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

At a time when the community is facing unprecedented environmental and economic challenges, this budget should be transforming Australia to a low-carbon economy. This budget should be, but is not, a green new deal for Australia. When the recession ends, Australia should be in place to reap the benefits of the global green jobs boom, not at the back of the queue. Instead, this budget is a clear demonstration of the Rudd government’s commitment to the old economy, a commitment that will delay Australians having the opportunity of the new jobs, innovative research, developmental opportunities, ecological security and social benefits that would come from a move to the new green economy. This is an opportunity that has been seized by governments around the world, as with the progressive decisions made by President Obama in his multibillion-dollar green new deal stimulus package for the United States.

Tonight I will set out some of the ways we Greens would grab this transformative opportunity with both hands. The Prime Minister has called on the Senate to pass this budget in its entirety. I say to the Prime Minister: this Senate is the house of review. It is the people’s backstop and innovator. We are not here to be a rubber stamp, and this budget is far from perfect. It fails single parents, the unemployed and the environment, so the Greens will responsibly scrutinise and improve it and we will be moving amendments in the Senate in later debate.

I do know that Australians do not want an early election, nor do we Greens, and we say to the Prime Minister: ‘Let’s work together to improve this budget in the same way that we Greens worked with the government to improve its economic stimulus package earlier this year.’ We are proud that through our effective work in the Senate we were successful in adding some $350 million for local green jobs to the government’s $42 billion stimulus package. It was a package which originally did not create many jobs outside the building and construction sector, and the Greens-inspired local jobs programs which went into it are now highlights in this budget. The millions of dollars for jobs in heritage, cycleway infrastructure and a range of community project grants will create thousands of jobs for Australians throughout the country, and, of the $60 million for heritage grants to be rolled out in the next year, $2 million has already been allocated to support important conservation restoration work at the National Heritage listed Old Government House in Parramatta, for example. The Budj Bim National Heritage Landscape in south-western Victoria, the first place included in Australia’s National Heritage List, has also received just over $360,000, and earlier this month these funds were provided to the Gunditj Mirring Traditional Owners and the Winda Mara Aboriginal Corporations for the Budj Bim Tracks project—more jobs created in regional Australia.

In March we also came to an agreement with the Treasurer for improvements to the liquid assets tests so that people who were on lower incomes would get better access to income support when they became unemployed. Our negotiations also sealed an increase in funding for the bushfire research centre in Melbourne.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics plays a vital role in collecting and analysing social data and providing essential information for research and policy development. We went in to bat for it. Sixty million dollars has been allocated to it over four years in this budget. This is a significant improvement for this agency. Having said that, I note recent job losses in the Australian Bureau of Statistics and I would expect that this funding will ensure that the jobs cuts there will stop.

We are particularly proud that Australia’s 1.2 million age pensioners and carers, who have been struggling to make ends meet, have seen an increase in this budget. Single age pensioners, forced to live on less than $285 a week, have been particularly vulnerable. That is an income which the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister and the Treasurer have admitted they could not live on. We have been campaigning for a minimum $30-a-week increase in the single age pension since before the 2007 budget.

Increased funding for the nation’s broadcasters is also welcome and long overdue. There is an additional $167 million to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in this year’s federal budget to increase Australian content and to roll out a children’s station, which will benefit millions of families. But we recognise that it will take much more than this to reverse the effects of a decade of neglect. There is an extra $20 million to SBS, which we welcome, but it is not even enough to remove the broadcaster’s reliance on advertising revenue, and we ask the government to look at better funding for this important alternative and creative component of Australia’s broadcasting. The Greens solidly back the ABC and SBS, and it is great to see that our public broadcasters, at least the ABC, have done better in the budget. But it is disappointing that the government has neglected smaller community broadcasters across the country.

Australian parents have been calling for action on paid parental leave for years. While the Greens are pleased to see a commitment in Tuesday’s budget to the introduction of an 18-week scheme, the fact is it will be delayed until 2011—that is after the next election—and will not require employer superannuation contributions to continue. It will not go well with the electorate. Senator Sarah Hanson-Young’s paid parental leave bill is currently before the parliament, and I urge the government to back our fully costed model for 26 weeks paid parental leave and to adopt this model before the next election.

We Greens welcomed the substantial increase in new rail projects, particularly the investment in metropolitan rail networks in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide and Perth, but it is a pity that these initiatives do not extend to rail projects for Tasmania or the ACT or to getting more of the nation’s freight off roads and onto the rail network. It is an even greater pity that one of the projects simply services the coal industry in Newcastle, which the Prime Minister visited today. We note that many of the rail projects in the budget are scoping rather than construction, rather than getting things underway. The government should ensure that these projects or their equivalents actually move on to action and fruition. For example, in Melbourne the announcement of $40 million for preconstruction work on the east-west rail tunnel is a real but preliminary victory for the ‘No road tunnel’ campaign and the Greens, who have been very active in supporting it. But the cost of this project, if it is to go ahead, is put at $3.5 billion. The fact is that there is no funding for tollways in Melbourne in the budget, and that is real recognition of the community’s increasing call for low-carbon transport options, particularly of course public transport. The Greens will pursue more funding for extending existing train lines and building more tram routes.

Australians want greener and more affordable transport options to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to improve public health and to reduce obesity but also to reduce the cost of transport—and I cannot help but think, with the massive allocations we are continuing to see for building prime arterial roads like the Pacific and Hume highways, and indeed the major thoroughfare in my home state from Launceston to Hobart, that the government should be looking expeditiously at providing space on these great arteries for a very fast passenger train network and for a cycleway linking the great cities of this country. It will be much more expensive to do this in retrospect.

I was speaking with a European ambassador today about the spread of these very fast trains in Europe. The most recent Spanish budget had €56 billion allocated to extend their very fast train network, which already services such cities as Valencia, Madrid and Barcelona. I can report to the Senate that these fast trains have taken 20 per cent of the air traffic out of the skies over Spain. I talked to people from France in recent days, and the 800-kilometre trip from Paris to Marseilles is now a matter of 3½ hours. It is faster than having to go to the airport through clogged traffic in both of the biggest cities of France, it is cheaper and it is much more comfortable. These trains are crowded—they are very, very attractive. We should look at that future for Australia as well.

The government has determined to keep its $4.5 billion tax cuts for the rich in this budget while at the same time ignoring those suffering real financial hardship. While the pension increase which I mentioned earlier is welcome, the Greens are disappointed that the government has failed to provide similar support for single parents or for the million or so Australians that the government expects may lose their jobs in the coming year. Unemployed people, whose incomes are even lower than those of pensioners, were ignored in the stimulus package cash payments back in March despite the Greens efforts to have them included. Now they are ignored in this budget. Unemployed Australians, increasingly out of jobs because of the recession, must try to scrape by on $227 a week. That is $90 less than the new single age pension rate of $317. It is a pittance, it is too hard, it is too punishing and it ought to have been increased in this budget. Not only have the Greens been calling for that increase but I have just pointed to the tax cuts as an alternative way of funding a reasonable increase. I will be pointing to more alternatives later in this delivery. The inequity in the income support system should be addressed. Based on 2008-09 data, the Australia Institute estimates the cost of an increase to the unemployment benefit to achieve parity with the pre-budget pension would be approximately $1.7 billion in 2010.

For the first time since the single mothers pension was introduced, pension payments to single parents will be paid at a different rate from other pensions. The Prime Minister has stated that he could not live on the pension, yet with this budget he is asking single parents—more than 85 per cent of whom are single mothers—to raise children on $285 a week. These children are effectively growing up in poverty, and this wealthy nation can do better—even in a recession. The Greens welcome changes to the eligibility for youth allowance, making it easier for many young people in education to access income support. We believe these changes should be brought forward to benefit students now, however. The tightening of the workforce participation criteria should not start until 2011 to ensure that young people who are planning to commence study in 2010 are not disadvantaged.

The decision to index the family tax benefit A against the consumer price index instead of being linked to pension indexation will hit those at the low end of the income scale, including more than one million children with parents in receipt of the family tax benefit A maximum rate. Instead of hitting these people, why did this Labor government not raise this revenue by reversing its tax cuts to the megarich? The government has also announced that taper rates will be increased from a 40c in the dollar to a 50c in the dollar reduction in a person’s pension, depending on how much income they make. This measure will also have the effect of lowering the rate at which the pension will cut out. That is very harsh; it is a harsh option for raising revenue when Labor could have raised contributions from wealthier Australians. This will affect pensioners, including old age and disability pensioners, to raise $1 billion or so when, again, there were better options. I will mention some of those very shortly.

When it comes to private health insurance—and I note the Leader of the Opposition’s comments a little earlier tonight—the Greens will move in the Senate to have money saved from means testing the private health insurance rebate allocated to public hospitals. We think it simply should not be put into consolidated revenue. We will also look very closely at the means testing of the private health rebate and the consequent increase in the Medicare levy surcharge—something that gives me some misgivings.

We will continue to be very vocal about Public Service sector job cuts, opposing the additional two per cent efficiency dividend which has already cost around 1,700 jobs in the nation’s Public Service. We welcome the government’s decision to in fact reduce this to the 1.25 per cent general efficiency dividend. But in the recession Public Service jobs should be retained rather than shed. We are pleased that there will be new Public Service jobs flagged in this budget in Centrelink, CSIRO, the Child Support Agency and the Australian Bureau of Statistics. But the decision to axe Land and Water Australia is a particularly nasty budget cut, in which not only will 51 public servants lose their jobs but a valuable research agency will be lost. Cutting this program for a saving of a measly $13 million at a time when climate change is creating the most significant challenges for rural Australia, not least amongst all Australians, is simply irresponsible and the government should think again about that cut.

The budget has no dedicated response to job creation in the form of labour market programs. While the government is spending big on major infrastructure projects, public housing and schools, creating building and construction centre jobs—and the Greens welcome that expenditure, in the main—there are no significant measures to create jobs in other sectors of the community. In the past, in tough economic times, it has been Labor governments that have instituted large-scale labour market programs for people who have lost their jobs as a consequence of the economic downturn. It appears now to fall to the Greens to try to get some of that back into economic planning in this country. Our changes to the economic stimulus package, which will create up to 10,000 jobs, show how a more targeted expenditure can create jobs as well as stimulate business. However, the extra $228 million injected into Adelaide’s desalination plant in the budget, on the agreement that it will double output from 50 gigalitres to 100 gigalitres, is concerning, considering we have seen a cut of $16.4 million over two years from water reform programs for the Murray-Darling Basin. Surely this money could have been better spent on water buybacks to give the Murray a bigger flow and the Lower Lakes the lifeline they need.

There is no worse demonstration of the old-style thinking of this budget than the massive expenditure on coal—almost double the amount to be invested in clean, renewable energy projects. In fact, that single coal project in the Hunter Valley, where the Prime Minister went today, will receive almost the same amount of money as the entire $1.5 billion Solar Flagship program over the next six years. This budget banks on coal mining and burning booming again. While it gives some much-needed support to renewable energy and energy efficiency, it remains locked into the coal-reliant past instead of forging a path towards a vibrant, carbon-neutral economy for Australia.

President Obama’s recent multibillion-dollar stimulus package points to the kind of priorities we need to emulate to set Australia on track to deliver a zero-carbon jobs boom. In President Obama’s package, funding to roll out renewable energy technologies was well over double the corporate welfare for coal. By contrast, the Rudd government’s budget support for coal is higher than all of the market-ready renewable technologies combined. The Obama package sets aside a much higher proportion of funding for energy efficiency than this Rudd budget. The most visionary aspect of the Obama stimulus is the massive injection of funding into an intelligent grid infrastructure—something that Senator Milne has been advocating in this place. Upgrading our grid is perhaps the most important investment our governments can make in energy. Building a high-quality, intelligent grid will save money for every Australian householder, every business and every factory. It enables much greater energy efficiency and it will modernise our outmoded energy network into cutting-edge technology that can repair itself, avoid blackouts and be open to being 100 per cent renewably powered.

The government has at least recognised that that grid investment is necessary, but it has put aside only $100 million, equivalent to only 1½ per cent of its expenditure on renewables and coal. Put that against Obama, who has set aside $11 billion, as much as his total investment in renewables and coal combined. Australia, 1½ per cent; the US, 100 per cent. The comparison is very stark. If this budget had followed President Obama’s albeit imperfect prescription, Australia would have invested $2 billion in renewable energy, $750 million in coal, $4 billion in energy efficiency and $2.2 billion in upgrading the grid. While renewable energy would have received slightly less direct funding, the indirect benefits from the grid upgrade, as well as the raft of supportive policies, would have driven investment many times further.

Of course, the Greens would rather see the coal sector invest its own profits in its infrastructure needs. The last figures I saw for the coal industry, which I remind senators has a very large component of overseas ownership and therefore drainage of profits out of the country, were a $48 billion income. This is an industry that has known about climate change coming for at least the last four decades and has no excuse for not having invested itself in the renewable component of its potential future to deal with the onrush of climate change. It should now not be falling back on, nor should it be being given by this government, the very important billions that need to go into energy efficiency and renewable energy.

President Obama has been investing tens of millions of dollars in jobs-training packages to prepare the American workforce for the huge task of transforming its energy infrastructure. Instead of bowing to polluters’ demands, Obama is protecting the workers’ futures by preparing them for the jobs that are needed to deliver a renewable energy and energy efficiency boom. The Rudd government should take heed. The Greens will be doing all we can to ensure that the parliament does.

There are many opportunities in the budget to fund the fairer, jobs-rich, green economy I have touched on here tonight. The Greens share community concern about the $57.6 billion deficit. That is money that must be repaid and cannot therefore be spent on transforming our economy or supporting schools, hospitals, public housing or transport in the years ahead. However, in these extraordinary economic circumstances, a moderate budget deficit is prudent if the funds are spent on investing in transforming Australia’s economy and creating the jobs that would flow from the transformation. However, the government has chosen to prop up the old economy, in the main, rather than transforming to the new economy, where it should be going.

We have identified very large savings which can he made by redirecting funds from the old, polluting economy. Over the budget period of the next four years the Greens would save $35 billion in the following ways. Removing the tax cuts for people with incomes of more than $100,000 would save $4.5 billion. Maintaining the current rate of defence expenditure but not increasing it by the proposed three per cent above inflation—we are not a country threatened by any other country on earth—would save $7.3 billion. We would save $22.2 million per year on public funding of research into carbon capture and storage; there is $89 million. The $1 billion to be spent on the Hunter Valley coal project, as I have said twice earlier tonight, would go. The additional $280 million to be given to the biggest polluters under the government’s carbon pollution reduction program would follow suit. I might add that we do support Mr Turnbull’s call for higher taxes on cigarettes.

In addition, the Greens would make further substantial savings by abolishing some long-running industry subsidies that damage both the environment and the budget bottom line. In particular, we would remove the fringe benefits tax subsidy for company cars—including those used by public servants—to save about $8.2 billion over four years. A further $3.2 billion over four years would be saved by ending fuel subsidies to the aviation industry and $10.3 billion would be saved by ending fuel subsidies to mining, electricity, transport and related businesses, such as gas, water, waste, postal and warehousing. We are talking here about taking out the massive public subsidies there are for burning fossil fuels and putting that across to transforming the economy as well as to a social dividend, which I would have expected of a Labor government but which we are not seeing in this budget.

The Greens have economically sound alternatives to this budget. Our ideas are much more job rich, more environmentally sound and more socially responsible than those Labor has produced. This government has flagged changes to the superannuation system, the private health insurance rebate and the pension age. Many of its measures require legislation. We Greens will be looking at them all closely. We will be consulting widely with the community and we will work to ensure that best outcomes for Australia can be made in this Senate. As with our job-creating changes to the $42 billion stimulus package, we can and will help the government make this budget more productive for the taxpayers’ dollar.

We are a constructive entity in this Senate and this parliament and for this nation. We are an ideas bank that is badly needed by a new government which has failed to rise to the challenge of this new century. We are a component representing a vigorous and thoughtful part of the Australian community which is intent upon improving poor quality ideas and legislation and improving upon the failure to innovate and be at the forefront of world thinking and government decision making. We intend to keep our foot on the accelerator to ensure better outcomes from this government and better governance in the future. The opportunities that were wide open for this government to transform to a new green economy in this budget, and which were actually in some cases enhanced rather than made more difficult by this recession, have, almost without exception, been missed. The power of those who have invested in the last century’s thinking is time and time again expressing itself in the budget that the Treasurer delivered on Tuesday. This country can and should do better, and we Greens are going to keep the pressure on this government to ensure that that happens for the benefit of all Australians.