Russell Broadbent (Monash, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise tonight because there was a very good article in The Australian today, on page 20: 'The electric vehicle narrative fails to tell the full story', by Chris Mitchell. I was drawn to one particular paragraph:

The rise of EVs also raises equity concerns in car markets. They are more expensive than traditional cars, driven by the wealthy and subsidised by governments. They are in effect a wealth transfer from the poor to the rich.

I've been watching, in my time in this parliament—it has been on and off since 1990—the transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich in the name of the environment, and in the name of reductions of emission. The article makes some very, very good points:

The larger problem for the world, and for the car industries of many first world nations, is China's rapid rise towards becoming the world's number two car maker. Many of its new overseas sales are EVs. This industrial transformation is built on soaring fossil fuel power use in China.

And who do we sell our coal to—our essential and amazing coal? To China. The article says:

As this column has observed, essentially Europe has been outsourcing its polluting industries to China and India for decades. This reduces CO2 emissions in Europe and destroys jobs for European workers but at no net benefit to the planet because European companies are simply making goods in highly polluting countries with lower environmental standards than the UK and EU.

That's us. We're doing the same thing. The article continues:

European car makers such as Volkswagen, BMW and Ford Europe are moving production to the US, and more models to China, as power prices in Europe make local production unviable.

US President Joe Biden's new green subsidies are accelerating the move to the US. The Guardian reported on January 30 that the UK electric van start-up Arrival would cut 800 jobs—about half its workforce—as it sought US expansion to take advantage of green subsidies.

  …   …   …

Meanwhile, the Greens here want Australia to stop all new coal mines when coal is our number two export earner, ban expansion of gas exploration and production when we are the world's largest natural gas supplier, and reject domestic nuclear power when we have 37 per cent of world uranium reserves.

You couldn't write this stuff yourself, as to the track that the Australian community is going down. As Chris Mitchell says here, beautifully:

Like turkeys voting for Christmas, Western governments, our own included, are not just shutting down reliable fossil fuel power generation but are moving to renewables products largely manufactured in China, again with expanding Chinese fossil fuel use. China makes more than 80 per cent of the world's solar panels, many manufactured using slave labour in western China. It also dominates the global market for wind turbines, making 70 per of world supply.

In all areas, governments of all persuasions, be they Liberal, Nationals or Labor governments in this country or be they independents—it seems that we are determined to stand on our own toes the whole time when we consider the overall pattern. All of these processes—you have your panels on your roof and you're getting the subsidies, but who is paying the higher prices? It is the lower socio-economic people in our community that are paying the higher prices. The poor are paying for the wealthy in too many areas in this country, and it has to stop. Electric vehicle subsidisation is exactly that. Our government did it when it decided to subsidise charging posts. This government has again transferred money from the poor, from the Commonwealth of this nation, to the wealthiest people in the community. And how many cars are they driving in this country? Last year, 3.1 per cent of car sales were electric vehicles, which makes them about 0.07 of the car fleet in Australia. This is wrong. It should stop. There should be further consideration of these matters.

Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is heartening that, after a decade, Australia has reversed its downward trend on corruption. Transparency International released its rankings at the end of January this year, showing that Australia's ranking is now 13, increasing five spots from 18 last year, halting a decade of decline which bottomed out under the previous government. Scandal after scandal, rorts, politically stacked public institutions, culminating in the multiple ministries saga. Australia was on the slippery slope towards an autocracy. However, the reprieve was short lived, with sordid details now emerging on a daily basis from the robodebt royal commission. The executive arm of the previous government casually adopted a don't look, don't see attitude, paid cursory attention to legal advice and, armed with a dirt file, plotted to intimidate and discredit critics, because that's how they did business. Power in a moral vacuum allowed substandard behaviour to flourish because there were no consequences—until constituents in Higgins and elsewhere in Australia said, 'Enough.'

My constituents are watching with growing disgust and, in the same measure, relief that those opposite are gone from government. One can only imagine that the architects of this scheme and their enablers are living on borrowed time in this House. Those vulnerable Australians, the victims of robodebt, have stories. Many were my patients. They were people who had fallen on hard times, from relationship breakdowns to job losses, spiralling addiction, untreated mental illness or consumed by bereavement. They washed up on my daily ward rounds. They were people who lived in Higgins, from all walks of life, young and old, who needed a safety net until they found their feet again. My hospital was their destination of last resort in their moment of crisis. It galls me that these people were fodder for a cold, calculating crusade of warped ideology and values waged by the former government. Nobody likes a bully, especially when that bully co-opts the Commonwealth bureaucracy to do its bidding, to intimidate and cower.

Posterity will remember the royal commission into robodebt as an exemplar of power in a moral vacuum. While the Albanese government has improved Australia's reputation on corruption by legislating a National Anti-Corruption Commission, we recognise that even we have limitations. We cannot legislate a heart in government. Miracle workers, we ain't. The passage of the NACC at the end of last year represents a legacy of reform of the Albanese government. While the nation breathed a sigh of relief with its passage, the NACC is the centrepiece in an overarching integrity agenda that has received only piecemeal attention.

The Attorney-General's earliest reform was actually to the Australian Human Rights Commission, ensuring commissioners were appointed through a merit based transparent process, a perversion of process with little regard to competency or transparency, along the familiar lines of more jobs for mostly mediocre mates by successive Liberal governments, threatened to downgrade the Human Rights Commission's A status. This was a damning indictment of Liberal mismanagement, which went to the heart of how we see ourselves in the world, as a beacon of freedom, so that, as Kennedy said, 'Man can go to his full stature.' That flourishing that Kennedy alluded to does not happen when human rights are stifled. We have restored independence to the Australian Human Rights Commission in order to—wait for it—protect the human rights of Australians rather than the political agenda of the prevailing government.

We have also started a long overdue review of all secrecy provisions in the Commonwealth legislation. We are particularly concerned as to whether existing laws adequately protect press freedom, which is why the Albanese government is convening a roundtable with media organisations. Journalists should feel free to do their job without fear of going to jail.

I started with the NACC, and I will circle back to it. Deterrence of corruption is one aspect, but preventing it from taking root is the ideal, and that means making our public institutions hostile to this cancer. Hardening the system to corruption should, however, spare its heart, because public institutions, after all, like their political masters, are there to serve the people with equal parts of head and heart.