Senate debates

Thursday, 9 February 2017

Bills

National Integrity Commission Bill 2013; Second Reading

10:32 am

Photo of Janet RiceJanet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In fact, the level of resources helped the Greens run a very successful campaign and ended up helping to give us the balance of power in the lower house and the balance of power in the Senate in that 2010 election. Together with the Labor Party, we put in place a framework for tackling climate change that we are very proud of. It has been ripped apart by your government in the years since, doing huge damage to our ability to take serious action on climate change and basically making Australia complicit in actions around the world that are seriously putting the future of our planet at risk. I am very proud of the fact that we have run a very strong campaign and that people want to support us—from Graeme Wood to the hundreds of thousands of people who support the Greens by giving small amounts like $20 in a very transparent, accountable way—to get action that serves the interests of a sustainable future for us all.

But look at the murkiness of other donations where we are not so clear about what the outcomes are. Look at the influence of Transurban on Victorian roads policy at the moment. I have no evidence that there is corruption there, and I am not claiming that there is corruption there, but there is not transparency and there is not accountability. What we know is that Transurban put to the Victorian government a market-led proposal to build the Western Distributor. We know that the Victorian government, at the time of the last election, suddenly changed their direction from having a different road to aiming to build this road that Transurban are proposing. There is huge amount of concern about the benefit that Transurban are going to get out of this and about the influence that they had on the Victorian government. It is not just the Greens who are concerned about this; in fact, there was considerable concern about it in the HeraldSun this morning. Conservative columnist Terry McCrann—somebody who I very rarely agree with—said:

It's also been far too easy for governments — especially Labor ones — to do deals with Transurban. Transurban pays the upfront bill; the government doesn't have to borrow.

We all get a new or bigger road. You just let the meter run a few years more.

That means that it is just a few more years of huge profits being made by Transurban, which, on the face of it, is not in the public interest. People think, 'Well, the government doesn't need to borrow,' but that money is being paid by communities, paid by the people who have to pay those tolls. They have no option but to pay those tolls. There will be a massive increase in the tolls being paid to Transurban and a massive impact on ordinary people because of the influence that Transurban have had upon the Victorian government.

We have the ongoing issue of those private sector interests—the roads lobby and the influence they are having—but there is also the issue of the broader influence of the fossil fuel companies and the millions of dollars in donations that they make. That is happening across the world. We are seeing that in the United States, with President Trump doing the bidding of those who want to pollute the planet, speeding up catastrophic global warming just for their own selfish, short-term greed. They want to keep on polluting, and they have a lot of money to be able influence governments to keep on polluting to serve their interests. They will keep on doing it for as long as they can get away with it.

Meanwhile, the planet is in a desperate state. We know that we need to pull back from fossil fuels being emitted. We know we have to transition to renewable energy. Everyone knows that that is the direction we need to head in—at least anyone who has any sense and any skerrick of a scientific understanding—and yet, because of the influence of the fossil fuel lobby, we are continuing to pollute in massive, unacceptable ways.

And now we have a government that is saying that suddenly coal is the new black again and that we are talking about clean coal. There is no such thing as clean coal. We get told that clean coal is clean because it is 30 per cent less polluting than other coal. I tell you: if we are going to protect the planet from dangerous climate change and if we going to protect ordinary people and our agricultural systems from climate change, 30 per cent cleaner is not good enough. We have to get down to zero carbon pollution as quickly as possible, so clean coal does not cut it.

Comments

No comments