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

To follow Senator Xenophon on that, I note with interest that the government recalculated the subsidy to households as a result of the mid-year economic forecasts but there were no other adjustments in the cash payments available in the scheme. Can the minister explain to me why it was only for households that the financial adjustment was made?

While I am on my feet, I want to put on record the facts of the matter in relation to the briefing that the minister just spoke about. The fact is the government has been negotiating with the coalition for many, many weeks. Prior to that the Greens provided the minister with our amendments in full, so she has had them for that period of time. When it became obvious that a deal was to be concluded, I wrote to the minister saying that the Greens would like to have a briefing in confidence before the deal was announced. That did not happen. On the morning in question we received a letter from the minister saying we would get a briefing at 12 o’clock, bearing in mind that the Senate was to sit at 12.30 with the bells ringing at 12.25. My staff rang the minister’s office and asked whether the minister would be there in person or whether she was just sending her staff. We were told that it would be staff. We asked why 12 o’clock when clearly the coalition party room was dealing with the matter at that very moment; therefore the deal should have been made available to other people. We were rudely told that if we wanted to play politics, that would be an end to it.

The issue is that 12 o’clock was the briefing with the minister’s staff and a departmental adviser. When my staff arrived, the minister’s staff were late. They did not get there until after 10 minutes past 12, and the bells rang at 25 minutes past. So let us not have any nonsense here about how long a time was provided at that particular time to brief us on the entire package of amendments that the government had negotiated over many weeks with the coalition. In the course of this committee debate, we will get to trying to find out—no doubt Senator Xenophon and the Nationals will be quite keen to know—the exact details of the deal, and we will go through it in that time. But I think it is disingenuous to be suggesting that there was some comprehensive briefing arranged.

While I am at it, as I provided the minister with my full amendments at least six weeks ago, it was extremely disingenuous—when the minister had our amendments to show that the Greens opposed compensating the energy-intensive trade-exposed industries for their profitability but supported compensating them for their trade exposure—for the minister to say on national television at least twice that the Greens opposed any form of compensation. That is not true. Our amendments were with her. They are still with her. They are before the Senate now and they will demonstrate that that simply was not the case.

I return to my original question as to why the only adjustment was in household compensation and why other cash payment compensation in the scheme does not seem to have changed.