Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Sometimes, I think about what people think of this place and what people in the gallery and those of us who occasionally listen to this place on broadcast make of all of it. After that last contribution, a contribution that treated the chamber with complete contempt and disrespect—

Opposition senators: Where is your tie?

Completely contemptible. And now I am getting fashion tips from Giorgio Armani over there. The fact is we have a very serious motion before this chamber and it warrants being treated with some respect.

A few weeks ago, I was at a public meeting in a place called Colac. For those of you who do not know, Colac is a place in south-west Victoria. It is a place that is largely a rural community with a manufacturing industry and dairy farmers—people who are struggling to get on in life. I attended the meeting because the meeting dealt with the overnight closure of the emergency department. Colac Hospital services that regional community; it provides important services to those people. It has an emergency department staffed by number of dedicated GPs.

The reason a thousand people met on one night in Colac was because they were distraught about the thought of the closure of the emergency department in Colac. The reason the emergency department was closed overnight was that midway through the financial year, this federal government ripped $100 million out of the health system in Victoria. It was part of a broader cut—$1.5 billion over four years. The cut comes on the back of chronic underinvestment by the conservative state government in Victoria, but there is no way of sugar coating the cut by the Commonwealth government. It was a huge kick in the guts to the people of Colac. The reason that people met was because kids with asthma in their communities need somewhere to go overnight, farm workers who might suffer an injury need to be able to access that emergency department and an older person who might be suffering from chronic disease, like high blood pressure and ischaemic heart disease, needs to know that they have somewhere they can go.

Why is the closure of that emergency department relevant to this debate? It is relevant because several years ago a tax was proposed by the then head of Treasury, Ken Henry: a good tax, a tax that was essentially a tax on super profits from mining companies. It was a tax that would only be paid when super profits were made. It was a tax on mineral resources that were exploited by the mining industry, for good reason, but belonged to all of us; resources that are non-renewable—they will not be there forever. A tax that, on every level, economically, in terms of equity and in terms of meeting our sustainability challenge, made sense.

Had we had that tax, this government would not be facing the financial pressures it currently faces and would not have had to have taken that money out of Victoria's public health system or, in fact, out of hospitals right around the country. The tax that was proposed by Treasury and then put forward by the former prime minister, Mr Kevin Rudd, was a good tax, but we do not have in place because, ultimately, what we saw was a government cave into an aggressive, shameless, blatant campaign by the mining interests, who essentially got together with government representatives to stitch up a deal so that they did not face a campaign from that industry. It was one of the great missed opportunities of this parliament and the previous parliament.

What is the cost of not doing it? We heard about Newstart. We have now got more money raised by taking funds from single mothers than we have raised through the mining tax. We cannot commit to raising Newstart so that people currently living in poverty are not faced with the decision of whether they can afford to buy a loaf of bread or a carton of milk or whether they have to get their public transport ticket so that they can try to attend a job interview.

We have got the great education challenge confronting the nation. We have got the Gonski reforms—reforms that are absolutely critical—and we have no means of funding them. And of course we have got the National Disability Insurance Scheme, a scheme that is long overdue and welcomed by all parties, and yet not one of them, the government or the opposition, has any explicit ideas on how disability insurance will be funded.

We have got the issue of Denticare. We have a situation in this country where people do not go to the dentist because they cannot afford it. I am proud that through the term of this parliament the Greens did get progress on Denticare. For the first time we have a situation where young kids will be able to go to the dentist in the same way they go to the doctor, handing over their Medicare card and getting treated. That is a good thing. We have got a big investment in public dental care and for rural and regional dentistry, but we need more. We need to make sure that we address the wrong that was done when Medicare was first introduced, so that we give everybody access to dental care and ensure that it is universal and that the size of your wallet does not impact on your ability to go to the dentist.

On that point I heard Minister Albanese talking about the Greens as 'parasites' for claiming achievements that were rightfully Labor achievements. He needs a history lesson here. The government tried twice to close the Chronic Disease Dental Scheme without putting anything in its place, and it was the Greens that dragged the Labor Party to the table to ensure that we had a replacement that was going to meet the needs of low-income people and young children. So we do claim that as a Greens achievement, and rightfully so. Without the Greens, the Chronic Disease Dental Scheme would have been closed and we would have nothing in its place.

Mr Albanese also needs a history lesson when it comes to the introduction of action on climate change. This government took to the election a plan for a climate assembly, a citizens assembly. There was no action, and it was the Greens that made sure that we put this country on a footing to address what is one of the great economic, environmental and social challenges of this century. We achieved that through negotiations with the government and the Independents, and what we now have for the first time is a price on pollution. We have got a massive investment in biodiversity funds and we have also got a raised tax-free threshold so that we can encourage people into work. They are good things. They are Greens achievements in this parliament.

But we need more. We need to make sure that everybody in this country can go to the dentist in the same way that they go to the doctor. We need universal dental care. We need to address the issue of rising out-of-pocket costs for medicines. We need to do more in the area of preventative health. We have to make sure that our public hospital systems are once again the first choice for people, not the last choice. Private health insurance in this country must be a choice and not a necessity. It is now the Greens that are the party of universal health care and universal education.

I heard the Prime Minister recently talking about her party not being a social democratic party. Well, the Greens are proud to take on that mantle. We do believe in the provision of education, health care, disability insurance and ensuring that people's needs are met if they are unemployed. They are core Greens policies.

But this motion is a motion of no confidence in the government. The Greens, like the Australian community, face a diabolical choice. We have got a government that has lost its way and we have an abysmal opposition, an opposition whose policy on the important action we took on climate change is to create uncertainty in the investment community and through some magical soil sequestration program to achieve the same target they criticise the government for. They signed onto the target and yet they want to pay polluters and tax the community—an economically irrational, environmentally scandalous set of policy responses. I would respect the opposition more if they listened to those elements within their own party and were honest about it and did not try to continue with this charade of pretending to have a policy that represents action on climate change when it does nothing of the sort.

It is just like their position on coal seam gas. Senator Joyce could not face a vote on that issue because he knows that his constituents are concerned about the impact of coal seam gas in his community on underground aquifers, the environment, and the fact that somebody can come and knock on your door and say, 'We are going to put in a coal seam gas well and you can do nothing about it.'

I am worried about the opposition's policies on health. They are going to abolish the National Preventative Health Agency and Medicare Locals, important reforms that do something towards addressing the issue of prevention and primary health care. On education they are going to continue with the inequitable funding model introduced by the Howard government and, with the election of an opposition government, I fear that the Gonski reforms will be dead before they have even begun.

On Newstart, they will not commit to ensuring that people facing those terrible choices will be given some comfort through a small increase that gets them somewhere near the poverty line rather than a long way beneath it. They have made some extravagant promises—on paid parental leave, for example. Of course, the question is: how are they going to pay for it?

This is an opposition that expect to sail into government with no scrutiny, with no-one pushing them on the revenue that it is necessary to raise in order to pay for some of these promises. The bottom line is that the Greens will do nothing to help this opposition coast into government. We will do nothing that will ensure that a backwards-looking, nasty, regressive opposition, with a 1950s view of what Australia should look like, becomes the next government of Australia. That is why we will not be supporting a motion of no confidence in the government.

In the end, government is about priorities. We need to decide what sort of society we want. Do we want to be a decent, caring, more compassionate society? Do we want a society where everybody, regardless of the circumstances into which they are born, gets a decent education, not just those who can afford it? Do we want a society where people can access life-saving medicines, have elective surgery done and not languish for hours in emergency departments, regardless of their ability to pay? Do we want a situation where people can marry regardless of their sexual orientation? Do we want a society where people who are seeking protection in this country because they face the very real threat of prosecution are granted that protection when they are deserving of it? And do we want a society that is prepared to meet the great challenge of sustainability, of ensuring our economy is on a sustainable footing going into this century?

That is the great challenge for our economy. And the mining tax was an opportunity to do just that, to ensure that we do not squander the benefits of the mining boom as we squandered the last decades under the coalition government, with very little to show for it apart from handouts and pork-barrelling, rather than ensuring that we meet the challenge of this century, which is to transform our economy so it is on a more sustainable footing and to provide the services—education, health care and a national disability insurance scheme—for those who need them That is why the mining tax represents one of the great missed opportunities of this parliament. It was a tax that, when it comes to equity, was to ensure that we get a fair share from the resources that belong to all of us. It was a tax that, when it comes to transforming our revenue base, would tax resources that will not be there forever, that will be gone, so as to ensure that not just this generation of Australians but also future generations will benefit, because it is their wealth that we are squandering along with ours.

We are faced with some huge challenges in this country: an ageing population and the impact of the health burden on our community, the shift in chronic diseases, the fact that our PBS system needs to provide decent medicines at low cost. How on earth are you going to meet those challenges if you are not prepared to raise the revenue? How are you going to meet the challenge of making sure that every child in this country gets access to a decent education and that we do not slip further down the rankings through our performance as a nation on a range of benchmarks?

We are not meeting the challenges because we have neither a government nor an opposition that is prepared to stand up to vested interests, to take them on and to say, 'This is the sort of society we want: a society that is decent, that is caring, that is compassionate, that recognises that the role of government is to provide those things for people.' Instead, we have a government that caved in to those interests, just like it did when it came to poker machine reform and just like it has done in a number of other areas. And we have an opposition who will not even take up the challenges because they are too close to the big end of town. What we need to do is to recognise what a modern, decent, forward-looking Australia looks like. We have got to make sure we do not miss this opportunity. We do need to amend the mining tax. We have to make sure that we use this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to meet the challenges of the 21st century.