Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well, they will be popping the champagne corks in corporate boardrooms around the country tonight after the budget that we have just seen brought down, but they certainly will not be popping the champagne corks in the public education system or in the public health system, and I can tell the Senate one thing: they will not be popping the champagne corks down in Tasmania as a result of this budget, because, as this budget looks after the top end of town at the expense of the less well-off, driving the gap even further between the haves and the have-nots in this country, of course those states that are the most economically disadvantaged will lose the most, and that particularly applies to my home state of Tasmania, where only 20 per cent of Tasmanians are earning above the $80,000 that you will need to be earning to feel any benefit at all from the income tax measure that has been put in place to address a very small part of bracket creep in this country. For most Tasmanians, there is very little to nothing in this budget.

One thing that I can inform Tasmanians about, after a preliminary look through this budget, is the ideologically driven attack on wilderness that is contained in this budget. I am glad Senator Abetz is in the chamber to hear this contribution. When you look at the national partnership for managing the World Heritage values of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area, you will see that in the current financial year that was worth $5.2 million to Tasmania; in the next financial year, 2016-17, the funding falls off a cliff, down from $5.2 million to $1.8 million; it drops further in the following year, to $1.7 million; and then, from 2018-19 through to 2019-20, it disappears entirely.

We should not be surprised, because of course this is the government that tried to shrink the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area and was snubbed by the United Nations and the World Heritage Committee. When you look at this national partnership and at the specifics of what it is for, it is actually funded to support the management of the World Heritage values of the areas added to the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area in 2013, as well as progressing the cultural heritage values study of the entire property. This money, in significant part, was designed to enhance the management of the values for which this property was protected on behalf of all of humanity by the United Nations. It is specifically designed to help manage the World Heritage area extension that this government tried to remove. So what you have is an ideologically driven government that, less than two years after the UN agreed to extend the World Heritage area, has gone to the United Nations to try to shrink it. It has been told—very politely, I am sure—to just go away by the United Nations: no, the UN will not accept the Liberal government's recommendation to remove the vast majority of that extension from the World Heritage area. So the next best thing is to attack the funding that is there to manage the values of this extension. That is what this budget shows. It is an ideologically driven attack on wilderness by a government that would not know the value of wilderness. And if they want to know the value of wilderness to the Tasmanian economy, I refer them to the Tourism Tasmania study that showed that, by some margin, it is the Tasmanian wilderness, more than any other asset that our state has, that influences people in making a decision to visit Tasmania.

I do not know where the minister for tourism, Senator Colbeck, is—he is probably trying to salvage his position on the Liberal Senate ticket—but what we should see is Senator Abetz, Senator Colbeck and all of the Tasmanian Liberal colleagues actually explaining to their government colleagues here in Canberra that in fact wilderness is a primary asset for the Tasmanian tourism industry. If you cannot understand the value of wilderness for its carbon or for its intrinsic value or for its value to the hearts and souls of so many Tasmanians and Australians, for goodness sake, understand its importance to the tourism industry and stop cutting funding designed to manage its values. (Time expired)