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

Senator Faulkner says that regardless of what the opposition do the government has the numbers in here. Senator Faulkner, it ain’t necessarily so. There is a revolt in the government against the revolting refugee laws that the executive of the Prime Minister, the Right Hon. John Howard, has brought into this parliament, and that has come through vigorous public debate. The Labor Party needs to understand that we have to take it up to the government in this place. That is what the Senate is here for. We cannot sit back and say, ‘No, it is too hard; we will not have an inquiry into this,’ or ‘The government has the numbers in the Senate; why worry now?’ You cannot do that.

It is really important that we do use the Senate committee system not only to discover where the government is falling short but to get the information and engender the policy that is going to be right for this country into the future. The government might vote that down, because this is a very arrogant government, but now the opposition capitulate and say: ‘Why worry? Why should we bother?’ That is up to the opposition. The Greens are not doing that. That is why Senator Milne has brought forward this motion for an inquiry. She knows the work that is involved in that. She knows what an extraordinarily complex issue is being grasped here, but she also knows how vital this issue is to this nation.

We should be a world leader on this issue, not a quarry of the sort that Senator O’Brien was just talking about. We should stop talking about being a clean supplier of coal, when we know that coal, like oil, is the generator of global heating, which has enormous financial penalties and which has written into it enormous social dislocation not just for this country but for the whole planet and particularly our region. There is enormous environmental destruction already under way, but it is increasing as we go down the line. How do we hand that to our kids? How do we just say: ‘We can’t inquire into that. That’s a bit hard. That’s too difficult. The government is not going to take any notice. Whatever it might be, we will give up’? Not the Greens.

This country should be leading the world in environmental policy, in energy policy, because the two are interlinked—and so is economic policy. We should be the driving house, the cockpit, of environmental technology which exploits the solar potential of this nation that Senator Milne was talking about. We should be getting behind those fantastic technologists and scientists in this country who are already taking the lead. No; the Howard government has taken away their funding. What comes next? China will come in and buy that technology—or Germany will. It already has a stack of it. Now that the Merkel government has taken over in Germany—and I will be interested to see George Negus’s program on SBS tomorrow night about that—it appears that they are saying ditto to the Howard government proposal.