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

The Australian Greens support the Corporations Amendment (Short Selling) Bill 2008. However, I flag an amendment, which I will deal with in the committee stage, to ensure shareholders have the ability to say yea or nay to severance payments of $1 million or more for CEOs. I want to put on the record that last Tuesday the Senate asked for a prime ministerial response to his commitment to deal with excessive executive pay and he has not done that. There was a statement available this afternoon. It is a rehash of what we heard last week. I just ask: what is it that has prevented the Prime Minister from making good on statements he made in Peru and at the G20 talks, and that he has made several times here in Australia, that had in them the promise that there was going to be some tackling of those most excessive of executive salary pays which go into the tens of millions of dollars?

The Greens have moved a number of times in this place to put a decent and reasonable curb—that is, if you call $5 million reasonable and decent—on the annual pay of at least those executives who are gaining from the government’s and the parliament’s move to insure banks and financial houses in this country. But that has been turned down by both the Labor Party and the coalition parties on those occasions. The Senate, however, did last week call on the Prime Minister to put some meat on the bones of his commitment, but there is nothing there. I suspect he is going to do absolutely nothing, which shows again the power of the big end of town.

There will be the hope by the Rudd government that, over the Christmas break, it will all go away and that people will get on with doing other things. That is a wan hope, because we will be back to pull the government to account on dealing with these executive pays, which, when you look at them on the global scale, are an incentive to risk-taking—unnecessary risk-taking, at times—adventurism and some of the less prudent decisions which have got the world into the financial mess it is in. It is not the poor people of the world who have done that; it is the most extremely rich people on the planet. But everybody suffers when you get a global crisis like we are getting at the moment.

One of the things we need is better management. If we are going to have multimillion dollar payouts, let us have some equity brought into it and some regulation and some restriction. So I will be moving that amendment during the committee stage of the debate. I understand that there has been a change to the dinner arrangement—which I know is going to come up soon—so I will keep further comment until we come back and go into committee.