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

The Greens will be opposing the motion. It is an abuse of the Senate. It is an abuse of the public’s right to be informed about legislation being dealt with by this parliament and, as Senator Carr has said, it is the height of arrogance by this government, at the end of this legislative year, to be putting through this table of bills without the standing orders prevailing. The standing orders insist that there should be some six weeks to look at legislation. That is so there can be a committee and so the public can look at the legislation at hand and give feedback to the committee. It is so the committee can then adequately inform the Senate, and the Senate can make a much more measured contribution to the debate. All that has been put aside since the government got the control through the numbers in this place, and what we are seeing here today is, as Senator Carr says, a process of accelerating through the Senate, before the election year next year, some particularly nasty pieces of legislation.

My colleague Senator Siewert points to the Commonwealth Radioactive Waste Management Legislation Amendment Bill 2006, and I understand there is a committee hearing about that today. And here we are removing the decent time scheduling for that piece of legislation, which amongst other things may allow for alternative sites to be looked at in this country for a potential nuclear waste dump. The Senate is being asked through this motion to cast all that aside and put this bill through in the next week or two. There is no way the people who are going to be affected by that sort of decision are going to be able to adequately give feedback to the Senate. It is going to be in a remote region of Australia. I will guarantee that the people affected by that, by and large, have no idea that this is being debated here in the Senate today. They are small in number and they are away from the scene, so the Howard government does not care.

The Medibank Private Sale Bill 2006 is a hugely important piece of legislation. It is privatising an important institution for the Australia people. The Greens will be opposing that legislation. What the government is saying through this process is: ‘Let’s not have a proper public debate about this. Let’s get on and privatise’—with legislation that has come through here and that is going to be effectively catapulted through without a proper public debate on it, simply because the government does not want a public debate on that piece of legislation.

Then we come to the Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006. As Senator Carr says, it is 409 pages and it is pretty complex. But it is also very evident what has happened here. Firstly, let me point out to you, Acting Deputy President, that the minister for the environment, whose bill this is, is absent from the chamber. Yet, from his own contribution to the chamber earlier, we know that the government has been considering this legislation for two years. When we talk about the government considering legislation to weaken the one piece of environmental legislation laying out the Commonwealth’s responsibility for protecting this great nation’s natural and cultural heritage, there needs to be a very careful look at that. We did not get that; we got, again, an accelerated, totally unsatisfactory, two short days of hearings.

Most of the people who are affected by this legislation have no idea it is being rushed through here. What the legislation does is extract teeth from a piece of environmental protection law that actually needs more teeth put into it. The issues of the environment, like climate change and the massive impact that is going to have on accelerating the extinction of species in this country, deserve to be looked at very prudently by government and addressed with laws to turn around the processes which are killing this natural heritage.

We are not going to get that. What we are going to get is legislation which weakens the ability of the minister or the government of the day—or I should say the responsibility, because the minister has shown no great ability—to protect this nation’s biodiversity and to ensure that we do not have worsening climate change, for example, with the impacts of bushfires, drought, coastal erosion, extinction of species and loss of snow cover, and a huge impact on the agricultural industries of this country, for one. Instead of putting teeth into this legislation which says, ‘If there are projects in Australia which are going to make climate change worse, the minister has a responsibility to do an assessment and to not allow that damaging process to go ahead’, the legislation effectively weakens the minister’s hand. It should be introducing a trigger on climate change. Instead of that, it is removing some of the very limited protections there are already.

Let me cite the forests of Australia. That legislation, Acting Deputy President Lightfoot, you will be alarmed to know will prevent citizens in future from going to the courts to take legitimate action against the government because it calls for a surety up front. If you cannot put millions of dollars up for Gunns woodchipping or whatever it might be then you cannot take court action. Or, to look at the same corporations powers—I am talking about the Gunns corporations powers—this legislation is going to make it clear that in the fostering of the Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania the minister will not be required to look at the impact on forests; in fact, he cannot do so. If there was any doubt about that, this legislation is there to say that the Minister for the Environment and Heritage cannot look at the environmental impact on forests of a pulp mill that is being built in Tasmania.

That brings me to the very important underlying reason for this legislation being jumped through the Senate in this unseemly fashion. Yes, the government has been looking at it for two years, even though it did not tell anybody here, and even though it did not level with the Australian public. Behind closed doors, the forestry and mining industries in particular have been fashioning this legislation. This is not so much government legislation as it is resource extractors’ legislation, and they do not want a public debate. Of course they do not. They do not want the public to be empowered. They want themselves to be empowered to avoid public scrutiny. They want to avoid the public being able to say, ‘We want to protect our nation’s environmental and cultural heritage.’

And we have a prime minister at the moment who says that he is concerned about the environment. This legislation points out that in fact the Prime Minister is an environmental heretic. He says one thing and he does another. We have one piece of legislation for the protection of this nation’s heritage, the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. The Prime Minister says he is concerned to protect this nation’s heritage, and what we have before the Senate today is a bill to weaken the one piece of legislation there is—to make the government’s responsibilities less. This is a fortnight after a High Court decision which empowered the Prime Minister through the corporations power to reach out and make things more difficult for working people all across this country, to give the corporations effectively what they wanted in disempowering working people in Australia. We get a sort of reverse process going on here where the government say that they will divest themselves of power to protect the nation’s heritage, the very thing the people of Australia would want them to do, because the corporations do not want that.

One of the difficulties with this legislation is trying to raise the issue. I tried to bring it up again this morning at the doors, where the press turn up and ask you about issues of the day. I tried to raise this issue. You could hear the clicks as they turned off. You could see the eyes roll up because it is complex and not well understood and the long-term impact is not understood. This is corrosive, erosive legislation as far as Australia’s environmental amenity and the federal government’s absolute responsibility for looking after that amenity are concerned. It is appalling legislation. It is a travesty of the Prime Minister’s responsibility to this nation. But the whole aim of the government—and it will be licking its lips about this at the moment—is to get the legislation through here in the next fortnight without anybody understanding it or its impact.

The Greens will be taking that legislation on when it comes into this place, when it is rushed in here in the next 24, 48 or 64 hours because it is critical legislation for this nation. It is going to have a huge impact against the nation’s heritage. We would expect from a government in 2006 strengthening legislation, not poisonous legislation like this to disable the Commonwealth carrying out its obligations to protect this nation’s heritage. The process is under way; it is all being orchestrated out of the Prime Minister’s office. The corporations have been working with the government for a couple of years to get this result. It will be done largely unrecorded, without there being any public clamour and in the run-up to Christmas. Who cares? And the nation’s heritage is going to suffer for it forever and a day.

The best we can do here is to vote against that sort of legislation and to vote against this sort of tawdry process the minister puts forward to fleet-foot the legislation through a place where it should be not only knocked out but replaced by something more responsible and appropriate for this year, for this nation and for this nation’s cultural and environmental heritage. We will oppose it.