David Bushby (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Climate Change and Water (Senator Wong) and the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship (Senator Evans) to questions without notice asked by Senators Bushby and Cormann today relating to the carbon pollution reduction scheme and to the Council of Australian Governments.

I am absolutely astounded at the answer provided by Senator Wong to my question regarding Nyrstar in Hobart. No admission was provided by her that she agrees with the member for Denison, Mr Duncan Kerr, that the Hobart zinc works is an important industry, nor any acknowledgement of the company’s concerns about the devastating impact that the proposed CPRS will have on their business in Tasmania. All she provided to us were the same old glib comments about consultation.

I think it is worth taking a look at the government’s record on consultation and its approach in the last 12 months. Consultation is not something that the Labor government is particularly good at, despite its efforts to portray itself as otherwise. In fact, I think it is patently apparent that the government needs to check the definition of ‘consultation’. It makes a lot of noise that it is always listening and widely consulting as part of the careful image it likes to spin. But does it ever listen?  To me, and I suspect to most Australians, ‘consultation’ means listening to concerns and ideas—and here is the rub: actually considering the value of the concerns and ideas that are put to it and giving them due weight as part of its decision-making process. But this government clearly thinks that by merely holding some form of formal meeting—it calls it ‘consultation’—that it has fully discharged its responsibilities and its promises to consult.

What is raised or is said at such meetings is totally irrelevant, because from that time on the government will always have the absolute defence that it consulted. ‘What more can we do? We consulted.’ I cannot tell you how many times I have sat in hearings of this chamber’s economics committee over the past year and heard stakeholders recount over and over again how they have been consulted, how they have relayed clearly and accurately their real and valid concerns and how this Labor government ignored everything that they said and ploughed on with its original plans regardless. But the Australian public is awakening to the government’s tactics of trying to fool them. The more it consults, and subsequently the more it ignores the matters raised by those it consults with, the more that Australians realise the government is trying to pull a swift one on them.

But you do not need to be awake to their tactics to be shocked by the astounding decision of the Labor member for Denison, Mr Duncan Kerr—and, incidentally, Denison is the electorate in which I live—to hold a roundtable meeting in Canberra today to discuss issues raised by Nyrstar. It is almost beyond belief that the federal member for an electorate which contains an operation employing so many people would organise a meeting with the federal minister responsible for a policy threatening all of those jobs and not even invite the company running that operation. To bastardise a quote from the comperes of the Australian Top Gear show, ‘What was he thinking?’

It is worth looking at who the member for Denison did invite. There was the Mayor of Glenorchy—the suburban city in which the Nyrstar operation is located—a card-carrying member of the Labor Party. Also, there was the federal Labor member for Franklin, Julie Collins, and Tasmanian Labor senators Senator Carol Brown and Senator Polley, who is here today. So far, it sounds like a Labor Party branch meeting.