Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

There was movement at the station for the word had passed around that Beijing and Tokyo and Chicago and Paris were on their way, and they have got more than a thousand pounds in their pockets. What is afoot here is the sale of effectively the environmental amenity and the water that flows onto the Snowy Mountains of Australia to any interest in the world that sees it as profitable and wants to invest in it. Let us make no bones about this: this is a another example of this government, which uses all the iconic assemblages of Australia to promote its interests, selling out on an Australian resource, taking it out of the hands of the people and putting it into the market at the big end of town not only ably supported by but at the instigation of the Labor Party.

The shareholding that the Commonwealth is about to divest from the public to the corporate sector is the lesser of the three shareholdings—the other two being those of the Labor government in New South Wales and the Labor government in Victoria—selling out the public interest. The Minister for Finance and Administration, Senator Minchin, said a while ago here that this will give the public a chance to invest in the Snowy scheme. That is from the very blighted and blinkered narrow view that all the world is about investment and money. What this is doing is taking the public interest and selling it into the city. It is taking the public interest, which is our responsibility in the parliament to represent in this democratic system, and giving it to the big end of town.

It is of course a fact that the Snowy Mountains scheme is one of the most profitable power generators in Australia, with a 19.8 per cent return on the investment, according to the last figures available. That is a roaring big profit. That is money which comes to those Labor governments, as well as to this coalition government, that the public will no longer get after the sale. That is money which will go into the pockets of big investors. The bigger they are, the more able they will be to decide whether or not this is a profitable investment for them.

Senator Allison just put another figure into the mix—that is, the potential for a 30 per cent loss of flow off the Snowy Mountains in the next 40 years or so due to global warming, due to the inaction of the Howard government. That is when the current infants of Australia will be in the prime of their life. What will that mean? Let us just stop and have a think about that at the moment, instead of holding it in complete ignorance, as this government did. By the way, I would recommend that the Prime Minister and his several ministers, including the Minister for Finance and Administration, look at the current edition of Time magazine. It is not their first edition devoted to global warming but it underscores the ratcheting up of the global horror coming our way from this human-made destruction of the environment and our future economic potential as a global community.

The minister is not even listening to this, because governments do not want to know about it. What they do want to do is to continue to turn the natural amenity of our nation and the whole world into a money-making machine for a short-term materialist viewpoint which has no sustenance. It will not be sustainable into the future. What we can do from our position is to highlight the global brains trust which is warning about this, with the intention that at some stage it may get through to the populace of Australia that to keep voting for Labor and the Liberals is to keep voting for the environmental disaster unfolding in front of us. That is writ large in this debate this morning.

A motion has been moved. That is all there is. It is a motion to be passed by the weight of numbers now that the Howard executive has control of the Senate as well as the House of Representatives. As ever, it is ably supported by the Labor Party, which deprives the Australian people of their right to have a say in this. There are irrigation interests. There are cities and towns along these great river systems. There is the urban interest. There is an enormous environmental interest. We have to represent the voteless millions who will live in these catchments in the years ahead, because we do not share the government’s blinkered view that all that matters is the next three years.

It is very important to recognise that the public is being defrauded of its opportunity to have a say and to increase the intelligence upon which a debate like this is based within the parliament simply because the government says: ‘We’ll put it through by motion. We won’t legislate this important matter. In the process, we’ll deny the people of Australia and particularly the people in the Murray-Darling Basin and the Snowy catchment their opportunity to come and say to the parliament: “This is our viewpoint.”’ The minister says, ‘Well, the public will be able to invest in this.’ One thing the minister is about here this morning is insisting that the public have no say in it.

On behalf of the Greens, I will be supporting the Democrats’ amendment to have the short-term gain the government will get from this invested in the environmental amenity of the rivers into the future. But how much more important it is that we give the public an opportunity to have a say on this non-urgent motion. That is why I will be moving that there be a reference of this imminent sale, before it happens, to the Senate Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee.