Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The first matter I want to draw to the attention of the Senate is the nationally banned substance ammonium nitrate, which this parliament, at the behest of the Howard government, banned because it was used in the Bali bombings and is favoured by terrorists. However, ammonium nitrate is not on the shelf throughout the country. According to the reports this week and in today’s Mercury, ammonium nitrate is being used by Forestry Tasmania to blow up some of the largest living entities on the face of the planet—that is, the giant trees in the World Heritage value Upper Florentine Valley in Tasmania. There are currently some forest offenders in the valley, and the Wilderness Society is working to try to protect these ancient forests from imminent destruction over the summer by the authority of the Prime Minister and the Tasmanian Labor Premier, Paul Lennon. What a terrible irony it is that the government which banned the use of ammonium nitrate because it could fall into the wrong hands has effectively authorised its use in order to destroy this nation’s living heritage and World Heritage value forests.

We may of course expect that the terror of the destruction of these great trees—which will be burnt later in the summer, adding to the impact of greenhouse gases on the climate—extends to the whole of the living ecosystem in the Upper Florentine Valley and in the Styx Valley, where, not too long ago, at least one of these giant trees was blasted, presumably with ammonium nitrate, while a young Australian, with a greater regard for this nation’s heritage, was up a tree trying to defend it as part of his nation’s future and heritage.

The second matter I want to refer to is a letter from the President of the Senate to me, regarding my request that he require the Minister for the Environment and Heritage to retract a statement that I had promoted policies of making drugs more freely available to children in Australia. I requested that not only because it is patently untruthful but also because it causes me great offence, as it would any other senator. I seek leave to table the President’s letter.

Leave granted.

In his letter the President says, quite fatuously, that the remarks are equivalent to senators claiming that the government’s policy is to drive down the wages of the lower paid or the government claiming that the opposition’s policy is to make trade unions all-powerful. So the President says that a specific untruthful claim that a senator would want to be involved in a form of child abuse is no different to a generalised claim about whether unions are too powerful or not. This is a mistake by the President that, in my view, affronts the standing orders of this place, which seek to prevent such offensive claims being made. How different is that intent to the actions of the Howard government? The Howard government has repeatedly over the years devalued the currency of public and parliamentary debate in this nation.

The very government that claims to have virtue in public life has done more than any other government—certainly in living memory and, I think, in this nation’s history—to tear away at the fabric of what it is to be honest, to be fair minded and to be fair dealing in politics and in public life. This is the government of the Prime Minister who turned his back on innocent children who were locked up behind razor wire in the desert of Australia until the professionals said, ‘Those children may be permanently scarred for life.’ This is the Prime Minister who, without reference to this parliament, sent Australian defence forces to Iraq, where every day now there is a casualty list greater than any in the preceding years of the Saddam Hussein government. Dozens of men, women and children are being tortured and killed in a war which the putative new secretary in the United States says the United States and therefore the Howard government are losing. This is the government of a Prime Minister who, in 1995, referring to a previous Prime Minister, said:

… it was a straight-out lie, lie, lie by the Prime minister … so used is he to getting away with telling lies, so protected is he with the paraphernalia of government, so drunk with power has he grown after 12 years in office, so believing has he become in his own infallibility and so authoritarian has he become, that that is how he behaves.

That was John Howard in June 1995. Well might he read his own words in November 2006.

I object to the President’s ruling because it is wrong. I have broad shoulders and I can put up with any accusation, false or otherwise, made in this place or anywhere else. But I stand in defence of a long and honourable history in this Senate and in this parliament of defending standing orders because they bring probity, decency and honesty into the way in which we behave in this place. That has been eroded by the President’s ruling this week.

Finally, I want to refer to the ongoing count for the upper house seat of Western Victoria in the Victorian elections. Those watching the count will see that the winner of that seat will ultimately come down to either Marcus Ward for the Greens or, more probably, the candidate for the Democratic Labor Party—the nemesis of Labor since the split in the fifties. You will know, Mr Acting Deputy President Marshall, that Senator Stephen Fielding, from Family First, is here because Labor accorded him preferences over the Greens in the last federal election. Here we have a situation where the Labor Party is now shown to be preferring its own nemesis, the DLP, to the Greens. Those preferences to the Democratic Labor Party are likely to have the DLP elected in Western Victoria over Marcus Ward from the Greens.

Government Senators:

Government senators interjecting—

Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The government members opposite are applauding this extraordinary decision by the backroom people in the Labor Party. This decision will leave many Labor voters in Victoria absolutely furious with the perfidy of it. Let me give one DLP policy as an example; it is a policy on government waste. A DLP advertisement says:

Abolition of all federal departments … whose essential functions are duplicated at the state level.

Now there is a wacky and cranky policy if ever I saw one, but it is one that has been potentially boosted into the Victorian parliament by the backroom people of the Labor Party in Victoria. When will they ever learn? When will they ever get over this process of not according with their members’ wishes? Obviously, the solution is to have above the line voting so that electors may determine their own preferences when it comes to political parties, rather than have it done by the backroom boys of the Labor Party. The Liberals and Nationals, of course, love Labor making such absurd and duplicitous decisions in their preference dealings.