Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move Greens amendments (1) and (2) on sheet 7487 revised:

(1) Title, page 1 (line 1), before "establish the Asset Recycling Fund", insert "encourage privatisation and".

(2) Clause 1, page 1 (line 7), omit "Asset Recycling Fund", substitute "Encouraging Privatisation (Asset Recycling Fund)".

For the benefit of senators not closely following the debate, this is the final amendment, which may or may not be subjected to a division. They are very simple amendments but very important ones. They are amendments of honesty. They change the title of the bill. The government discovered that Greens like recycling. So they invented the cute phrase 'asset recycling', which I think is hilarious. We are substituting in the name of the bill 'Asset Recycling Fund Bill' with the 'Encouraging Privatisation (Asset Recycling Fund) Bill, for reasons that will be fairly obvious to everybody by now. Setting up a fund to effectively bribe states and territories from a $12 billion infrastructure fund by using this 15 per cent incentive, as all senators would be aware by now, is not a particularly good idea. I think the very least the government could have done would have been to give the bill an honest title. I strongly commend this amendment to the Senate.