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

It gives me great pleasure to speak tonight on the alternatives which the Australian Greens would have put forward in the budget context and will be moving to implement in this parliament, in the consequent parliament and in coming fiscal years. I first of all want to pay a tribute to my colleagues, Senators Christine Milne, Rachel Siewert, Sarah Hanson-Young and Scott Ludlam, who are prodigious workers in this place and who ensure that the Greens as the third political party in this nation are not only across all issues but in advance of the big parties in advocating alternatives for a nation which badly needs a lead, which badly needs innovation, which badly needs imagination in politics and which badly needs a closer connection with the Australian people, who pay us to be here.

A little less than a year ago, the country was faced with the prospect of recession. All of us will remember the projections from Treasury, which showed that by the final quarter of last year we would be in recession unless the government acted swiftly in the face of the global downturn. In that circumstance, in February last year the government brought forward a package of some $42 billion to stimulate the economy. The first thing the opposition did, the Liberal and National parties, was to announce that they would block that stimulus program. That immediately threw the challenge to us Greens. In consideration with my colleagues, we recognised that while we did not support all the components of such a huge taking of taxpayers’ money and applying it to, in no small measure, the big end of town as well as to such worthy projects as a building program for 9,000 schools across this country, we would support that package and we did so.

We took the responsible option of negotiating with Treasurer Swan, the Prime Minister and several other ministers to improve that package. As a result, a jobs dividend came from the Greens work and thousands more Australians were employed. Not only that, those people who did not survive with their businesses or jobs intact got a much better deal from the government to tide them over until the worst of the recession had passed. We Greens are proud of that arrangement we made with government. It did involve $100 million to stimulate jobs right across rural and regional Australia, including in the refurbishment of this nation’s great heritage, for which there was no budget line until the Greens arrived and got $60 million put into these job-rich projects, and another $40 million for bikeways in all states and territories of the country.

We are also aware now that, in hindsight, it is the consensus of social commentators and economists that it was that stimulus package which the Greens made possible—and I pay tribute to our two crossbench colleagues, by the way, who were essential to its success—that prevented the country from heading to double-digit unemployment, and we are talking about hundreds of thousands of Australians out of work had the coalition succeeded in its negative attitude, which is ‘block everything the Labor government puts forward’. In this budget the country now has a forecast of 4.75 per cent unemployment by next year. What a remarkable achievement that is. Without the Greens that would not have happened. We are very proud of the role we took, responsibly, in the economic management of this country when the National and Liberal coalition failed at a moment of crisis for the nation.

Climate change is still coming rapidly upon the planet, and Australia is one of the most exposed and potentially damaged countries in the world. Yet the government has decided to set aside for three years further action on climate change, and the opposition have a polyglot of proposals which do not take government responsibility seriously should they be elected to government. Faced with a proposal which included a $20 billion waste of public money, if I correctly interpret the Grattan report of just a couple of weeks ago, the Greens have been proven right in not accepting the government’s proposal nor its failure to adequately tackle climate change with a prescription for five per cent downturn in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 rather than 25 to 40 per cent, which is required if we are really going to be successful in protecting the Great Barrier Reef, our snowfields, the productivity of the Murray-Darling Basin and a great deal more that is at stake in Australia in the coming century.

Instead, the Greens earlier this year took up Professor Garnaut’s proposal for an interim carbon tax. You will know the details of that. I want simply to point to what some of the commentators have said about the Greens’ proposal, which in this parliament and in the run to the election is the only consistent, nationally directed action plan to tackle climate change. I might add that, rather than costing taxpayers billions of dollars, as the government’s ETS proposal would be doing in this and subsequent budgets, the Greens’ proposal would bring in some $10 billion a year from a pollution tax on the 1,000 biggest polluters in the country, $5 billion of it earmarked to help households facing climate change right across the country. It would be a community dividend as well as a stimulus to business and a reorienting of our economy to green in an age when we must do that if we are going to face the challenge of much bigger and stronger economies—witness China and India for two.

Dr Frank Jotzo, a leading environmental economist from the Australian National University and an adviser to the original Garnaut review, said the Greens’ proposal:

… is a very sensible proposal. It was first suggested by Professor Garnaut to start the emissions trading scheme system with a fixed price and I believe that it’s even more relevant now in the political deadlock that we’re finding in Parliament.

Mr Acting Deputy President, on carbon tax generally you might listen to these comments from Geoff Carmody—no Green but a co-founder of Access Economics and before that a senior officer in the Commonwealth Treasury—who said:

A carbon tax allows a steady, predictable, ramping up of the price of carbon over time, allowing business (and, ultimately, consumers) to plan against this prospect and shift to lower emissions technology and more efficiency in energy use.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz from Columbia University, a Nobel laureate, said:

Economic efficiency requires that those who generate emissions pay the cost, and the simplest way of forcing them to do so is through a carbon tax … Indeed, it makes far more sense to tax bad things, like pollution, than to tax good things like work and savings.

Dr Richard Denniss is Executive Director of the Australia Institute and an adjunct associate professor in economics at the ANU. He said:

But the beauty of a carbon tax compared to an emissions trading scheme is that it is easy to design complementary policies, such as investments in energy efficiency, public transport and renewable energy, to augment the impact of a carbon tax.

Professor William Nordhouse, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, said:

The international community should move quickly to replace the current cap-and-trade structure with one in which the central economic mechanism is a tax on greenhouse-gas emissions.

These are comments that absolutely back the wisdom of the Greens’ proposal for a carbon tax at $23 a tonne of emissions now, ramping up at four per cent plus CPI into the future, allowing the way for a much more successful emissions trading option or carbon tax option in the future. It is to be noted that carbon taxes have been imposed in Sweden, Finland, the Netherlands, Norway and the United Kingdom, for example. As Kenneth Davidson commented in the Age last year:

Sweden is the most successful country in the world in reducing its carbon footprint … Between 1990 and 2006 Sweden cut its emissions by 9 per cent, exceeding the target set by Kyoto, while at the same time real growth increased 44 per cent.

This Greens prescription is central to the emerging political reality that it is the Greens who will present a positive alternative when neither of the big parties steps up to the mark with proposals that meet the biggest potential economic challenge of the age, which is climate change.

Finally, I quote Professor James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute and dubbed ‘the godfather of climate science’, who was in Australia recently and was quoted in the Age. He said:

If we had a democracy where decisions were based on the public’s best interest, then that—

that is, the Greens’ proposal—

would be taken up in a heartbeat … Neither of the major parties gets it—or they don’t want to get it.

That speaks for itself.

The mining boom tax has been seriously panned by the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Abbott, in the House of Representatives tonight. It cannot pass notice here, of course, that the government’s proposed mining boom tax, which the Greens support, is a progressive tax on the huge, multibillion-dollar profits coming to the big mining corporations, which, as the Prime Minister pointed out, have massive transfer of funds overseas from those profits, using the Australian people’s own ore resource in the Australian ground.

I remember, because I was in this place, that the GST was favoured by Mr Abbott in the Howard government. It was a regressive tax which hit people right across the board. The lower your income, the greater was the impact of the tax. Mr Abbott tonight spoke about the impact of a mining boom tax on average Australians. As the Greens see it, properly applied it will be a boon for average Australians, not like the GST, which as a fundraiser has added a great deal to Australian society but which hit the poor much harder than it did the very wealthy, the multimillionaires, who are organising the current protest against this mining boom tax.

The Greens would, however, see a sovereign fund set up, as the Norwegians have done with their windfall profits from mining and from the petroleum and gas reserves of the North Sea. That small country, with fewer than five million people, has put aside $450 billion for its future infrastructure and the progress of its society. The Australian government would do well to do the same. The Greens will be pursuing that strongly when legislation comes into this parliament, if it does, in the coming year to ensure that we wisely put aside money for the nation’s future and not simply return it, as the government would do, to instant proposals, including the building of infrastructure for the very same mining corporations to export coal faster through taxpayer funded railways and port facilities—including those on the Great Barrier Reef—to line the pockets of people other than average Australians.

The Australian Greens support the government’s $7.3 billion per annum health reform package, as we did the private health insurance rebate, which was unsuccessful in this Senate but which was supported by the Greens alone when the government brought it forward earlier this year. We are very strong advocates for better spending in the areas of mental health and dental health for this country. We believe we now have the resources to do that and we should be pursuing it. The Greens are calling for a minimum of $350 million per annum for mental health over the next four years. That would put $100 million a year worth of incentives at the primary care level to target those in need—the vulnerable and long-term clientele within the community and the NGO sector. That would also afford $150 million per year for early intervention mental health programs, including the youth mental health service, ‘headspace’, and early psychosis prevention services. It would also mean $100 million a year for alternatives to emergency department treatment such as multidisciplinary community based subacute services that support stepped or two-stage prevention and recovery care for people suffering mental problems or illnesses.

Denticare is the clear concept of paralleling Medicare by ensuring that all Australians have ready and easy access to dental health care. The failure of government to provide dental health care to everybody in this country remains a black hole—caries—in the delivery of health care in the country. A full national scheme would cost about $4.8 billion per annum. One billion dollars or so is spent on dental health care in current schemes. We could well fund that amount by, for example, reducing the fuel tax credit scheme for miners by $1.7 billion. How much better to be putting that into dental health care for people who have to wait months otherwise for treatment of their dental problems. We could add to that the rethinking of the $0.7 billion for coal and mining infrastructure out of the mining boom tax, which I just referred to. The $1 billion per annum dished out each year in the fringe benefit tax rebate on corporate vehicle fleets could be diverted to a national dental healthcare system. This is no great difficulty. It is just a failure of policy, imagination and carry-through from both the big parties. This has been advocated for decades, but it is the Greens here who have funding proposals for a national dental healthcare system—funded from the wealth of this country at the moment.

On some particulars from the Rudd government’s budget, I note that there is $27 billion over six years on roads. We are in peak oil. We are facing an enormous cost, both in pollution and in real costs for transport, if we depend upon the road system. We Greens would do much more to advance public transport, bikeways and a high-speed rail system. It will not have passed your notice that the government and the opposition both in the last few days have voted down the Greens proposal for a feasibility study into high-speed rail. It is an extraordinary failure not just of imagination but also of determination not to look at this proposal. The proposal is a must for this nation’s future. It is a proposal for high-speed rail linking the big cities of the eastern seaboard, and later all the big cities of this country. We see it going ahead apace in Saudi Arabia; in Argentina; in the United States; in the United Kingdom; in China, where a train recently reached 510 kilometres an hour; and in France, where standard high-speed rail is at 340 kilometres an hour. But in Australia we have two major parties who cannot step up to the plate, who are failures when it comes to the delivery of innovative public transport and who have even voted down a proposal to even look at high-speed rail in 2010. It is a proposal which I wrote to the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government, Mr Albanese, about today—again—saying, ‘Let’s get together and talk about this.’ A $10 million injection of funds would get world’s best expertise into Australia in the coming 12 months so that we could look at this fantastic high-speed rail facility—not least between Sydney and Melbourne, the third or fourth busiest air route in the world. Passengers could comfortably travel between those two cities in peak hours as quickly as, if not faster than, they can at the moment by air. They have to travel through peak hour traffic and go through all the delays in airports. Instead, they can travel in comfort while being able to access computers, mobile phones and entertainment en route.

Unemployment benefits still sit at $231 per week. Through the actions of the Greens, pensions were raised last year by $30 to $332. We would lift the decreasing number—if projections are right for the next year—of people employed in this country. Unemployment is decreasing because of Greens actions—following on a Labor government proposal for the stimulus package—out of that level way below the poverty line.

The $2 billion being spent on Christmas Island at the moment is the most expensive way to deliver a system for vetting refugees coming to this country from extraordinary circumstances. Senator Hanson-Young has put forward the much more cogent, humane and cheaper options that the Greens would pursue there.

Overseas aid languishes at 0.33 per cent of gross national income, and the government’s target is 0.5 per cent by the year 2015, when it should be one per cent. Included in that aid is $760 million, or some proportion of that, committed by the government at Copenhagen for helping poorer countries in our neighbourhood and elsewhere tackle their own problems with climate change. This was taken out of our aid budget, against the United Nations’ wishes, instead of coming from other funds.

Now we have a childcare rebate pegged at $7,500—that is $500 less per child for eligible parents—which saves only $86 million in an area where there is a need for an injection of funds to meet the quality performance that government quite rightly is now putting into the area. But it is an area that is being neglected and squeezed because the government is applying the squeeze. The Greens see that as a basic need for parents and children across this country if the country is going to have the future it should have.

I might note here some of the other innovations which do not strictly come into the budget speeches of the government or the opposition but which the Greens have initiated in this place in recent years and which we are proud of but which have been knocked off because the big parties simply will not move in the region. One is euthanasia legislation, backed by more than 80 per cent of the Australian populace. Even when I moved to restore the territories’ right—the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory—to legislate in this area, again both the big parties opposed it. Another step was legislation to ensure that Australians are not involved in aiding the Japanese killer whaling fleets of the south—opposed by both parties. Container deposit legislation has had no chance in here under either coalition or Labor governments. Senator Milne’s national feed-in tariff, which would be a great boon to renewable energy, is not seeing the light of day despite experts in the field and business calling for this innovation, which other countries have had for years. A referendum on the republic gained great applause at the Prime Minister’s 2020 forum but there has been no action there at all. Truth in political advertising, which has been proposed by the Greens, was voted down by both the big political parties—that speaks for itself. I referred to high-speed rail earlier. There was the proposal that junk food advertising be banned in children’s TV viewing hours—the scourge of obesity cuts across the health and lifespan of increasing numbers of Australian citizens but, ‘no’ say the big parties to a simple move towards offsetting obesity by banning junk food advertising aimed at children in children’s TV viewing hours.

Yesterday I brought forward legislation to give citizens a far better go in the banking system, including to prohibit the rip-off $2 which banks charge at ATMs to citizens from pensioners right through if they happen to go to an ATM which is not that of their own bank. The legislation requires basic no-cost banking services for people who have simple banking needs wherever they might be in this country. Also, of course, there is the 26 weeks paid parental leave with super, which the Greens not only have before this parliament but will continue to promote, because that is at best standard fare in similar countries around the world. It is every parent’s and every child’s right in this nation in 2010.

I note tonight that the coalition is about to extend the threat to the Australian Public Service with a freeze for two years on new public service jobs. Imagine the incentive that will be for young people who have aspired to study hard and gain themselves a place in the service of the nation when we have an Abbott government saying, ‘If we get in, your road will be blocked now for at least the next two years.’ I quote from the opposition’s shadow Treasurer, Mr Hockey, on ABC TV’s Lateline as recently as April—apparently not understanding that there are 200-plus members of parliament here who do not bake bread, who do not fill potholes and who are not serving in Afghanistan—slinging off at the Public Service, without which this country would not be what it is and who work in the country’s interest. This sneering by the coalition had Mr Hockey saying:

There are 5,000 people in the Department of Health in Canberra and they don’t treat one patient—

and—

There’s 5,000 people in the Department of Education and they don’t teach one pupil.

The threat of the axe hangs above public servants right across this country. There are 2,000 facing it in the current Labor budget, but that will extend to tens of thousands if an Abbott government is elected. The voters of the ACT in particular, but also in my home state of Tasmania, which has a very healthy public service, will be looking carefully at that threat because it cuts right across their future employment and the employment of their children.

There has arisen to public notice in the last few days a wonderful opportunity for this government if it will take it—that is, to end the many decades of contention about the fate of the great forests of south-east New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania. There is a current collapse of that industry. It is due to a glut of wood from around the world. It has been predicted by the analysts, including Judith Ajani from the Australian National University, for many years. It has arrived. The industry is in such a parlous state that it has asked the Greens in Tasmania to meet with it in council to find some way forward. This is a remarkable opportunity to do as Labor Premier Geoff Gallop, following on the work of his Liberal predecessor in Western Australia, did in 2004. When the industry was restructured 29 national parks were created. They are now a huge boon for jobs and productivity in the south-west region of Western Australia. The contention, which pitted people so much against each other, was taken out of that issue. I note that over 80 per cent of Australians in all opinion polls want the end of the destruction of our great native forests and their wildlife. Here is an opportunity for the Rudd government to work with the three south-east states of Australia to indeed achieve a historic outcome for a very small, I believe, outlay which will be in the interests of that industry and, of course, in the interests of Australia’s heirloom forests going on into the future.

As we head for the election, the Greens have a very proud record of responsibility, of taking government proposals in this place and treating them genuinely, of working hard on them and of getting better outcomes. Unlike the coalition, we are not simply naysayers. We do not block simply for the sake of blocking. We are not simply oppositionists, as the coalition is. We believe that if you say no to something you should come up with a better alternative. That is our credo and we will continue to do that. We have a long-sided view for the security of this nation and its future. That is why we are the experts, with the only standing positive proposal on climate change before this parliament.

We will go to the election with a fresh and alternative but very progressive and economically sound outlook and a raft of policies for the people of Australia to consider. We will continue in our role in the Senate to be responsible and economically forward thinking, and we will do so should we win seats in the lower house. Post election, we commit to negotiating responsibly for better outcomes with whichever government is elected. We will go to the people of Australia with the policies I have put forward tonight and more. We look forward to this exercise in democracy and a greater green presence in this parliament—and not least in this Senate, the constructive backstop of democracy for the Australian people.