Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have seen the budget that was brought down last night by the Treasurer, the Hon. Mr Morrison. It is a budget that tragically fails to address the major challenges facing Australia today. He could not even bring himself to mention the greatest challenge facing the Australian people and, for that matter, people right around the world, which is global warming. How he could possibly assert that we are living in sensitive times and not even mention global warming once beggars belief. It simply beggars belief.

It is a budget that also fails to address economic inequality in our country. It fails manifestly to rein in the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots in Australia. There are too many people at the moment in Australia who are faced with the terrible choices every week or every fortnight about whether to put food on the table for their kids or pay the power bills or whether to pay the school levies or pay for much-needed for their children. These are choices that too many Australians are forced to make every week. And what do we see from the government? We see a typical Liberal budget—corporate tax cuts masquerading as support for small business; a failure to rein in to a satisfactory level the tax avoidance of multinational corporations; an abject failure to provide essential public services for this country—social housing, education and health; and an epic fail in relation to infrastructure funding.

Tonight the Leader of the Greens, Senator Di Natale, will outline our budget priorities and the response from the Australian Greens to the budget that was brought down last night. I look forward to that speech outlining how Australia will transition out of fossil fuels into renewable energy. I look forward to Senator Di Natale outlining our comprehensive response to inequality in Australia and our progressive and comprehensive suite of tax policies that will address economic inequality and that will rejig the tax mix so that corporates pay their fair share and wealthy Australians pay their fair share, so that our country can invest in the public services and the infrastructure of the future that it so desperately needs.

My home state of Tasmania was completely dudded by the budget last night—a massive fail. There was nothing in the budget that had not already been announced to support much-needed infrastructure in Tasmania—particularly, for example, the proposal around the University of Tasmania and its intent to invest in infrastructure in Northern Tasmania to support an equitable provision and an equitable access to university education for people all around the state.

It slashed funding for managing our precious World Heritage wilderness area. That funding is flagged to come down by 80 per cent in terms of the extra funding that was allocated to manage the values in the 2013 World Heritage area extension. That was purely a vindictively-driven decision by government. Having failed embarrassingly in their attempts to shrink the World Heritage area in Tasmania they have now vindictively slashed the funding to manage that extension, which was an outstanding addition to the World Heritage wilderness area in 2013. It included some of the iconic forests that tens of thousands of Tasmanians and millions of Australians have voted to protect time after time—forests like the Styx and the Florentine, which I had the pleasure of visiting with Senator Janet Rice and Senator Sarah Hanson-Young in recent months. These are magnificent, globally-significant carbon-rich forests that need to be properly managed, not only for their natural values—the biodiversity, the carbon and the threatened species—but also for their Aboriginal cultural heritage values. Last night's budget slashed funding to manage those magnificent areas that the Australian government has agreed to protect and manage on behalf of all of humanity by nominating them for inclusion on the World Heritage register.

It is also worth pointing out that 'wilderness', by some margin, is the single factor that more than any other influences a tourist's decision to visit Tasmania. We have a tourism minister, Senator Colbeck, who sits in this place and who is out today spruiking a budget that attacks and slashes funds to manage wilderness in Tasmania, when we know that it is, in fact, the biggest reason that tourists come to our state. It is more important in driving decisions than our wildlife, our built heritage, our fine food and wine and our coastlines. It is the wilderness above all else that attracts people to Tasmania. We need to make sure that we do more to protect it, and the budget last night abjectly failed to do that.

We have seen the terrible fires that started in January of this year and resulted in thousands of hectares of non-fire-adapted wilderness being burned, probably never to adequately and fully recover. These precious pencil pines, these magnificent cushion plants—these fragile alpine ecosystems—that have not been exposed to fire for hundreds of years burned because of dry lightning strikes, which the Bureau of Meteorology say will become more and more prevalent in south-eastern Australia, as a direct result of global warming. There was a distinct lack of focus on fire response in last night's budget.

In education, we have seen this government announce a $1.2 billion spend in the lead-up to the budget. And they are expecting rounds of applause after overseeing $30 billion worth of cuts in the Abbott-Hockey budget of 2014? They have restored between three and four per cent of those cuts, and they are expecting a round of applause from the education sector in Australia? Well, the silence has quite rightly been deafening.

We need to see Tasmania's unique competitive advantages enhanced. In the 21st century, if you had to design somewhere to thrive and prosper in a rapidly changing world racked by global warming you would design somewhere pretty much like Tasmania. It would be a temperate climate. It would be an island so that we could stave off some of the industrial pests and diseases that are all too prevalent and growing around the world. It would be a place with abundant freshwater, clean air, spectacular coastline, renewable energy, carbon-rich forests and fantastic soils. That is what Tasmania is. We need to enhance those competitive advantages, not detract from them as last night's budget did.

We have an energy crisis in Tasmania. I acknowledge the rains that have fallen in Tasmania over the last week or so. We welcome them as much as anyone else in Tasmania has welcomed those rains. It is great to see our dams slowly filling rather than slowly draining, as has been the case for most of the last six months. But where is the investment in on-island renewable energy generation? It was nowhere in the budget last night. Where has the leadership been from the Tasmanian government around energy conservation in homes and small businesses? It has been nowhere. How much will this cost Tasmania? We do not know as yet, but you can absolutely, certainly say that it will be a cost of many hundreds of millions of dollars. That is why we need an independent inquiry into how we got into this mess and what we can do to prevent it from happening again. This budget dudded Tasmania.