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

I thank Senator Stephens for that submission to the committee. Frankly, I am glad that she is the parliamentary secretary for this matter, because she does have an understanding of it. She is obviously very sympathetic to the sector and has her heart in the matter, and that is fundamental to this portfolio.

I want to raise a couple of issues. The first is in relation to the comment that this is not the place for Senator Siewert’s amendment to be brought forward, because it is a piecemeal approach. I have just had a quick look at the legislation, and it deals with more than a dozen different adjustments to legislation or to other matters. It is a piecemeal bill itself. It is trying to pick up on a whole range of issues and to fix them in one way or another. It is the ideal place for Senator Siewert to bring forward this amendment. The Greens are not the generator of the major legislation in this field. It is the task of the crossbench and smaller parties to take the opportunity where they can to improve legislation, and that is exactly what Senator Siewert is doing here. It is the proper place for it.

The second matter concerns the costing. Senator Stephens has just talked about projections for the next three years of less than $1 billion each year. Let us put that into the context of tax cuts, which largely benefit the wealthy in this country, of $507 billion over the coming three years from the last budget and this year’s budget. You suddenly get a sense of proportion of the priorities of what is a self-proclaimed fiscally conservative Rudd government in the matter. I would have thought the priority should be in this area, not in the multibillion dollar tax cuts which have been afforded to people—as you know, Mr Temporary Chairman Murray—who are in the top income-earning brackets in our country. And, by the way, it is an inflationary matter at that, which is not going to help at all the sector that Senator Siewert is coming to the aid of.

Finally, there is the business of this being done on the run and not being properly costed. I do not want to anticipate an order of the day, but we will be dealing again with the Tax Laws Amendment (2008 Measures No. 1) Bill 2008 a little later in committee, and we dealt with that last night. There we have a classic case of a multimillion dollar windfall to investors from the big end of town that is not costed and potentially has the perverse outcome of making greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere worse, not better. It has been done totally on the run; it has been done for vested interests by those who have an enormous amount of lobbying power in this parliament—much greater than the social justice sector that we are dealing with in this legislation. I challenge Senator Bernardi or any member of the opposition to say what the costing on that is. The government does not know, and certainly the opposition does not. But that is going to go through a little later, if I have my ear to the ground right. So we have this extraordinary dissonance or disjuncture of argument: when it comes to the social sector, let us make it comprehensive, let us wait a year or two, let us make sure that we have our costings right and that it is all integrated and in an omnibus bill, do not do it piecemeal; but when it comes to the big end of town—no problems—rush it in, have no costing, no due diligence and no discussion with the community; both parties will get together and push it through. I ask you.