Peter Whish-Wilson (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thought I would start my speech this morning by making a couple of confessions. The first confession is that actually I agree with the strong point that was made by Senator Bernardi in his speech earlier today. Senator Bernardi said: 'The public is sick of politicians putting their convictions aside.' On that, I absolutely agree with the Senator for South Australia. Whatever you think about the Greens, we are a party of very strong convictions. I would like to thank the 40,000 or so Tasmanians who returned the Greens to the Senate in this last federal election. They did so because they know that we will stand by our convictions. We always do stand up for our strong values and we will certainly do that in this term of parliament.

The second confession I would like to make is about the Governor-General's speech. I actually thought for the first few minutes that the Governor-General's speech was the Governor-General's speech, that they were actually her words. I have since found out from speaking to a number of Tasmanians that they were as ignorant as I was. I remember thinking to myself after about a minute: 'I can't believe the Governor-General is being so vacuous and using such toxic terminology in her speech about Australians and the Australian economy'. I quickly realised that in fact these were the words I have heard and every Australian has heard ad nauseam for the last three years from Prime Minister Tony Abbott.

Then I thought: 'first impressions are most important'. After sitting and listening to that for 20 minutes, what really struck me about that speech was the message it was delivering about the next three years of coalition rule in this country. The idea is simple: we live in an economy. That is what the speech struck me as saying. 'There is nothing else to our lives except for business and the economy.' We do not live in an environment or live in a community. We live in an economy. In other words, the fundamental assumption is that what is good for business, especially for big business and their interests, is good for all of us. Personally, I believe and my party believes, as do other people in the Senate, that that is a fundamentally flawed and dangerous assumption: 'look after business first and the rest will follow.'

The Greens recognise that the economy is important. It is an important tool for allocating resources, helping manage our communities and our lives. It is here to help us flourish. It is not the other way around. We are not here to be a slave to the economy and to help the economy flourish, necessarily. When I think about the legislation that is shortly going to be before this House, such as the repeal of the clean energy package and the mining tax, I thought about a recent 7.30 interview with Al Gore.

Senator Abetz interjecting —

Yes, you know the one Senator Abetz. Annabel Crabb was sitting in. Mr Gore made same pretty big statements about what we have come to know as 'special interests'. He described how, in relation to climate change and the destructive influence of energy, coal and oil companies, our democracy has been hijacked and that special interests control decisions too frequently. He then quite provocatively went on to claim that the debate in Australia around climate change and the repeal of a carbon price reminded him of the tobacco companies in the United States who were able to lobby compliant politicians to deny links between tobacco smoking and cancer; that shameful period of history that we look back on now and cannot believe happened. He went on to say that the power of special interests is a political fact of life and is pitiful. Especially when he was queried about whether this was some sort of conspiracy theory, he said, 'No, this is the way it works.' And that has certainly been my experience in my very recent time in parliament.

Debate interrupted.