Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Future Drought Fund Bill 2019. At the outset, I will just foreshadow that I will be moving my second reading amendment—which is on sheet 5817—to this bill. I want to start by saying that it is kind of insulting, really, to have a bill that sets up a fund to try to help desperately afflicted farmers in drought—and in my state of Queensland almost two-thirds of our entire state is now drought declared; so there are many, many people who are now facing desperate situations—while you continue to ignore the impacts of climate change that are of course driving, worsening and deepening that drought now and will continue to do so in the future.

My colleagues will make a range of contributions—and, indeed, we have a range of amendments that we will be moving to this bill—but our fundamental point is: what is the point if you are not going tackle what is causing the deepness, harshness and the cruelty of these droughts? If you continue to have your head in the sand on climate change, you are not faithfully representing or helping those people. Of course, we want to see farmers in drought receive the financial support to try to tackle this, but we also think that they deserve a decent climate policy. This government, sadly, is not going to give them that reality check.

I might also bring to mind the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, which was a similar sort of National Party-led slush fund that was meant to have great promise, and barely has had any dollars get out the door. It sounds to me that this fund is going to be pretty similar. It's not starting for ages—it is being rushed through today even though it doesn't kick in for a good 18 months or so—and then it is going to dribble out a little bit of funding each year. Surely you can do a bit better than that. People actually need assistance now. They need a genuine climate policy now, and they shouldn't have the whims of the likes of Minister Littleproud—or perhaps Barnaby Joyce will be minister again by then—dictating what little pet project gets funding. That's why I'm pleased that there have been some amendments that establish some level of accountability, transparency and oversight—though not quite enough, in our view. My colleague Senator Rice has run through the amendments that we will move to try to further tighten that process. This parliament shouldn't set up another slush fund for the National Party to administer while that party continues to abrogate its duty to tackle climate change and genuinely represent its members. That's the first point.

We are also concerned, as I believe my colleagues on the Labor benches are concerned, that this money would strip needed funds from an infrastructure fund. Yes, the government haven't spent anything from that infrastructure fund in recent years, but it was set up for good reason and has meritorious projects that could have funding allocated. But of course the government just want to score yet another political point and have decided to grab that money and try to spend it elsewhere. If they were genuine about wanting to alleviate the drought, not only would they have a better climate policy but they would decide that this was worthy of some funds that were not stolen from some other decent project but instead came from consolidated revenue or, as my colleague has proposed, from a levy on the fossil fuel resources industries. As you've probably heard us say before in this place, we know that coal and coal seam gas are driving climate change, which is furthering, worsening and deepening the drought, and yet all of our policies under this government are yet more subsidies for the mining industry, yet more free rides. They don't pay the appropriate amount of corporate taxes and they get many thousands of public subsidies for the privilege of taking out what are meant to be publicly owned resources. This is why we want to make it crystal clear that none of the investments made by the Future Drought Fund should further fossil fuels, and nor should the money come at the expense of an infrastructure fund when it could come from the fossil fuel industry.

That brings me to the substance of the second reading amendment that I will be moving, which is:

At the end of the motion, add:

", but the Senate notes that free or unlimited water entitlements given to fossil fuel companies by State and Territory governments, while farmers struggle with drought conditions, significantly undermines the effectiveness of any drought response by:

(a) depriving farmers of water;

(b) exacerbating droughts; and

(c) worsening climate change which further exacerbates droughts."

It makes a bit of a mockery of this plan for a drought fund and alleviation of drought through financial contributions when you've got state and territory governments giving free water to big mining companies and to coal seam gas companies. I want to go into a bit more detail about that. There's a little project that you might have heard mentioned sometimes—certainly it exercises the mind of Senator Canavan, who earlier told the chamber he'd been trying to get this mine up for years. It is of course the Adani mine. They're on a pretty good wicket when it comes to their water entitlements. In fact, the farmers in the region that they share are pretty cross about it. For the record, Adani have an associated water licence granted to them by the Queensland state Labor government which is for 60 years. It's got no volumetric cap, so they can take an unlimited amount of groundwater.