David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Across my home state of New South Wales as we speak, local council elections are happening. My party, the Greens, is running some 377 council candidates and 21 mayoral candidates across 61 councils; you can tell we're not the Liberal Party!

Amongst those councils, I just want to highlight a couple of councillors running for re-election. In my local patch, councillors Nicki Grieve and Matt Robertson have done extraordinary job for the Greens. I know both of them very closely and consider them friends, and I served on council with Nicki Grieve. They have been doing terrific work on Woollahra council, delivering an urban forest strategy that will see their canopy grow to some 30 per cent of cover and lead to $15 million of investment in new street trees over the next two decades. They are protecting the trees and canopy controls for pretty much all the residential land in the space and putting in place requirements so that there's actual ground for new generations of trees to grow and produce canopy. They've introduced ward meetings to enhance transparency and better communicate between councillors and residents. They've had a focus on improving footpaths, really effectively, and helping people get around. One of the things I love is that they've installed free public whale-watching binoculars on the coastal walk—so anyone can turn up and watch this extraordinary natural spectacle. Well done, councillors Grieve and Robertson.

They have embedded a 10 per cent affordable housing target for new developments; we would like to do more, but the state government won't let us. They have made a Paddington urban domain plan, banned alcohol consumption before council meetings—I can't tell you how much residents want that to happen—put in place an EV charging strategy to advance the rollout of EVs across Woollahra and achieved reforms and savings for council's $2.9 million legal expenditure for bringing a bunch of those services in-house. They are great councillors up for re-election. I can't tell you how proud I am to have them on the team.

On Waverley council, councillors Ludovico Fabiano and Dominic Wy Kanak have been doing extraordinary work as well: increasing affordable housing contributions in the Waverley LEP and getting houses so that people's kids and people who are doing essential services can live in the area; improving Waverley Park and the kids' playground; improving and protecting that gorgeous heritage rocket ship that so many kids love; ensuring the refurbishment of the Tamarama Surf Life Saving Club; and putting in the Equal Pay for Equal Play prize money requirement for sports clubs, including those having competitions on Bondi Beach. They are constant advocates for residents' concerns and protectors of the amazing Bondi Pavilion. If you've ever seen Ludovico wandering around the streets with his dogs, Blue and Bob, you'll know how popular he is with locals. Great work. I wish them well in the election.

Right now, as we speak here, the Albanese government and the Labor government in Victoria are rolling out the red carpet for foreign weapons companies for land forces in Naarm, in Melbourne. For decades, the Liberals and Labor have been signing literally blank cheques for foreign arms dealers to siphon off billions and billions of public funds. The sums are just nuts: $45 billion to the UK's BAE Systems for the scandalous Hunter frigate program, and $365 billion—last time I checked, at least—for the US and UK war industries for these mythical AUKUS submarines. The international arms industry has found a bottomless pit of money from the major parties in this place. There are thousands of young people who see this for what it is—that their future has been sold out and mortgaged to these multinational weapons companies by the major parties. Already there have been reports that riot police shot at protesters with rubber bullets down in Melbourne. Young people protesting for a fairer and more peaceful future are being shot at by their own government. And why are the government doing that? Because they're protecting international arms dealers.

Things have escalated so quickly that the Australian Democracy Network has sent an urgent representation to the Victorian Premier. The letter was signed by Amnesty, the Human Rights Law Centre and many others, and they are urgently asking the police and the Victorian government to ban the use of dangerous police weapons in policing protests and to ensure that Victoria Police complies with its obligations under the Victorian Charter of Human Rights and Responsibilities in policing protests. Did I mention that violence against people seeking a peaceful future is being directed by their own government to defend weapons manufacturers?

It's not about keeping Australians safe. It's not about defending Australia. This is about putting Australia into the US production line for US wars. That's what is at the heart of it, with AUKUS pillars I and II. Australia, under Labor and the coalition, will keep pumping out weapons to wherever the US wants us to deliver them, whether it's to Israel, Saudi Arabia or other countries who are notorious for human rights abuses.

It's not about making us safe. It's about making a small group of international corporations bucketloads—obscene bucketloads—of money. Members of both major parties are getting in on that, and the second they leave parliament they join up as directors or government relations advisers to these overseas weapons companies. Both the ALP and the Liberals will sit in this place and vote to funnel public funds—funds that could be used instead to benefit society, deal with climate change and build houses—to foreign weapons companies who in turn will donate crumbs of it back to the Labor Party and the coalition. They accept this kind of money as political donations. And then, whether it's as a minister or an aggressive backbencher—and there's a long list, a conga line, of Labor and coalition members—they'll use those connections they have with foreign weapons manufacturers, whether it's Thales or Boeing, to get a cushy job when they leave parliament. It's obscene. No wonder people are on the streets, protesting.

While we're here, people are still being held in PNG, trapped in PNG, as part of Australia's disastrous offshore detention regime, and they're literally being made homeless by the Albanese government. These are people who came to Australia over a decade ago seeking safety and protection, and, instead of offering them any kind of fair process, the government disappeared them. It paid another country, a much poorer country, a country dependent upon us, to break international law on our behalf—to torture people and then abandon them. It's sick.

Now those people in PNG, almost all of whom have been found to be refugees, are being told they can no longer stay in their accommodation due to the Australian government's withdrawal of any financial support for PNG or the people that they've abandoned. Labor gave people false hope earlier this year by opening up a way to provide funding to PNG for the people trapped there. That's especially cruel now. The funding hasn't happened, and they are facing homelessness, in addition to chronic poverty and illness. And it's not just the people who sought asylum all those years ago, the great majority of whom have been found to be refugees, but also their children who are being used as political pawns by Labor.

According to recent research, every single refugee held in PNG is suffering from physical health conditions. They can't access medical care, and they're said to have been traumatised by their treatment by this government. Due to family separation, medical trauma and experiences of violence in detention, these people are deeply unwell. Forty per cent of the refugees in PNG suffer chronic suicidal ideation and have a history of suicide attempts. It's all part of a toxic race to the bottom between the major parties on how cruelly they can treat refugees, and it's a race where everyone loses, including our national character.

The answer to this is not hard. We're talking about 50 or 60 to 70 people, many of them kids, in PNG. The Albanese government could evacuate them from PNG to get the urgent medical care they need and then, given they're all refugees or the children of refugees, provide a pathway to permanency and protection. That's the least we could do.