John Madigan (Victoria, Democratic Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This speech is one of what I would call frustration, having come up to just on two years in this place. I am frustrated about the fact that quite often what is discussed here is not the issues but the personalities; and the fact that often people in government say, 'We're looking into it,' while Rome burns. The first thing I would like to put on record tonight is that a lot of people in rural Australia are concerned about foreign owner­ship. On Cubbie Station and the Ord River, $500 million of infrastructure was developed by the government and then just given away to the Chinese. We did not encourage Australians or give them the same consider­ation that we gave to foreign companies.

There is the wheat belt in Western Australia, which is now somewhat dominated by the Chinese, and the fact that they are able to build a port in Albany for their own exports. We have got the shambles of the Murray-Darling Basin Plan. We have got people who are proposing man-made deliberate flooding of private land, with no consideration for, and very little input from, the people whose lives are going to be affected by this.

Another topical discussion at the moment is GrainCorp and the fact that the Foreign Investment Review Board is looking into it. Meanwhile, as I said earlier, Rome burns. In today's Weekly Times we see that there is a closing price of $8.85 a share, and now the foreign buyer is offering $13.20, a 49 per cent premium on the closing price. None of us should be surprised by that, when they are basically going to buy a monopoly. And then we will have people coming into the Senate and the House of Representatives to express the concerns of our farmers and our manufacturing exporters about the cost of accessing the ports. But what is $13.20 when you are buying a monopoly.

We have tacit acknowledgement of people's concerns in rural and regional and urban Australia, but they do not get addressed and then the house is sold. And then there is the state of food processing in this country—SPC, the Goulburn Valley and the pictures we see in the paper of them burning trees—and we wonder what is going on. 'We are going to look into it.' Well, it will be too late by the time something is done—in one month or three months it will be 'all over red rover'. The state of citrus, our horticulture, is a shambles—and we have just tacit recognition of what people say.

Going to the state of our manufacturing, we've got the position of Shell and the Geelong oil refinery, and the fact that some people think that the rest of the world is going to give us cheaper petrol, diesel, avgas or whatever. Well, when we do not have the ability to do our own refining, nobody is going to give us a free kick, nobody is going to give us cheap stuff. We are kidding ourselves if we think the rest of the world is going to help us.

When our assets, our land, our infrastruct­ure and our companies are bought overseas, they are given consideration that our own businesses do not get. I am always astounded that, as soon as you want them to play by the rules or you question what they are doing, people scream out about sovereign risk to foreign investment. But what about the risk to Australia's future and the future of all Australians when foreign predators are picking off our nation's resources both natural and man made? Maybe we should be putting more encouragement into investment in Australia by the Australian superannuation industry.

The next big issue on everybody's list, which is often bleated about in this place and the other place, is human rights. But on our very doorstep the plight of the West Papuans and the East Timorese is virtually ignored. We have got the asylum seekers, we have got the Tamils, we have got people coming from the other side of the world to our shores. Frankly, we should be more proactive in our diplomatic efforts and help them so that they do not have to leave their countries and flee to our shores because of the oppression, violence and torture that a lot of these people face. When are we going to question how much foreign aid we spend?—$541 million to Indonesia last year, and in this budget we have rewarded Indonesia, that tortures and kills our neighbours who put their lives on the line for Australian servicemen in the Second World War. What do we do? We give them another $106 million. So now we are up to $647 million to Indonesia.

We had the Barwick theory for our relationship with Indonesia and then the Lombok treaty, and then we had the JSCOT committee findings that said Australian resources were not to be used for the repression of people in the Lombok treaty. But we ignored that. We are training a military that is out of control. They are torturing and killing people. We are complicit in this by our silence.

Our country is subjected to social engin­eering on a scale that is possibly unprecedented in the rest of the world. We are custodians of Australia and it is our duty to hand it on better than we found it—socially, economically and environmentally. But first and foremost, in all our decisions, we must put the people first—whether they live in rural, regional or urban Australia we must put the common good back into the Commonwealth.

Senate adjourned at 19:59