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

There are a few readers on the conservative side of the house, I see. It had an article by Sue Neales about Mr Roderic O'Connor, of Connorville in Tasmania, and it explained how keeping the forests on his magnificent property under the Great Western Tiers was potentially a greater money spinner for him in an age of carbon trading than running sheep or certainly logging the forests and trying to export them as woodchips or whatever. What is so fascinating in that article is the win-win situation that is underlined in the carbon trading future which all of us face. Listening to Senator Boswell and the opposition, you would think that the better option is the non-market option, which is very curious for a conservative political party, and that is the central state option—and this has overtones of Eastern Europe of some time ago—where the state pays the factories to hopefully get them to stop polluting. Doing that, of course, does not come out of thin air—it takes money off the taxpayers.

The alternative option by the Greens and the Gillard government is for the polluters to pay for the damage they are causing to the economy, to the environment and to society. This option allows that money to be collected and to go in a well-honed way to a number of pursuits, including offsetting the cost on householders, not least pensioners, low-income earners and middle-income earners as well and, at the same time, give a boost to renewable energy via energy sources of the future. That means relief to taxpayers who recognise there will be a cost of any action in an age of climate change.

We have here the extraordinary thing of a Labor government with the Greens going for the market option—the capitalist option, if you like—of requiring those who create the damage to pay for it. It is very simple logic. From the money collected, it is given across to those who suffer the consequences of the pollution of the most polluting industries—that is, householders, through increasing power costs. Also, it is to look at a better way for the future, which is to put somewhere between $13 billion and $15 billion collected in coming years into renewable energy, including solar, wind, geothermal and the other very promising options of the future.

In this report, we do not see any backing of that. It is largely a report based on the numbers in the committee system and the conservatives had those numbers. But what a different conservative we have under Mr Abbott, the Leader of the Opposition, here in Australia from those in Britain under its Conservative government, the Cameron government, which just a few months ago put into place a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions in that country by 50 per cent—a whopping half—by 2025. If that were to be touted in Australia now there would be paroxysms from the conservatives and their backers down there in Holt Street, where the Australian newspaper, the Murdoch newspaper, is produced.

However, what is perfectly reasonable and has backing across the board in Britain is not contestable or debatable here in Australia. You have to think beyond the sections of the media that do not support reasonable, sensible and logical action on climate change in Australia. You ask yourself what it is that has made this huge difference in our country and then you come to the power of the mining industry, not least the coal industry, and its enormous ability to purchase the policy outcomes of this parliament against the public interest. We saw that last year when the then Rudd government proposed a mining superprofits tax which had been recommended by Treasury, that very conservative think tank. In doing so, they were following the simple principle of many other countries—Norway is a good example—of having a mining boom reined in at least to the extent of some money being put aside for the public from that mining boom to ensure the national wellbeing into the future.

In Australia's case, if Treasury's advice had been followed, the proposal would have brought in, over the next decade, some $100 billion more—$60 billion on conservative estimates—than the now proposed Gillard government alternative. That is because, in the course of a couple of weeks in this city, three big mining companies came to town—Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton and Xstrata—backed by a $22 million advertising campaign and the fury of that section of the press which resides in Holt Street, and the government dissembled. The outcome of the talks which followed was one in which the Australian people will lose $100 billion that should have been invested in their future over the next 10 years. Had it been left to the Abbott alternative, however—the opposition of Mr Tony Abbott—it would have been $140 billion going to the mining companies rather than to the people of Australia who own the coal, the iron ore and the other minerals which were to be taxed. They were only to be taxed, it should be noted, when superprofits were being made, not during ordinary times or if the companies were losing money at any given time.

That means that, because of the $22 million advertising campaign and the rollover of the big parties, in particular the opposition, there will not be the money for high-speed rail in Australia, there will not be the money to promote Asian languages as we would want to in this Asian century and there will not be the money to preserve Indigenous languages as we would like to in Australia. We have to be concerned that there will not be the money for a national dental healthcare scheme as there ought to be, there will not be the money coming from Canberra to help big cities get light rail and better transport systems and there will not be the money to help ameliorate the impact of climate change, including the impact on the 700,000 vulnerable properties on the eastern seaboard of Australia let alone, as we saw from a report this week, the impact of the loss of the ski fields with all the associated jobs. All the wherewithal of this nation—