Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection, because I will cite some examples soon. It goes to the point about disclosure. Often people do not find out about this dirty money until many months after, yet we have other jurisdictions where there is continuous disclosure being brought in and where the threshold for disclosure, when political parties have to tell the public how much they have received, is so much lower. So I am really proud that my colleague Senator Lee Rhiannon has today introduced a second bill in this donation space which says that the donations disclosure threshold should be lowered back down to $1,000. It was at that level for quite a while. Correct me if am wrong: I think it was the Howard government that lifted it up to above $10,000; it was eleven thousand and mumble, and that has increased over the years. We want to lower that back down to $1,000. Donors need to be honest with members of the public and, importantly, political parties need to be honest with members of the public about where they are getting their money from. That bill would also require continuous disclosure so we avoid that problem of huge pre-election donations and then a lack of disclosure until many months after it is relevant for voters at the ballot box, and it would also look at banning overseas donations and putting a cap on anonymous donations.

Importantly, it would prevent donation splitting, because this is a further problem that we see. We know the figures for the donations to federal political parties. I listed those before: $1½ million to the Labor Party, $2.3 million to the Liberal Party and $200,000 to the Nationals from fossil fuel companies alone. We know that they are just to those federal parties. It does not include money that has been given to the state parties, and it does not include money that has been given to branches of those parties, which can be called donation splitting—lots of little donations just to get in under the disclosure threshold so that the donor does not have to identify that they have given money and the party receiving the money does not have to fess up to the public.

So these two bills, taken together, would really help clean up our democracy and it would help arm members of the public with the information that they need to know who is holding the decision makers hostage. It might explain why we have never seen a coalmine or a coal seam gas well rejected at the federal level under a government of either side.

One wonders what the fossil fuel sector in particular gets out of this arrangement, because I noticed that on the radio a couple of weeks ago the head of the Queensland Resources Council was, ironically, crying poor and saying that he and his industry needed even further public subsidy. They can still afford to make enormous donations, so I do not know how they can simultaneously be wealthy and broke, but that is a matter for them to try to explain. So what are these fossil fuel companies getting out of these donations, other than the approvals that are issued hand over fist? They get a very good return on investment. For every dollar that is donated by a fossil fuel company to one of the big parties—be it Labor or be it the Liberals in coalition with the National Party—the fossil fuel sector get the equivalent of $2,000 back in perks. Whether that is accelerated depreciation, which certainly no other industry gets, or cheap diesel, which certainly no ordinary road user gets, or a tax break for further exploration and production, they get these various tax and depreciation perks that equate to about $2,000 worth of value for every dollar that they have donated to the big parties. So they get their approval and then they get all sorts of fossil fuel subsidies, as we call them. Then you have the irony of various governments saying that they do not want to subsidise the renewable energy sector and—boy!—they do not support subsidies in other sectors, but of course the fossil fuel sector seems to be in a category of its own.

We Greens not only want to clean up the donation system, ban donations from fossil fuel companies, from the tobacco, gambling and alcohol industries and from property developers, address the disclosure rules and lower that threshold so that the public get to know, and they get to know sooner, where the money is coming from and how much it is; we actually want to remove those fossil fuel subsidies. We do not think it is fair that mining companies get cheap diesel when no ordinary road user gets that perk. Obviously the farmers do, and we support them keeping that entitlement, but take it away from the big mining sector. We do not support the mining sector getting those tax breaks for further exploration and production, particularly not while our environmental laws, our environmental impact statements and our social impact statements are so poor and so weak and do not properly protect our land, our water, our communities, our climate and people's health from the ravages of this industry. In particular, it is more insulting for those subsidies to be flowing from the taxpayer purse to entrench and further that industry.

It is very interesting to examine these donations and the flow of people between parliaments and staffers' offices and the fossil fuel mining sector. There is an awful lot of crossover. I would go so far as to say that there is a revolving door between the fossil fuel sector and politicians. It is a revolving door that very much suits ex-politicians or ex-staffers, who presumably get paid a very healthy wage and, of course, fantastic access to the decision makers, while ordinary community members have to fight to even get a meeting with an adviser these days. They get their multimillion dollar donations to help contest elections, and then they get the promises of these very well-paid, cushy jobs once they have exited the parliament. It makes for incredibly depressing reading because this is, sadly, a disease that is happening on both sides of politics.

I want to mention just a few examples. I am not seeking to disparage the character of these people; I am merely going to put the facts on the table about people who used to work in politics and have gone to work for the fossil fuel sector and, in some cases, come back again. There is a genuine revolving door, where people go back and forth several times. We all know that the former Nationals leader and former Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson went off to become the chair of Eastern Star Gas. That is the much maligned company—deservedly so—behind the Narrabri gas project. It was bought out by Santos in New South Wales and has been plagued with environmental contamination incidents about which there is much community concern.

Another former National Party leader and former Deputy Prime Minister, Mark Vaile, left politics and became a director and then the chairperson of Whitehaven Coal. Again, Whitehaven Coal have a terrible track record in terms of environmental impacts, and they have been devastating a local forest which is also a koala habitat and a part of the country that is much loved by its inhabitants, who are trying everything they can to resist Whitehaven Coal. Whitehaven have trashed not only the forest but some really important Indigenous sacred sites. Much to my extreme disappointment, the Minister for the Environment at the time—Greg Hunt, who is also the current minister—had an opportunity to step in and protect that heritage on an emergency basis. He did not do so, because one of the boxes was not ticked on the form that the community had sent in, begging him to do an emergency listing of this important Indigenous heritage site. It was, 'Oh, there was a tick missing from a box,' and so that form sat unattended somewhere in the minister's office, to his eternal shame.

Former Labor resources minister Martin Ferguson stepped into what I believe was a position specially created for him: chair of the APPEA advisory board. Of course, that is the coal and gas company lobby group that fancy themselves as quite slick lobbyists. That was about six months after he stopped being a minister. I thought that the Lobbying Code of Conduct said that ex-ministers had to have an 18-month cooling-off period. In fact, in this case, there was just a six-month break between former Minister Ferguson being a minister of this parliament and working for one of the chief industry protagonists, APPEA.

I have seven minutes left, and, sadly, I have more than enough names to fill that seven minutes, so I will persist. Craig Emerson, who was the federal Labor trade minister, went on to become a lobbyist for AGL Energy and for Santos. Former foreign minister Alexander Downer was at one point a registered lobbyist with a group called Bespoke Approach, which had amongst its clients Woodside Petroleum, Xstrata, PetroChina and Yancoal. While he was foreign minister, Mr Downer was infamously implicated in the East Timor saga, which really has not ended well for anyone involved—but I digress.

Greg Combet, who was the federal Labor climate change minister, went on to be a consultant to AGL Energy and Santos. That is particularly distressing, given we know the enormous climate implications of unconventional gas. We know that it leaks like a sieve from wells and pipes. We know that, if it is for export—and much of this stuff is—the energy footprint for compressing that gas so that it can be liquefied for export is enormous, and the gas itself is methane. American studies have shown that effectively the life cycle footprint of unconventional gas is about two per cent better for the climate than coal, which is to say it is a bloody bad idea for the climate. So it was very distressing to see former climate change minister Greg Combet go to work for the one of the chief coal seam gas companies.

Sadly, there is also a long list of staffers, some of whom came directly from the mining sector to work for politicians, stayed around for a while and then went back to the mining sector and vice versa. I believe the current chief of staff to the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Bill Shorten, is Cameron Milner, who is also the former Queensland Labor secretary. He is a fellow whom I have not met. I believe that he was Adani's lobbyist. We know Adani is one of the companies proposing to open a megacoalmine in Queensland's Galilee Basin, which Bill McKibben has described as a carbon bomb. We know that if all the coal from that basin was mined and burned and if that region was considered a country it would be the seventh highest emitter in the whole world. So it is an enormous climate disaster waiting to happen, if anyone is foolish enough to fund that mine. Thankfully, the world can see that the transition to clean energy is on. I think up to 15 banks have now ruled out financing that particular project, which gives me great hope for the future of the reef and, indeed, our own species.

Ben Myers worked for the Queensland Gas Company, another coal seam gas operator, and went on to be the chief of staff to then Queensland LNP Premier Campbell Newman. Mitch Grayson also worked as a staffer for the then Premier Campbell Newman in 2012. By early 2013, he too had joined Santos, but later on he went back to Premier Newman's office.

Stephen Galilee, who was chief of staff to Ian Macfarlane when he was the Liberal federal resources minister—before the current Prime Minister replaced him—and also chief of staff to Mike Baird when he was New South Wales Treasurer and when he was shadow Treasurer, went on to be CEO of the New South Wales Minerals Council. Geoff Walsh, who was a former adviser to Labor prime ministers Paul Keating and Bob Hawke, and also a former national secretary of the Labor Party, was given a senior advisory role to BHP in 2010.

Claire Wilkinson spent a year as a senior media adviser to Minister Martin Ferguson and then got a job as a senior external affairs adviser to Royal Dutch Shell. Brad Williams, who spent four years as Mark Vaile's chief of staff, was and is the manager for government affairs at Inpex, yet another oil and gas company that has approval for a multibillion dollar LNG project, near Darwin. Shaughn Morgan worked as an adviser to Geoff Shaw, New South Wales Labor Attorney-General, before becoming the manager of government and external relations at AGL.

I have another page and a half here, but I sense that people get the point that I am trying to make. There is a revolving door between the fossil fuel sector, who make rich donations to both sides of politics, and this very chamber and the other chamber. For their incredibly generous donations of—what was it?—$3.7 million in the last three years, the fossil fuel sector gets any approval that it asks for; it certainly has not had a refusal yet. It gets cheap fuel; it gets accelerated depreciation; it gets tax breaks for exploration and production; and it gets extreme access to this place and its decision makers. It even gets to topple a prime minister when it threatens to run an ad campaign, which it spent $24 million on, to get rid of the resource super profits tax and water it down to the very diminished minerals resource rent tax, which did not raise much at all—and then, of course, this government took the opportunity to axe it.

This industry is very powerful, and that is just one of the reasons why we need to clean up politics and get rid of these donations, which have in my view a corrupting influence on politics. The public also hold a dim view of them, because people think that it smells bad. Even if you cannot prove corruption or influence—although sometimes the facts mean there can be no other conclusion—people can see that it is not right that decision makers should be given money by a company that at some point will seek, or perhaps already has sought, approval for a project. It is not fair and it corrupts good decision making—decision making which unfortunately already locks out the community, so it further entrenches that imbalance of power.

I am really proud that we have brought this bill into the parliament. It has been on foot for about 2½ years now, and I am really pleased that we have the chance to debate it this evening. As people might know, we often do not get the opportunity to debate private member's bills in this place. There are just a couple of hours allocated each week, and of course the crossbench shares that time. It is really important that members of the public know that we can do better; we can clean up our democracy. That is with Australians want. We can get rid of the corrupting influence of these dirty industries, whether it is mining or alcohol, tobacco, gambling or property development. We can actually put power back in the hands of the people and restore this country to the representative democracy that we know it is meant to be.