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

The Greens oppose this motion. It is consistent for us to say that the government has had a long opportunity to sit extra weeks before or after this session to deal with the hugely important matter of the emissions trading scheme legislation. But here we have micromanagement from the Prime Minister’s office putting the Senate into extra sitting hours on the last Wednesday night before the Christmas break, as if a couple of hours tonight is adequate to address the deal that the government and the coalition have come to.

We are talking about billions of dollars of Australian people’s money. We are talking about the transfer, under this deal between the government and the coalition, of $5 billion out of households across to the big polluters. We are talking about an extra $8 billion for polluters on top of the $16 billion for polluters already. That is a $24 billion deal for the big polluters, and the government and the opposition want us to sit tonight to flick that through without a Senate inquiry. What an appalling process this is. What an appalling abrogation of the duty of the Senate to scrutinise such a massive transfer of wealth to the big coal miners and burners in this country just to get a deal. There is no success written on this; it is a failure for the Australian people. The government say, ‘Well, we’ll sit Wednesday night and put it through.’ What an appalling process this is. The Prime Minister’s office is micromanaging the Senate and the coalition is willingly going into that deal. I ask you, Mr Acting Deputy President, can you ever remember the Senate being treated in such a cavalier and rude fashion as we are getting in this motion?

So we have extra sitting hours on Wednesday night—and the coalition are going along with this—to put through a multi-billion dollar transfer of funds. Whichever direction it was going, surely this is up for Senate scrutiny. This is our responsibility. And the coalition—the timeless defenders of the Senate, they say—are flopping into an arrangement with the government to say, ‘We’ll flick this through.’ They had all this travail in the party room yesterday—a completely divided party room—and they come in today and say, ‘We’ll sit Wednesday night and flick this through.’ And it is somehow going to magically, suddenly, be in the interests of the Australian taxpayers in rural and regional Australia, and right across the cities of this country, to get no say in this. The Senate, the watchdog of the people, which gives people the opportunity to have their say, will get no feed in, no feedback whatever. And the coalition is meekly going to go across and vote with the government to do it on a Wednesday night.

So we get this multibillion dollar transfer, this polluters’ bonanza, at the expense of the Australian people, small business, renewable energy businesses, green new energies, green new businesses—right across the board, they get dumped for the coal industry, the polluting industries. There is an extra $40 million in there for the loggers—a bonanza for them. We will not debate it after a committee inquiry; we will just get on with putting it through—we will go through the formalities. I say to both the big parties: you are letting the Australian people down. You are treating the Australian people as if they do not count. The big end of town is the big winner here. But the Australian people are totally dumped by a Senate which is duty bound to look after their interests. How can you look after their interests if you give them no chance to feed into the hugely important decision that was made yesterday by the coalition to go along with the government on a failed emissions trading scheme which locks us into climate change which is going to impact on every Australian—on their lifestyles, their pockets and their security in the future? What a travesty of the Senate is unfolding here. What a travesty. Talk about a Christmas present. This is an abrogation of responsibility by both the big parties. I ask the coalition to think about this again before meekly going over and supporting the Rudd executive in treating the Senate in this fashion. We will be opposing this motion.