Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

Victoria is being cheated by the Prime Minister and the government, who are undermining possibilities for public transport in Melbourne by refusing to fund promised support for Melbourne Metro. Federally, Victoria has only received eight per cent of infrastructure money—getting $91 per head as compared with $230 per head for New South Wales.

Thirty-five per cent of all immigrants coming to Australia are pouring into Melbourne and we have net migration now from other states. Melbourne will become a city of four million people and it needs rapid expansion of its public infrastructure. We can handle the population growth, as Australia expects us to, but we need the correct proportion of funds to fund public transport so people can move around the city. Worse, until recently the hypocritical Liberal Party were voting with the Greens in the Victorian upper house to prevent the sale of the Port of Melbourne. Ideologically the Liberal Party talk about being in favour of privatisation, but as soon as they get the opportunity they vote with the Greens in the Victorian upper house to prevent the Victorian government having the money to partially fund this themselves.

The Prime Minister says that this nation will grow through investment in infrastructure but he has yet to commit funding to any new projects since taking over. Melbourne Metro now has a business case showing its economic merits. The Victorian government has committed $4.5 billion of its own funds, but despite all of this the member for Wentworth, the Prime Minister, is refusing to match the funds. Victoria may now have to go it alone, paying the $10.9 billion that the project will take that will integrate trams and trains, put a lot of the trains underground in the inner city and connect the outer services with level crossings, et cetera. All of these are absolutely necessary in a growing city of four million people.

We have seen pictures of our Sydney Prime Minister crouching down outside the Melbourne Club, taking selfies of himself on trains and trams—but, selfies aside, as Australians, as Victorians and as Melburnians, we want someone to actually fund public transport, not just take pictures of themselves. The Melbourne City Loop is at full capacity at peak hour. There is no room for more trains. The trains are severely overcrowded—something you do not see in the Prime Minister's selfies. Some of the trains have a capacity of 800 and yet 1,200 people are cramming into them, Tokyo style.

There has been a 70 per cent increase in people catching trains in Victoria in the past decade—40 per cent over the past five years. That is why Infrastructure Australia had a business case for Melbourne Metro ready years ago and has released a new one. Yesterday the Premier of Victoria, Dan Andrews, wrote to the Prime Minister asking that $4.5 billion in funds be given to the state government in order to proceed with the project. Mr Andrews made the reasonable point that Victorians pay taxes to the federal government and they should be returned in infrastructure.

In early February, the member for Grayndler stood with me at the Domain interchange, where the trams and the trains meet each other opposite the shrine, and reaffirmed that Melbourne Metro will be Labor's first priority for infrastructure in Victoria when a Shorten Labor government is elected at the forthcoming election. Mr Albanese said: 'If you leave public transport infrastructure just to the market, you won't get a good outcome. You need a government that is willing to deliver it.' I ask this government why Victoria is being so unfairly treated when such funding is clearly needed for one of Australia's largest and most needed infrastructure projects.

On another topic of appropriations, on 16 January our Minister for Foreign Affairs suspended sanctions against Iran and against certain individuals and entities. Although accompanied by a statement, these sanctions were essentially suspended through a backdoor process. There was no ministerial statement from the floor of this House and no debate. The opposition has been calling on the foreign minister to debate her policy for months. Every Monday during November and December we demanded that this government come into the House and explain the process of dropping sanctions. Surely a substantial step like this warrants a debate in this House. We had many debates when we put sanctions on; it is a disgrace that this House—unlike many other democratic assemblies around the world—has been unable to debate these issues. Members of the coalition have expressed to me in private their discomfort about the foreign minister's apparent infatuation with Iran.

I will list here, for the public record, issues that Ms Bishop needs to defend in public with regard to Iran. The first issue is her announcement in April last year—before the nuclear deal was even signed, much less implemented—that she was negotiating an intelligence sharing arrangement with Iran. Just this week, we read in the Manila Times that Saudi Arabia has tipped off three governments—Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand—that members of the Iranian revolutionary guards were in advanced stages of planning bomb attacks or hijackings of Saudi passenger planes over South-East Asia. The foreign minister knows as well as we all do that many Australians were aboard MH17 when it was shot down by Russian-backed rebels. A plane going down over South-East Asia, shot down by this country's apparent new allies, could easily have plenty of Australians aboard. Not that it should matter if Australians were aboard; any nation that threatens attacks against commercial passenger aircraft is clearly an inappropriate one for us to have such a close relationship with.

The second issue is that the foreign minister quite rightly condemned ballistic missile tests by North Korea in the last few weeks. I remind the House that Iran had ballistic missile tests on 10 October and 17 December last year which were in contravention of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1929. There was not a word, not a peep out of the foreign minister. Yes, there should be condemnation of North Korea but equally there should have been something said—even by people who go along with this Iranian deal—about these Iranian ballistic missile tests.

The third issue is her statement in June last year that Iranian and Russian involvement in Syria should be seen as a positive, given that they, along with Hezbollah and Syrian forces, are now besieging and shelling 300,000 civilians in Aleppo. I constantly interject on the foreign minister during question time and ask her how the bombing of Aleppo is going. She does not respond, but it is totally inappropriate to support Iran besieging the second-biggest Sunni town in Syria, to have Shiite forces in that part of Iran. Again, the Australian government should be saying something about it.

The fourth issue is: last year she floated the idea of Iranian consulates in Sydney and Melbourne, giving Iran a diplomatic presence as it has had in Argentina and Thailand where they have organised terrorist attacks—particularly in Argentina where 88 members of the Jewish community were killed.

On the fifth issue, I would ask the foreign minister why she would consult with Iran ahead of Australia bombing Daesh targets in Syria, given that Iran is part of the problem in Syria, not part of the solution. The sixth issue, most pertinent to the issue of sanctions, is the apparent lack of scrutiny that has gone into the 144 entities from which she removed designation in January which would assure the Australian public that none of them have institutional relationships with the Iranian revolutionary guards or that dual purpose use could be used in military activities.

The foreign minister may not like me or the ads that I have been putting in The Australian Financial Review questioning her policies. She may not like my campaign to have her front up in this parliament. She can ban me from events, as she did yesterday when I was the designated representative with the Estonian and Finnish foreign ministers, but she cannot avoid the spotlight for much longer. We are not going to let this issue die. The opposition is going to see that this issue is brought up at other venues, perhaps in another place, and the foreign minister will have to answer to the public there.

Let me turn to the issue of live exports and animal cruelty. In 2011, the then Labor government worked with farmers and industry to establish the Export Supply Chain Assurance Scheme, ESCAS, forcing exporters to show that they have a plan to treat Australian live exports humanely, and providing a monitoring and auditing system all the way from the port to the abattoir. On top of ESCAS, Labor established the Australian Animal Welfare Advisory Committee to provide relevant advice on standards and practices, and proposed establishing an independent Inspector-General of Animal Welfare and Live Animal Exports to scrutinise the industry to ensure that the sorts of incidents we have seen many times on TV, the horrific treatment of Australian animals that have been exported, do not re-occur.

I am a supporter, like the opposition, of the Australian live export industry. I think it can perform a valuable role for Australia in foreign exchange earnings, but the animals do not have to be brutalised or mistreated. Unfortunately, just a month after the coalition formed government, the new agricultural minister who is now doubling as Deputy Prime Minister, Barnaby Joyce, scrapped the committee and binned the Inspector-General proposal. Mr Joyce's disappointing explanation was, 'This is one bit of red tape we can do without.' In his brutalist logic, he said: 'We all need to be realistic about the fact that livestock are raised for food.' Well, they are but Australia can do better than that. Now, the Deputy Prime Minister is talking of watering down ESCAS. A strong regulatory system is good for animal welfare, it is good for farmers and it is good exporters.

The humane treatment of animals is compatible with maintaining a sustainable agriculture sector in this country. Indeed, the red tape that the minister simplistically described, helps project Australia's image as a clean, green agricultural exporter. Animal welfare is more than just red tape. The proper treatment of export livestock should be a standard to which any self-respecting government should strive. Indeed, the enlightened self-interest of the industry is that there be adequate regulations and that they be enforced. It is this same principle that has seen Labor announce just this week the introduction to parliament of legislation that will ban the sale or import of new cosmetics that have ingredients that have been tested on animals.

Exporting livestock accounts for close to $1 billion of Australia's economic output. Tens of thousands of jobs rely entirely on this industry. Labor has consistently been a strong supporter of sustaining and fostering Australia's reputable agricultural sector, and it is in this light that our reputation will hang or fall, depending on the treatment of livestock in global exports.

Again, the government had better watch this space because the opposition is going take this to the public all around the country, as I am doing next week with shadow agriculture spokesman Joel Fitzgibbon and Clare O'Neil, to public forums on this issue where the very many people who are interested in the humane treatment of animals can express their opinions. And we will explain to them the differences between the opposition's views and that of the unnecessary brutality and cruelty we have heard from some in this government.

The attitude of the current government highlights how disconnected the Liberal National coalition is with the Australian people. People in my electorate and right across Australia have made it abundantly clear that animal cruelty should be stamped out. I, and the Labor Party, will continue to fight any Turnbull government plans to wind back the instruments of animal welfare protection, and we will re-introduce the Inspector-General when we get back into government.

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