Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

As the general motion articulated, the upcoming Western Australian by-election will have significant implications for both the people and the environment of Australia in the face of an Abbott government. The people of WA are just 16 days away from a Senate by-election and a vote that will affect the future of our great state of Western Australia and the nation. Of course, this is just six months after the federal election—a very unusual event. The people of Western Australia get to have another go at voting and will be electing six senators. From our perspective it is a choice for a positive future, one that is based on compassion and the generation of jobs in a clever, innovative, sustainable country or one that is based on cruelty, secrecy and a lack of compassion. It is a choice that will have ramifications for the country.

We have a government that is determined to heedlessly push on with an agenda that places little emphasis on an evidence base, lacks compassion and does not have regard to the wellbeing of people, the community or our environment. They are committed to the interests of big business at the expense of the most vulnerable in our community. Mr Abbott and his government wilfully ignore the complexity of problems we face, favouring simplicity and reckless three-word slogans. Of course, there is no better example of that than their support for the shark cull in Western Australia, where they just signed off on Mr Barnett's knee-jerk publicity-stunt approach to sharks in Western Australia.

The WA by-election is our state's chance to stand up to Mr Abbott's agenda on behalf of the nation. Let us look at a couple of things that I urge voters and Western Australians to bear in mind when they go to the polls in 16 days time. Let us look at the environment. One of the first acts of the Abbott government was to essentially do away with our world-leading national system of marine parks. They got rid of the management plans. Essentially they are lines on maps and it is business as usual in those marine parks. They cannot wait to hand environmental powers back to the states. You need no better example—the example, in fact, that Senator Sterle was just making —than James Price Point, where the environmental assessment process in Western Australia was so bad that the court has told them to go back and do it again. They could only find one person from the EPA who did not have a conflict of interest in the great mining state to actually make that decision.

This government keeps talking about Landcare funding and the fact that they will put more funding into Landcare. I have got natural resource management groups that are extremely concerned about the future of that funding and are extremely concerned that in fact it is a bit of a pea and thimble trick and that there will not be proper new funding for our natural resource management and for protection of our biodiversity. Then, of course, you have got Mr Abbott's comments that we have too many national parks this country. He cannot wait to get the loggers back into our magnificent forests, including winding back some of the protections. We need to consider the potential for the winding back of the protections for old-growth forests in Western Australia.

Let us look at social policies, another set of issues that are very close to my heart. We have the government fiddling around with people on disability support and potentially moving to a two-tiered approach where we treat some people differently from others. The cuts that they are making as part of repealing the mining tax hit the most vulnerable in our community.

Then, of course, there is the mean, cruel, compassionless approach to asylum seekers, where they use scare tactics to justify their mean, vindictive approach. Asylum seekers are fleeing persecution, fleeing for their lives—and what do we do? We lock them up on Manus Island or Nauru or Christmas Island indefinitely. On the one hand they talk about the horrors of conflict—and they are horrors—but those very people who are fleeing those horrors are then locked up indefinitely. They use border security to justify that approach. It is cruel and it is mean.

In Australia we have inequities and our society is growing more unequal. That is also the case in Western Australia. A recent Curtin University report, Sharing the boom: the distribution of income and wealth in WA, shows that the gap between the rich and the poor is growing. The wealthiest 10 per cent of households earn up to four times as much as the poorest. The report says that Western Australians have seen some clear benefits from the mining boom but not all have benefitted equally, with the state's lowest income households falling behind the rest of the WA population. It said that the gap between the richest and the poorest households in WA rose consistently between the acceleration of the WA boom in 2003-04 to its peak in 2009-10, at a greater rate than the rest of Australia. Professor Duncan, one of those involved in the report, said: 'Low income families in WA have failed to share the benefits of the boom at the same rate as higher income households, which emphasises the need to support those people on low incomes who may not benefit from the standard of living increases experienced by the rest of the population.'

There is no plan beyond 'dig it up and ship it out' and trying to find the next place to dig a hole in Western Australia. We need a better vision for how we support the most vulnerable in our community, for how we support those on low incomes who are not benefiting from the boom, for how we can have a more just and compassionate society that does share the benefits better. We need to look at how we can better support single parents, those living with a disability and older Australians who are struggling to survive on Newstart while they are being discriminated against in the workplace. We need a real focus on housing and homelessness. As Senator Milne very articulately pointed out, we need a clever, innovative approach to focus on generating jobs that build on a sustainable, clean, green future—not the past based on dinosaur fossil fuels. We need better transport and infrastructure and we, the Australian Greens, have plans around all those things.

If we look at the Commission of Audit this government is currently carrying out, everybody knows it plans to make massive cuts across the board; and they are not going to tell Western Australians what is in that report until after the election. What have they got to hide? You have got to you ask yourself: why won't they tell Western Australians before 5 April what those cuts entail? In fact, what are they going to fund? I have been contacted by group upon group by phone, by email and through my door expressing their concerns about funding for programs. These are programs that provide support and services to the most vulnerable in our community. For example, we have funding supports for family relationship services—again for some of the most vulnerable in our community. We already know the government has cut funding to Aboriginal legal services. But they say, 'It's okay, we've only cut the advocacy and policy generation components.' But during estimates when I asked Mick Gooda, who is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, he said that cutting advocacy and policy directly impacts on incarceration rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It directly impacts. And yet this government has cut that funding. They have cut funding to Aboriginal domestic violence services—absolutely critical, essential services to support some of the most vulnerable people in our community.

We know that Newstart is so low that people are living in poverty. We know it needs an increase of at least $50. There has been no commitment by this government to help those people who are still struggling on Newstart. The government's response has been to go back to the bad old days of demonising people with disability on disability support pensions. I have had lots of people emailing and ringing my office expressing deep concern. They are on disability support pensions and they are deeply concerned about the impact that it will have on them if the government does cut funding. It is also the uncertainty. They are worried, because government talks about cutting funds and says that there are too many people on disability support pensions. Of course, these people have been assessed to qualify for the disability support pension—even the new tougher eligibility criteria that the previous government brought in. When people are on DSP they have qualified for DSP.

One of the key areas in Western Australia that is of deep concern to people is affordable housing. The situation in Western Australia continues to get worse in terms of affordability, and a number of homelessness services are, in the very near future, facing the possibility of having to close their operations, because this government has not committed to re-funding the National Partnership Agreement on Homelessness. What Prime Minister Abbott said when he was in Perth was, 'You'll be right.

That does not deal with the issue at all. These fundamental services provided to the people of Western Australia are absolutely critical, and the government say, 'Trust us; we'll deliver.' Well, no, I am sorry; I do not trust you. Services are going to be closing their doors—these vital services, as I said.

Senator Milne outlined the work of the magnificent, I have to say, Foyer Oxford, which is innovative and supports vital services to homeless young people in Perth. Part of their funding is dependent on that agreement. Just saying 'she'll be right' does not do it. How much funding is available and when? It is the same for all the other programs that this government has not committed to funding, such as the Link-Up services for the stolen generations and, as I said, family relationship services. There are literally dozens of programs, and community service providers are hanging on to find out whether they will get re-funded.

Looking at the people in Western Australia who depend on renewed funding, there are 9,592 people who find themselves homeless every night and 15.6 per cent of them are under the age of 12—and, of course, homelessness disproportionately affects Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. For a government that say they are committed to helping Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, they have a strange way of showing it: they will not let community organisations know if they are going to receive funding and they have cut their funding.

For example, there is an early learning centre in the north of Western Australia, at Wyndham. I think it was $1.2 million that was spent on building this magnificent centre that provides a fantastic resource. Last year, they did not know if they were going to get funded; fortunately, they were. But it is now nearly the end of March and they do not know if they are going to get re-funded, come July. They provide an absolutely critical service for parents and their young ones in Wyndham, and they do not know if they are going to get funded. So we can build this infrastructure but then we have this stop-start approach to funding, and this government will not tell this vital community organisation whether they are going to be funded again.

On top of all this uncertainty for community organisations, which are an absolutely essential part of support services for civil society and which in Western Australia play an absolutely vital role, the government announced with a repeal bill yesterday that they were going to be cutting the ACNC, the Australian Charities and Not-for-profits Commission, throwing more uncertainty over the not-for-profit and community sector in Western Australia and around the country.

Another area that is absolutely vital and that we need the government to pay attention to—and this government is not paying attention to it; it is in denial; it is burying its head in the sand—is of course climate change and the impact it is already having on agriculture in Western Australia. There is the threat of a drying climate, particularly in the south-west of Western Australia, which has just had another 17 per cent drop in rainfall. As I articulated around lunchtime, in the debate on the drought package, this government is ignoring the fact that global warming is transforming our agricultural regions, and the south-west of Western Australia is a classic example. But the government are merrily going along as if nothing was happening. If we are to have a sustainable agricultural system in Western Australia and around the country, we need policies that acknowledge the impact of global warming and the government have to start realising that they need to act.

The Greens do realise that we need to act. We have been articulating, very clearly, a positive vision for the future—a future that is sustainable. We have a plan for long-term prosperity as the mining boom slows. We have a vision that is based on science, equality and sustainability, not waste and exploitation. We understand that we need to make the right investments, ones that will create construction, manufacturing and renewable energy jobs across Western Australia. The plan that has been articulated by my colleague Senator Ludlam, the Greens' Energy 2029 plan, outlines the creation of 26,000 construction jobs in renewable energy. Investment in modular housing will not only create sustainable jobs but also address the issues around affordable housing. That is the sort of vision we need—not one that is based on 'dig it up and ship it out', one that is cruel and shows no compassion for the most vulnerable in our community. (Time expired)