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

I am very privileged to be able to reply to the Governor-General's speech. I am especially fortunate to be doing it nearly six months after I started—I am in continuation. Back then, in the first few minutes of my speech, I reflected on what Al Gore had said on The 7.30 Report about climate change and the Abbott government's attempts to repeal the carbon package. He very clearly said that our democracy has been hijacked by vested interests, special interests. An incredulous Annabel Crabb said, 'Surely you are not putting forward some sort of conspiracy theory here?' He said, 'No, this is how it works in politics.'

Looking back on it now, my feeling while listening to the Governor-General's speech was that it did not have any vision and was all about tearing down existing legislation, legislation which my party feels is good public policy. Interestingly, I was sitting next to Kevin Rudd during the Governor-General's speech. He said the same thing. He asked, 'Where is the vision?' I do not know if anyone else was listening, but I certainly was—because I felt the same thing.

Looking at what has transpired over the last six months in this chamber and in this parliament, I would have to say that my comments at the beginning of my speech have turned out to be correct. What Mr Gore was referring to is commonly called the 'special interest effect'. It is well studied, understood and accepted by economists, sociologists and students of political science, but we seldom hear much about it. The effect explains why vested interests—usually big, powerful, profit-seeking corporations—often get their own way in politics. They have a very simple but persuasive strategy. Because they are well-resourced they lobby hard, often through front groups and lobby groups, and are effective.

According to the theory, special interests can concentrate the benefits and costs to decision makers, such as politicians, on issues like the mining tax—or, I should say, the tax on the superprofits of miners—the price on carbon and financial services reform. The costs and benefits to the politicians are made very clear. On the benefit side, there are often political donations or other carrots. The costs are such things as legal challenges or the threat of high-profile advertising and political campaigns against MPs and governments. Do you remember the advertising campaign on the superprofits tax that helped unseat Mr Rudd? I am sure he is very aware of the special interest effect in this country.

But the reasons for the success of powerful industry lobby groups go much deeper than this. There is another side to the ledger. Any decision maker on an issue of importance faces a trade-off: face the big powerful corporations on one hand or face a potential backlash from the people, the voters, on the other. Sadly, both experience and theory tell us that in this trade-off it is usually in a politician's self-interest to back the powerful vested interests instead of the public interest. Why is this the case? It is because of what economists term the 'rational ignorance' of voters. The costs of devoting significant time and resources to fully understand the issues are too high for voters, especially if those issues are not accurately reflected in the media—and especially when those voters are busy putting food on the table and getting on with their busy lives. On the other hand, what is the benefit to them if they do invest the time and effort to gain an understanding of these issues? Often the costs or benefits of a policy change to an individual are not acute, are indirect, or are spread out over large numbers of people or long periods of time. Sometimes they are even transferred to future generations. This is often the case when the policy involves the issue of sustainability.

So, from a simple cost-benefit point of view, it is often rational for an individual voter to remain ignorant—to a point at least. Throw in the fact that there are a multitude of things that are important to individual voters and it becomes unlikely that one thing will significantly influence their vote. So a pollie can often assume they are safe from voter backlash on any single issue. This special interest effect is a longstanding political and economic theory. In addition, many of these issues are complex—and it is in the interests of the vested interests to make them complicated and to put out misinformation to muddy the waters. I have heard a lot of that misinformation here in this chamber in debates on the sorts of issues I have been talking about.

One issue that I feel very strongly about and campaigned on for years before I came into the Senate is getting a recycling refund in place for single-use plastics, especially plastic bottles—what is often called 'cash for containers'. The power of the Food and Grocery Council has always been really obvious to me. They have an impact on decision makers. I have seen the way Coca-Cola and other beverage companies have behaved when legislation has been proposed to give this country a refund for recycling bottles. Their power is no surprise to me, but it was a surprise to me that a lobbyist on behalf of the Beverages Council was actually an adviser to the minister. It just you how entrenched lobbyists and special interests are in our political system.

This same theory explains why it is such rubbish that the Liberal and National parties claim a mandate on just about every issue that it suits them to. The world is a lot more complex than that. There is no science that explains exactly how people vote when they go to the polling booth.

Al Gore was right. Our democracy has been undermined. It is undermined when special interests do not have any regard for the public good and are only looking after the interests of their members. Advocacy groups are exactly the same. Who was most vocal in supporting the carbon tax repeal legislation that has just passed through the Senate? Yes, you guessed it—the big end of town. The cheer squad included the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Australian Industry Group, the Business Council of Australia and the Minerals Council of Australia. 'Industry calls for swift repeal of carbon tax'—that is one of the headlines I picked out from the newspapers. Of course they would; it is in the interests of their members to call for the repeal of a price on carbon.

But our job is to look at the much bigger issues here and at the public good, not just the good of a few large businesses. This is especially so given that only 0.01 per cent of Australian businesses are liable to pay the carbon price and that four companies alone pay nearly 50 per cent of Australia's carbon liability. It is concentrated in a very small number of industries. This demonstrates how effective the big polluters in this country have been in influencing the Liberal-National government and, sadly, in attempting to change our legislation. We have already been through the minerals resource rent tax in detail in the last week. Only 10 to 20 companies are being impacted by it—out of the 300 originally touted. We have seen attempts to change EPBC laws and hand back powers to the states, because the same big business cheer squad are asking for it. We have seen changes to New South Wales environmental laws that put the economy above the environment in that state.

Another area of interest to me is the so-called free trade deals that we are negotiating, which are being pushed almost entirely by vested interests—we are talking about not just the self-interest and vested interests of Australian companies but those of significant global multinational corporations domiciled in other countries, including US corporations—and how that may impact Australian sovereignty in terms of how we legislate in the public interest. That is all on the table with Trojan Horse clauses called 'investor-state dispute settlement'.

It is no secret that my party, the Greens, feel that the government has a very important role to play in standing up to vested interests, balancing the equation and making sure all interests are represented, not just some. It is about restoring balance to this government's extreme agenda, which is putting the interests and profits of corporations ahead of the people. Nowhere is this more important than in tackling climate change. The role of government is in correcting market failures, and the biggest market failure of all time is climate change. There should be no more of this rubbish about the cost of living; we should be discussing the costs of living with climate change.

I do not want to give the impression that I am antibusiness, because I am not. I worked for big and small business for many years before coming into this role in the Senate, and I have spent years chasing a buck. I lived for my bonus at the end of the year. But I have also had a different life in the past decade in Tasmania, and I have genuinely glimpsed an alternative reality. We do not need as much as we think to be happy. The community, the environment and nature should be central to our thinking and our decision making. In this regard, tackling global warming, as the biggest threat facing my generation and the generation of the children watching me as I speak, is an issue we have to take seriously, and it is more important than the short-term costs to the profits of the big polluters in this country.

Six months ago I was happy to go into a lot of detail, which we have already seen in this chamber, about climate change, but clearly food security, the loss of crops and effects on drinking water are not just environmental issues but also anthropogenic issues and economy issues. They are economic costs to future generations which if the forecasts are right—and we have seen even more in recent weeks—will lead to trillions of dollars worth of damage and costs to our global economy. We have already seen billions of dollars in costs from individual weather events. Who knows what it will stack up into in the future? We need to mitigate and we need to take action against this now.

I remember going to Agfest in Tassie last year, and I saw the Liberal Party tent. They must have spent a lot of money; they certainly were very impressive in their display. They had a picture of a Holden ute—a big pull-up ute—and it said, 'The carbon tax will cost you a Ute every year.' I remember Christine Milne saying, 'Climate change will cost you your farm if you don't get behind taking effective action.' That is really the debate in this chamber that we need to try to find balance in.

I will look at Tasmania in the few minutes that I have left. Tasmania has been a beneficiary of a price on carbon, because we produce clean energy and we export that clean energy. The dividends range between $70 million and $200 million a year to Hydro Tasmania because of a price on carbon. We were never going to get that back if these repeal bills were passed. The dividends are very important to my state. They account for 12½ per cent of Tasmania's non-Canberra revenues. I notice Senator Smith, who is certainly one of the champions in this chamber of taking GST money away from Tasmania. Have a think about how you are going to give us that money back, Senator Smith, not to mention the fact that the mining boom has put significant upward pressure on the exchange rate, which has been one of the negative impacts on my economy. It is called Dutch disease, and everybody knows about it. It is never discussed in here—the impact on manufacturing and the agricultural community of a high Australian dollar. So let us be fair and reasonable about how we share out the pie in this country and not claim that my state, which has had 70 years of sucking on the teat, suddenly wants to take money off other states.

We have also seen a change in Tasmania in recent weeks. People in Tasmania have voted for a new government, but there are significant areas that we need to have tripartisan support on in Tasmania: the importance of our scientific community and the money that they need for research, the importance of the University of Tasmania, and the importance of finding a truly sustainable forestry industry and a way forward to look after our natural assets, which are so important to Tasmania's economy. It is what we have a competitive advantage on. Every other state would love to have our forests and wild areas. In fact, most people in the world would give their left leg to have them. They are what brings people to my state, and they are one of the biggest generators of employment and income. We need to look after them and we need to put them first.

One of my famous quotes is from Hernan Cortes, the most famous of the Spanish conquistadors. He said, 'My men and I suffer from a disease of the heart that can only be cured by gold.' The tale of the conquistadors is a sad tale of the consequences of greed, of always wanting more and of enough never being enough. It is not too different in our modern society, where corporate greed and a never-ending search for increasing profits can undermine our democracy. I do not want to see, in the next three years of this Liberal-National government, the heart of this big nation further infected by an incurable disease—the never-ending, never-satiated, profit-seeking behaviour of a few big, powerful corporations. Politics is the art of the possible, and it is about showing leadership. I strongly believe it is possible to do our bit to stop climate change, to care for people, to be good international citizens, to be real and not phoney, and to do something real. I would not be here today if I did not believe this. But this is going to require standing up to special interests and breaking the nexus that so often hijacks our democracy. It is about making the Australian people truly understand these arguments and getting action in this chamber.