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

and work with other parties to get constructive outcomes. But the coalition has chosen not to be constructive and use the power it has in a balance-of-power parliament. Instead, it has chosen to run a negative agenda from day one, opposing everything and filibustering for days and days. The filibuster that occurred around the Carbon Farming Initiative is a classic case of this. For weeks in the Senate the coalition, the National Party and the Liberals stood up one after the other and said how bad it was, how shocking it was, what a disaster it would be for rural Australia—and then, when finally we got through the Carbon Farming Initiative, we heard from the coalition that it no longer opposed that part of that clean energy package; no, it was going to support it and keep it, in the event that the coalition ever got back into power.

The issue here is that the coalition absolutely wasted the time of the parliament. They railed full of complete and utter rubbish, put up all kinds of propositions that were unsubstantiated and then, when they lost and it passed, they said, 'Oh, no, we will keep it as it is'—having just spent hours, weeks, saying how bad it was. That is the kind of nonsense that you get when an unintelligent opposition refuse to use a shared balance-of-power parliament to actually get constructive outcomes. Senator Abetz was criticising the Greens for using a balance-of-power parliament to get constructive outcomes. Well, I say that the most productive periods of parliament are balance-of-power or shared-power parliaments, because it is in those circumstances that ideas have to be negotiated and talked about, that amendments are brought forward and significant progress is made. For example, we are addressing climate change. Unfortunately there are still members of the coalition who do not believe that climate change is happening and that it is human induced. And I see that Senator Bernardi has his hand up. He is still—