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

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President, and I totally concur with your ruling. I assure you that I stand here in defence of the rights of senators not to be eroded, ever. That is what I am doing here this afternoon.

I come back to the matter at hand, which is this specious motion of lack of confidence in the government, on a presumption in the motion that does not exist—that is, that a carbon tax has been introduced in Australia, when one has not been. What is true here is that the Abbott opposition has decided to take this negative knocking and completely unconstructive opposition to everything that the government and, in the main, the Greens and the Independents put forward in this place. That is a political tactic, but I think it is very fraught.

What we are seeing from Tony Abbott, the honourable Leader of the Opposition, is a patronising of the people of Australia in a way that I have not seen in recent years from any political leader. The honourable leader is treating Australians as fools. What he is trying to do by appearing at petrol stations with a pump in his hand and filling up people’s cars, is to treat with disdain a very important debate that is occurring in this country. It may be that he wants a people’s revolt. In fact he said that. But I think he ought to be very wary indeed about the progress of that low level of political operation in a mature democracy. People will not like it. The intelligence of the Australian people is far higher than Tony Abbott would place it. The knowledge about the threat of climate change is far more developed in the Australian people generally than it is around the opposition party room table. The disdain that Australians have for those people who wilfully pollute, having had decades of forewarning about the threat of climate change, is very little different to the disdain people generally have for big tobacco, which continues to push its death-dealing products on a populace here and, more particularly, overseas, to make expenses on the basis that it causes no harm. That does not wash in modern Australia. I would have thought that an opposition would understand that in 2011, but it does not.

So we have this motion here today. And, by the way, this motion was brought on in question time. It would be my expectation that question time will resume at the end of the debate on this motion. That is in the hands of this house, but it may well be that the opposition has cut across question time when it could have put this motion a little later in the day. Indeed, it has an urgency motion on exactly the same topic to come. But these are political and strategic matters within the chamber. They are nowhere near as important as the impact of a decision made by an aberrant, straying and lost opposition in their party room today that it will rescind legislation which tackles climate change if such is agreed to by the other components of this parliament. That is a recipe for instability; it is a recipe for economic uncertainty; it is a recipe for job losses. Above all, it is a recipe for far greater pollution by the worst polluters of this country than we are even seeing in 2011. It is daft. You would expect a higher level of political behaviour and nous from this opposition. But they are not showing it and they are showing no signs of getting it.

I go back to my first point. The opposition have this strategy for going to the next election promising to return to uncertainty by rolling back properly considered legislation coming from the Gillard government and agreed to by the other components in both houses of parliament which give a majority—if that occurs. We will willingly debate the opposition on that in the lead-up to the next election. I predict that they are going to be in opposition for a long time to come.