-change targets. He has come into this House and delivered lectures about how important it is that we continue to dig up and burn coal, when our scientists are telling us that we need to keep it in the ground. Recently he has been prepared to throw the Safe Schools program under a bus just to appease the hard Right within his party, even though it is a successful program that has been stopping bullying.

We still see this divisive plebiscite on marriage equality on the table, even though part of Mr Turnbull's subtle pitch to the community beforehand was that he was someone, as the Prime Minister, who believed in marriage equality. We are seeing repeated attacks on people's rights at work. We are seeing attacks on Medicare, and billions of dollars are still being cut from our schools and hospitals. Increasingly, people who had so much hope that the change of prime ministership might bring a change of direction understand that no such thing is likely to happen.

I was relieved when the member for Warringah, Mr Tony Abbott, was no longer our Prime Minister. Everyone around this country exhaled. We thought it might mean a change and we are learning that it is not. But what is sad to witness is not just the lack of change in the government side; it is that on so many of those issues that matter Labor has been there to give the government a helping hand. Time after time they have voted for offshore detention, to lock people up and to send them to the hellholes of Nauru and Manus Island. They have opposed the Greens' push to let 267 people seeking asylum, including Baby Asha and 36 babies, stay in Australia. Only the Greens have stood up to Labor and the Liberals in this parliament and said: let them stay. Labor and the Liberals joined together to slash the renewable energy target—a target that was working. Its crime was to be too successful. We were generating more renewable energy than people had potentially hoped for, and so what happened? Labor and the Liberals got together and said the best thing to do was to reduce the target.

We have seen every citizen in this country turned into a suspect, with an agreement to keep people's metadata for two years. Even though you are not suspected of having committed any crime, thanks to Labor and the Liberals the government now has available to it a pile of data about you. We have seen whistleblower laws restricted by Labor and the Liberals joining together. Then there are the things that hit people's hip pockets, like the Greens' move to stop banks from making profits by charging $2 to $3 ATM fees. Instead of voting with us to make that happen, Labor and the Liberals voted together against it.

Then in Melbourne in the last couple of weeks, I saw Senator David Leyonhjelm from the more guns-less services party decide that, because the Greens are standing up to say that voters should have the right to decide their own preferences, he is going to coordinate a whole range of microparties to come down to Melbourne and run against me. Maybe it will be the we-love-renewable-energy party. Maybe it will be the more-guns party. We do not know. But he is bringing his far-Right agenda down to Melbourne and saying that it is time to unseat the Greens in parliament. Well, when you have the Greens standing up against Labor and the Liberals, and then you have the more-guns party joining in to say, 'We better get the Greens out of the House of Representatives and out of parliament', you know you must be doing something right!

We will, over the next few months, steadfastly continue to stand up for what matters. We will stand up against a government that says: 'We are not prepared to ask high-income earners and wealthy corporations to pay a little bit more tax. We are going to come and slug everyone else.' We will stand up to that. When the government comes in here and says, 'We believe the only way of dealing with the issue of global migration is to lock up people, including children, until they break,' and when Labor says, 'Can we give you a blank cheque to continue doing that?' we will stand up to that every time. There is one thing that people can be absolutely confident of: we will try to turn this election not into a race to the bottom but into a reaching for the stars; it is about reaching out and speaking to the best of us.