Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

It is not overly common to take note of a report at this stage but, given that we will not have an opportunity to comment on any of these documents throughout this entire week, and quite possibly not for the rest of the year given the way general business usually disappears on Thursdays, I thought I would move to take note in particular of the annual report for 2005-06 of the Department of the Environment and Heritage to indicate the importance of this whole area of the environment. I think we are finally moving to a stage where there is not just much stronger government recognition but much stronger community recognition about some of the very serious environmental threats that we are facing.

I noticed recently that the first mention of the need to do something about climate change was made in the Senate about 20 years ago by former Democrat senators Norm Sanders and John Coulter. In 1988 a Senate inquiry was initiated to look into some of these areas. In 1991 the now defunct Senate Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology released a report entitled Rescue the future. We have had, just in the form of this chamber, 15 years of comprehensive reports and a range of recommendations urging significant action and significant change in policy settings and in the way we as a country and as a community conduct business. Frankly, we have all failed to do as much as we should and we really cannot say that we did not know.

One of the things which is clear in the climate change area, and which has become quite evident even through the very short committee hearings we are currently conducting into the proposed changes to the federal environment laws, is the lack of resourcing for the federal environment department to do some fundamental things. As witnesses have said to the current Senate inquiry, you can have the best environment laws in the country, you can have the best environment laws ever—and, in fact, we do—but there is no point in having good laws unless you have the political will and the adequate resourcing to implement them. A range of witnesses, some of whom are concerned about the changes and even some who are supportive of the changes, have noted that there has been inadequate resourcing for the Department of the Environment and Heritage to properly administer and enforce its own legislation. So we have strong national environment laws, courtesy of the Democrats from 1999, but what we do not have is adequate resourcing to ensure that those laws can be administered and enforced effectively.

The same issues apply when we are talking about some of the broader challenges to do with climate change. Unless we put adequate investment into some of these areas, then we are not going to get the very significant shifts that we now need. If we had acted 15 years ago when that unanimous Senate committee report first came down, a report that was initiated by the Democrats, then perhaps the urgency and immediacy of the actions we have to take now might not be so severe. But there was not sufficient action taken—and that was across both major political parties—so we now have our face very much pressed against the glass, much more than we would have 15 years ago. It is a broader concern and a broader issue that needs action.

I have heard Senator Brown say—and I agree with him and hope that he is right—that the next budget will perhaps be the greenest budget ever, that there will be very significant amounts of extra resourcing going into the environmental areas. We know the federal government has sufficiently maladministered our economy and stuffed things up by focusing so much on buying votes through one-off bonuses and big tax cuts that there is a risk in a pre-election context that, if it has any tax cuts at all, it will create further problems with the upward pressure on interest rates and inflation. With that option being more dangerous than ever—and it is an option that the Democrats have warned about in the past—there has never been a better time from an economic point of view, let alone an environmental point of view, to have that much needed increase in resources put into the environmental area.

That is about more than just employing more public servants to administer the laws, but that is a fundamental component. Public servants and bureaucrats are not people who just sit around counting paperclips; public servants are much maligned and unfairly maligned, as I am sure Senator Moore would agree. Their role, certainly when they are properly deployed, is to ensure that the laws that we spend all this time debating and passing through this place get administered. It is getting proper value for money out of the work that we in this parliament do all of the time in putting in place laws. If I use the federal environment laws as an example, there was an enormous amount of resources put by this parliament into developing that legislation, there was a significant Senate committee inquiry that took place over more than a year, there was further examination of the legislation through another inquiry and there was debate in this chamber. To go to all of that trouble to put in place a legislative regime and then to not properly administer it is really not getting full value out of the expense that parliament costs people. That is just one example.

I want to take the opportunity with the tabling of this report to emphasise that point and to reinforce the urgings from across the community for this federal government to take genuine strong financial action come the next budget—or, ideally, even before that if they can—to put more resources into the Department of the Environment and Heritage to ensure proper management, enforcement and administration of our laws and to ensure proper resources are put into the management of some of our protected areas. We have seen with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park in my home state of Queensland a massive increase in the areas that are now protected under legislation. I have continually congratulated the government on their achievement in doing that, but they have not increased the budget of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority to properly protect, administer, oversee and manage those areas. Those are the sorts of things they have to do. It is a short-term investment. Sure, it costs money, but when it is such a valuable asset as our natural environment, whether it is the marine park or anywhere else, that delivers a hundredfold down the track, whether it is in jobs or in broader environmental services, we have to be investing that money up-front. We are not doing that and the feedback and the evidence is very clear. With the tabling of the annual report of the Department of the Environment and Heritage, I think it is the appropriate time to make that point because, unfortunately, we may not get time to talk to that report again before the end of the year. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.