Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to stand tonight to speak on the Social Security Legislation Amendment (Green Army Programme) Bill 2014. I have been looking forward to an opportunity to do so for some time. There are many of my colleagues on this side that have addressed issues in the bill relating to the training, or the lack of training, for the participants and the lack of protections in the case of injury, but I am not going to spend much time talking on that tonight. I actually want to talk about the environment.

I remember that, when this program was launched by Tony Abbott in the election campaign, it was launched clearly as part of his Direct Action strategy. They were going to move away from a market based mechanism and go to direct action, and they were going to create a Green Army across the country. It was a part of Direct Action and part of their environmental program. So I want to talk today about a $300 million program that purports to be about the environment and look at whether or not there are alternatives that might be more effective, both in terms of local environmental protection and in terms of spend. The government talks a lot about value for money, so let us have a look at this program.

It purported originally to be about the environment. If you look at the bill and hear the speakers on the other side, it seems to have morphed into something else. It is somewhere between a training program and a volunteer program, except there is no training budget, so it seems to have morphed but it was about the environment. We have a Minister for the Environment at the moment on the government's side that rarely mentions the environment. We on this side of the House wait for him in question time to get up and talk about the environment, ever—he never does. Today he actually used the word 'forest' and I got excited because I thought the environment minister was going to talk about the environment, but he was referring to the member for Forrest. Imagine my disappointment when he went back to talking about on-road and off-road diesel, which does seem to be his main topic of conversation at the moment.

This Green Army Program is his program, and this is the first sign of any action on the environment that we have seen from the environment minister in nearly seven months, so it is worth looking at it in great detail. There is $300 million over the next four years, between 2014-15 and 2017-18. That is $300 million for 15,000 people over those four years, for 1,500 projects. I always do a quick calculation when I see numbers like this. There are 150 electorates, so we are talking about 10 projects on average per electorate. I expect Western Australia might have a few more, because 10 projects spread out over the entire state of Western Australia would not be particularly effective, but let's accept the average of 10 projects per electorate over the next four years. For those who can divide 10 by four, it is about two to three per year per electorate.

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