Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I thank the Senate for its indulgence. Although I am not intending to go for 20 minutes I may need to go for more than 10. I rise tonight because we have seen today in this place some focus on state elections. In question time we had some focus on the Tasmanian elections from two members of the coalition who were asking questions. I think we have come to expect that during election campaigns the partisan approach of the parties in this place ensures that senators will seek to support their parties and candidates in the state elections that are taking place in the immediate future—and that is what occurred today. Sometimes senators do get overexcited about these things. We saw Senator Barnett today get so excited that he actually forgot to ask a question in the time allocated for his first supplementary. That is probably not the only time someone will make that error, but it was the first in my memory. That gave us all a chuckle. I suppose the partisan way in which these things are sometimes approached gives a chance for people to vent their amusement during question time and lighten the proceedings.

But what I was really intending to speak about today was the position that Mr McKim and the Australian Greens are taking to the Tasmanian people in the election when we, like South Australia, will go to the polls on 20 March. Labor is in power in that state and has presided over a remarkable turnaround in the Tasmanian economy. We started, with the premiership of Jim Bacon about 12 years ago, with the worst unemployment rate of any of the states, by a long way, and we now come in with an unemployment rate below the national average. Frankly, when Labor said its aim was to achieve substantial progress and a substantial reduction in the unemployment rate, that drew guffaws from our political opponents, and I am certain from some in the community who thought it just could not be done—but of course it has been. Now we have an election where the Liberal opposition is seeking to portray itself as the appropriate alternative government. I would have to say that Mr Hodgman is having difficulty convincing the Tasmanian public that he is the man for the job of the premiership of Tasmania. I guess 20 March will show whether I am right or wrong about that.

But trying to sneak up between the major parties, the Labor and Liberal parties, are the Tasmanian Greens. The Greens in Tasmania have generally taken a position of opposing everything—trying to shut down forest industries and opposing tourism developments, land developments, industrial developments and rural developments. They have generally built their political progress by attaching themselves to small groups in the community who are opposed to this or that program or project and by seeking to gather them into their political numbers for the purposes of getting their members elected to parliament. And they have had some success, although very limited, to this date.

Mr McKim is seeking to portray himself as different from the Green leaders who have gone before. He is seeking to portray himself as more reasonable, as someone who is not as committed to the dark green environmental philosophies of his party previously or to necessarily the antidevelopment approaches that his party has taken. I suggest that he has been doing that more by not saying things than by espousing policy. He is hoping his nonaction will be accepted as support for various actions.

We have seen over many years in Tasmanian forests a degree of protest by those aligned to the green movement, some of which has become in recent years quite violent in terms of attacking forest machinery, disrupting processors, protesters chaining themselves to pieces of machinery to stop work and vehicles being fixed in the middle of a road to prevent access, with human occupants of the vehicles placing themselves in a position where they would be endangered if it was attempted to remove that particular vehicle.

Funnily enough, in this, the election year, we have not seen those participants in the forest debates. We have not seen those participants who have been prepared to disrupt the forest industry. It is almost as if there has been a conspiracy between the Green party and those who are ostensibly disconnected from it, such as the group Still Wild Still Threatened, to not protest in the lead-up to the state election, as if there is some quietening of the protest situation. I believe that it is a temporary lull.

We saw, of course, in the last couple of days another announcement by Mr McKim on forestry which would slice another piece of resource off from the industry and condemn more timber workers to the unemployment lists—with some fanciful promises of replacement jobs—due to the cutting back of the timber industry workforce and its operations. Funnily enough, the timber industry has continued to operate in a state where employment has grown. The people who are dependent on the tourism industry are quite successfully coexisting with the timber industry.

Today we have seen the first indication of the hidden agenda of the Tasmanian Greens. Today we have seen it revealed that the Tasmanian Green policy on prison reform says this:

Prison Reform: legislate to give the fundamental democratic right to vote in elections to all people serving custodial sentences …

‘All people’—that is what it says. It would not surprise anyone if the Tasmanian public were horrified that some special democratic privilege were to be granted to someone such as Martin Bryant under the Greens policy. Mr McKim is backing away from that at a hundred miles an hour because he has been confronted by the reality of his policy. He said on the ABC program run by Tim Cox this morning:

Tim, we would ... we would give ... or seek to give judges the right to remove ... a prisoner’s right to vote where there has been a particularly heinous crime committed, and we would also ... allow that to be done retrospectively. So, that’s our policy.

That is a qualification of the policy which they have announced—only a qualification when the reality of the extreme policy of the Greens has been revealed, in this case a policy which would, on the words which are in the policy, grant the right to vote to people such as Martin Bryant, who frankly will for many years be viewed as the worst criminal ever to be locked up in Tasmania. That is the Greens policy. It was on their website today. You cannot spin away from the reality of that policy. You cannot pretend that does not exist because it is an embarrassment. Mr McKim needs to clearly articulate just which hardened criminals he thinks should be able to vote.

Frankly, the people of Tasmania deserve to understand, when they go to the polls on 20 March, just what the policies of the Greens really mean. Or can they take this to be an indication that Mr McKim will say what he needs to get the people’s vote but, after the election on 20 March, that Tasmanians will be faced with the same old Tasmanian Greens party, opposed to everything, destroying jobs, making alarmist statements about a variety of things, attaching themselves to every minor cause in the community and ultimately being a destabilising force in the Tasmanian parliament and to any Tasmanian government in the future? I will be urging Tasmanians to vote for my party in the state elections but certainly not to vote for the Greens.