Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the explanation concerning the response to the order relating to the Nature Positive bills.

In taking note, Acting Deputy President, I'll first say that the new era of transparency the government said they were going to usher in clearly hasn't arrived yet, even though we're on the eve of an election. In much the same way that Senator Lambie earlier showed the chamber just how little respect the Australian Labor government has for democracy and this chamber, I'll point out that the same has happened here. I simply asked, on behalf of all Australians, what dodgy, dirty deal the government had entered into with the Australian Greens and the other crossbenchers to get their nature-positive bills across the line. Well, I asked. I note that in his explanation a little earlier the minister said that they take transparency seriously and, as a result, they've partially released the documents that I was referring to. I have here a 4½-page letter. It says: 'Dear Senator Hanson-Young. I write further to our recent discussions about the nature-positive bills currently before the Senate. The nature-positive bills will deliver—' and then there's a big black box with everything blacked out. On the next page there's a big black box with everything blacked out and then another page with a big black box with everything blacked out. And then we get to the final page—a big black box with everything blacked out.

What is it that the government don't want Australians to know about their dodgy, dirty deal with the Australian Greens and other crossbenchers on the nature-positive laws? What is behind these black boxes that is so bad that we must hide it from Australians who are considering how they'll vote at the next election? All of the detail's redacted, so you have to wonder what it is they've offered. Is it a ban on native forestry? Perhaps. We will never know, because this government has decided you don't need to know, Australia. Is it a ban on new coal and gas exploration that would help generate energy and bring down power prices? Again, we don't know. We can only speculate. Is it a ban on new housing developments in certain parts of the country that the Greens don't like? Again, we don't know.

What is alarming about this, of course, is the fact that the Minister for the Environment and Water, in thinking it's okay to hide this information from Australians, says that for our second attempt to get this information she had the arduous task ahead of her of going and checking with the recipients of these letters, Senator Hanson-Young and Senator David Pocock, as to whether they were okay with the letters' release. I don't know about you, Mr Acting Deputy President, but for the last two weeks we've been sitting in the same room as these people. It was pretty easy for me to walk up and ask them, 'Do you have a problem with this information being released?'

I'll let them speak for themselves, but my impression, from what they had to say to me, was that there was nothing to hide, yet the minister, in her response of 11 February, said, 'I need time to seek advice on the texts of the documents to determine whether I assert public interest immunity.' Well, that information is information she shared with them, and they don't seem to have a problem with releasing it. She 'needs time to talk to them'. Well, I'm sorry; we've been here for two weeks.

Again I say: the government promised they would usher in a new era of transparency, yet since the election we have time after time seen the government hide behind bureaucratic reasons and refuse to reveal to Australians what it is they're up to in the smoke-filled back rooms of this building, doing dodgy deals with their coalition partners the Greens. It is not what was promised, and we are falling far short of what we deserve as representatives of the Australian people trying to make this democracy work and make the government accountable. They refuse at every turn.

Here we are this afternoon, on potentially the last sitting day of this term of parliament, and it's clear that the Senate has had enough. I do not recall when, in my nine years in this place, we have had three attendances and explanations demanded of ministers, and senators from across the political spectrum have stood to take issue with the ridiculous responses provided.

There is no excuse for this sort of response, which is just page after page after page of information blacked out based on spurious reasons. The real reason is that they just don't want Australians to know what they were willing to trade away to the Australian Greens and other crossbenchers to get these ridiculous bills across the line. Let's not forget these are bills the Prime Minister said were dead when he went to Western Australia. 'We would not do deals with the Greens.' He said it himself, black and white—no deals with the Greens. Yet here we have it, a letter outlining deals with the Greens which will kill mining, kill forestry, kill farming and kill fisheries. The government are not interested in job-creating industries. They're interested in deals with the Greens to hang onto government.

Tim Ayres (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Minister for Trade) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I might make a couple of short observations about this question. Senator Duniam, as he knows, is making it up as he goes along. If we want to entertain a world in which letters between the government and former senator Birmingham or letters to Senator Cash or others are suddenly out there, I think that's an interesting set of views about how those sorts of discussions ought to be undertaken.

I note that we had a request to table documents from Senator Bragg this afternoon and leave was denied. The course of action before that was a chaotic attempt to derail the procedures in the Senate over the course of the last short period. I don't think that's in the interests of the couple of hours that we have left to us, during which it is anticipated that we'll be dealing with a condolence motion. I think we ought to have some regard to that. The government will not be giving leave for the tabling of documents this afternoon while these procedures are occurring.

If the opposition want to posture around questions of environmental management following their period in government, where they had the former Prime Minister simultaneously holding multiple ministries, I'd say their processes around these issues were a complete shambles and open to being knocked over in the courts, which caused a substantial amount of damage and uncertainty because they had so corrupted and debauched the processes of government. Fine. If they want to spend time dealing with that, no problem. If the coalition want to pretend that they are being defenders of the arts and local content, be my guest. Nobody on the planet believes that proposition after their 10 sordid years of offshoring arts and demeaning the arts and all of the associated creative industries. Fine, but it is a symptom of a coalition that doesn't have the wherewithal for policy development but is only interested in parlour games in parliament here.

My view is that what we ought to do is deal with the matters in front of us as expeditiously as possible and move through to the condolence motion before we end up not being able to do all the things that we need to be able to do this afternoon to provide an orderly end to the Senate processes.

Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What an exercise we just saw from the minister! It wasted more time than it would have taken for everyone on this side and on the crossbench to table their reports and wasted more time than it would have taken for every single report to be tabled by leave of this chamber. What a waste of effort from this minister attempting to defend the indefensible. Senator Duniam quite rightly showed this document with its massive redactions of the deals being done between the government and the Greens.

One piece isn't actually redacted. Let me read that to you so that those who are listening to this debate actually understand what is at stake here, particularly in my home state of Western Australia. This is talking about negotiations between the Greens and Labor at a time when, supposedly, Prime Minister Albanese had spoken about the nature-positive bill in Western Australia and said it was dead and buried. He said that that was it and that it was off the agenda. Yet here we have negotiations between Labor and the Greens: 'I would be grateful for your confirmation that the Australian Greens will support the bills, including the amendments above'—redacted—'when they come before the Senate. I also seek confirmation, as discussed, that you will support the government on all procedural votes required to ensure the timely passage of the bills'—that is, let's guillotine it—'through the Senate as early as possible this sitting week'—and this is actually in the letter—'including on a guillotine or similar motion.'

So the Prime Minister says to Western Australia: 'Nature positive is gone. It's dead.' And here we have the government doing deals with the Greens not just to pass nature positive but to guillotine it through this place before an election. If that doesn't give you an indication of the kinds of arrangements that are going to be made between the crossbench and the Labor Party if they do happen to form a minority government then I don't know what bigger wake-up call the Australian people—and particularly the people of Western Australia—could possibly need.

Let me again remind those listening in Western Australia what this nature-positive law is designed to do. If this nature-positive law, as it has been outlined, had been in effect 30 years ago in Western Australia, we would have no mining industry, we would have no gas industry and, in fact, we would have no agriculture industry. We would have none of the industries which make not only Western Australia wealthy but which make this entire country operate, channelling the funds—tax revenue and other revenue—that governments require to actually do the things that Australians like.

I ask the people of Western Australia: when we first heard about this nature-positive law, what was the first thing we heard about? I know Senator Smith, a fellow senator from Western Australia, would know the answer. The first thing we heard about was 60 kilometre an hour speed limits in the Pilbara. Think for a moment what it would do to the mining industry of Western Australia if you instituted 60 kilometre per hour speed limits throughout the Pilbara. That was an idea that was thought up in Canberra. That was thought up over here. Nobody who comes from Western Australia or who has ever taken even a passing glance at the mining industry and the way it operates would think that that was a remotely feasible idea, but this is the kind of ideologically driven thought bubble policy development that we get from this Labor government.

There are other examples as well. This is the Labor government that promised transparency. This is their transparency—blanking out whole pages. This is their definition of transparency: redacting whole pages of negotiations they're doing with the Greens on nature positive. I also remind you that they actually promised to introduce federal Aboriginal cultural heritage legislation. You might remember in Western Australia the amount of damage done by the state Aboriginal cultural heritage legislation. But not only do they now have the nature-positive bill tucked away in a secure filing cabinet in the Prime Minister's office—awaiting their deal with the Greens after the next election, if they're so lucky—but they also have that Aboriginal cultural heritage legislation tucked away in there as well.

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The former speaker has told of when he first heard of the Nature Positive Plan. I first heard about it the night before the last election. It was the night before the last election that the Labor Party announced this policy. It was on the evening of the election. It's a little bit suspicious. There's something a little bit off about announcing a major policy like that. The Labor Party is right that it will be a big change to how things happen in this country, and they announced it just hours before people began to vote. If it was such a good policy, why wouldn't they announce it weeks before and give people a chance to consider it?

A lot of people vote early, so a lot of people had already voted by the time the Labor Party announced this policy. They announced it the night before the election. Why might that be? One suspicion of course would be that, at the election the next day, the Labor Party needed the Greens voters to preference them. That's the only way they win. The only way they win is to have Greens voters across the country preference the Labor Party and get Labor Party people elected, because in lots of seats, the Labor Party don't get enough votes to get elected. In fact the Labor Party primary vote at the last election was the lowest the Labor Party had ever received since 1910! And they actually won the election. They got just a third of the votes from the Australian people directly. Indirectly, they were able to govern through the preferences of the Greens.

I've got a lot to say about my Greens colleagues, but they're no fools, and they would have asked for something for their preferences. They would have asked for something to say, 'We're going to give the power for the Labor Party to govern, to become ministers and to be in this place.' They would definitely have asked for something. Maybe—just maybe—what they asked for was a nature-positive plan. That's why it was announced on the night before the election. It was because the Labor Party were a bit embarrassed about it, and they didn't want a scare campaign. They didn't want the truth. A truth campaign is what it would have been. They didn't want a truth campaign to be out there in parts of Western Australia and in Queensland where this is important to my constituents, so they dropped it on the night before the election. That's probably what happened.

The previous speaker, my friend and colleague Senator Brockman, spoke about the deals the Labor Party do in this place. We might be just hours from finishing this parliamentary term, and the thing that the Australian public should be wary of in the next few weeks and months is the deals that the Labor Party will do outside this place, because, once again, before the next election there is no doubt the Labor Party will have to enter preference discussions with the Greens, with teals and with crossbenchers. Unlike the deals in this place, we may not have any transparency or know what's going on there. We may not have any idea what they're agreeing to to get those preferences, and the Australian people might be completely in the dark once again if there's a drop on the night before the election of some major policy change that affects this country. This policy was clearly announced without thought and consideration. Otherwise, it would have passed by now. They've had three years to do this. As I said, they promised it three years ago on the night before the election, and they haven't delivered it. They haven't delivered it because it is a complete dog's breakfast of a policy that the whole mining industry is opposed to and that large parts of the country that rely on good, strong industries like mining and agriculture don't want to see. There is very little support for it out there.

The scary thing despite that and despite the fact that this massive increase in red tape on the business sector of this country has been stopped in this parliamentary term—it won't happen now for sure—is we may very well get this because there's a very good chance that the Labor Party won't just be needing the preferences at the election; they'll be needing the actual votes of members of the other place after the election to form government and to keep confidence. They may have to form a minority government. That is a real risk. That's why the teals went along to have drinks at the Lodge. Was it last night or the night before?

Hollie Hughes (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Mental Health and Suicide Prevention) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Monday night.

Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Was it Monday night? Time flies this week, but they had drinks the other night this week. There's no doubt that they're being buttered up by the Prime Minister to try and ease and smooth those negotiations with them that might occur in a few months time. Again, the Australian people won't have any knowledge of those or any control of those.

The only way the Australian people can stop those backroom deals that may sell out Australia again is to not vote for—and not re-elect—the Labor Party. They're the ones that will do these deals. They're the ones that are already doing it. They're already having these discussions. They're getting ready for it. So if the Australian people don't want that kind of chaos and if they don't want that kind of non-accountability to the Australian people, they can't vote for a box of chocolates, because that's what these guys are. They're a box of chocolates; you'll never know what you're going to get. If you vote for the Labor Party, you might get a nut.

Question agreed to.