Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens will not be insisting on the acceptance of the opposition amendments. I do not wish to delay the Senate unnecessarily but I do want to make a couple of points. The Greens moved for any direction that the minister made to Infrastructure Australia to be a legislative instrument so that it could have been disallowable. What the opposition did was actually weaken that and say they wanted it laid on the table of the House. Laying it on the table of the House is better than doing nothing; making it a disallowable instrument would have been a more powerful case for accountability, but the opposition were not keen to support that. Whilst I recognise that the opposition wanted the direction laid on the table in the House, they voted against the ultimate method for really looking at transparency in terms of private-public partnerships, really looking at accountability and really looking at efficiency by refusing to allow the times when Infrastructure Australia made a recommendation for a project worth more than $50 million to be referred to the Public Works Committee. The opposition failed to support that.

So, in terms of real accountability, what I was moving to do was to give the public an opportunity to really have a look at what infrastructure projects were being recommended before they were considered by the minister. That was not allowed either. Of course, as Senator Allison said, the really disastrous part of this legislation is the fact that the greenhouse gas implications of any infrastructure project will only be considered and advice will only be sought at the minister’s discretion. What this allows the government to do is to choose not to have the greenhouse gas implications considered when they want to expand the coal port infrastructure all down the eastern seaboard and not to look at the greenhouse gas ramifications when they want to support a desalination plant, a new coal fired power station or something of that kind. They will have the discretion to choose when and how they use that greenhouse gas emissions power, and that is completely unacceptable if you are serious about dealing with greenhouse.

I did hear the government say yesterday that, in saying that Infrastructure Australia will bring out a strategic plan, it is implicit that they will consider greenhouse gas emissions, but it is not, in my view, implicit at all. It will be obvious when the government announces the membership of Infrastructure Australia whether any of the people on the board have expertise in determining infrastructure in an age of climate change and oil depletion and whether they have any expertise in transport, planning and policies related to a low-carbon economy. If we get an Infrastructure Australia board that does not have at least one person on it with that kind of expertise, it will be very clear that there is no intention whatsoever to look at an infrastructure strategic plan with a view to incorporating climate change.

I would hope that the government now has a serious look at this and fixes it up when it comes to appointing the members of the board, because at this point the only mechanism for having greenhouse gas emissions considered is through the discretion of the minister. Many of the projects which the Labor Party have put forward have appalling greenhouse gas ramifications and long-term ramifications for more car use and bottlenecks in cities and no consideration of how those road projects, in particular, are going to lead to urban sprawl and even greater long-term impacts from transport emissions. I would hope the government has taken on board the real criticism, because it is on a collision course.

Infrastructure Australia was an opportunity to deliver on greenhouse gas emissions commitments. It was a mechanism through which the government could have started to seriously address long-term greenhouse gas emission reductions and it has failed to do so. On the one hand it is going to bring out the Garnaut report, it is going to develop an emissions trading system and it is going to commit to a cap—and they are good things; on the other hand, it is setting up Infrastructure Australia with a capacity to deliver a strategic plan. In that strategic plan, unless they take into account the greenhouse gas emissions, they are going to be approving projects which will make the task of reducing greenhouse gas emissions even harder.

To me, it is a serious blow to those of us around the country who are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. I think the government needs to recognise that it is on a collision course with two of its key policy platform objectives by its failure to incorporate in the legislation. However, I am pleased that, by not insisting on the opposition amendments, we have at least retained the discretion of the minister to seek that advice. Had the opposition amendments been insisted upon, we would have ended up with no capacity at all even to have them considered. At least this way there is a discretionary power, but it is not enough. I hope the government will take it on board and I hope it will also take on board the fact that we are not satisfied that cutting out parliament from an assessment of the major infrastructure projects that Infrastructure Australia may recommend is an appropriate way of going about it.

I do not believe the current parliamentary process is adequate. If it were adequate, we would not have had the rorts under the Regional Partnerships program where ridiculous projects were funded for pure electoral pork-barrelling and we would not have the Tasmanian Community Forestry Agreement partnerships rorting, which I note Labor supports in government—there is disgraceful rorting going on there. The parliamentary processes have not allowed for adequate scrutiny of those projects. Even the Auditor-General’s report has come out saying, in the case of the Tasmanian Community Forestry Agreement partnerships, that they have allowed a person to put in an application for money for machinery which is second-hand and they have allowed the person applying for the grant to say what the market value of that machinery is with no independent verification. They have then paid the money on the basis of a tax invoice only, with no proof that any machinery was actually purchased. They have paid the money and there has been no ground truthing to establish whether machinery ever changed hands. They are the current parliamentary practices and that is the level of scrutiny. I do not think that is good enough when public money is being used to purchase infrastructure of any kind. I would like to think the government would take that into account, if its agenda on transparency and accountability is genuine.