Speech Cooma meet the candidates 13 November 2007
Just imagine an Australia over the past six years without The Greens. Without Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle? Where would we have been?
Without The Greens, who would have held the big parties to account on climate change?
On Australia’s treatment of refugees?
On indigenous rights?
On student allowances and university fees?
Public education?
On work choices? Not the timid Labor Party.
On rights of same sex couples?
On uranium mining?
Children overboard?
West Papua?
Who would have stood up against George Bush over the Iraq War?
Who would have stood up for David Hicks?
Who would have questioned the treatment of Mohammed Hanif?
Sale of Snowy Hydro?
The list goes on. And on.
Me-tooism isn’t something that the big parties only discovered during this election campaign. It isn’t even something that Labor under Kevin Rudd discovered.
It’s been a characteristic of national politics for years.
Labor Front Benchers these days can’t even state Labor Party policy without being reprimanded and corrected.
A Labor shadow minister can’t even oppose the death penalty without being chastised by his leader. The death penalty!
One of the most difficult things about this election is that we have to choose one of them ahead of the other to make our votes valid. And for me personally to advise anyone to vote for either of them is not something I can readily do with a clear conscience. It’s not an easy choice.
Government over the past few years has been characterized by the porkbarrel. I’m not just talking about the recent election campaign, I’m talking about day to day Government. Expenditure which was once a normal part of a government program or redistribution of wealth, is now a gift from a munificent local member, and too bad if you don’t get on with him. You miss out. We’re about to find out how successful that is as an election strategy but it certainly keeps people frightened about upsetting the controller of the purse strings. That Father Xmas ethos has debased government. The pork barrel is not an effective weapon against climate change or any of the other serious threats this country is facing.
Whoever wins Government, Australia will need The Greens in the Senate more than ever. We’ve all heard the one about Kevin Rudd: yes, he is John Howard without the eyebrows.
It’s not just that on most issues the major parties are indistinguishable; there’s hardly a woodchip between them, on some issues Labor is actually worse.
On woodchipping of native forests, Labor is worse. On the forests, it’s me-too plus $20 million cash to the logging industry from Labor. And not even the National Party has a future minister for forestry who wants to burn 5 million tonnes of native forest – living, breathing native forest – burn it and call it renewable energy. That’s what Martyn Ferguson wants to do.
I am sure everybody here knows that the Greens have pioneered the issue of global warming. We have detailed policies; we have campaigned on the big picture and the small picture for many, many years. We didn’t discover it a few weeks or even a few months ago. Our election platform has achieved top score in the Climate Institute election scoreboard. The Greens rated 90% with Labor 40% and Liberal 23% in the report. The Australian Conservation Foundation assessment came to the same conclusion and rated the Greens even higher.
The cheque book and the porkbarrel are not the weapons we need to combat global warming. The world – and our very small part of it - has to deal with the looming realities of oil depletion and global warming, which make our present way of life unsustainable. We must urgently reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. Public transport, even rail has to be part of the solution. If the pork barrel has become so deeply ingrained into our way of political life, and our future MP wants to dip into it, let it be for something useful like a railway, not bigger and better roads.
And we’re not jealous of our policies. We’d love to see a bit of me-tooism coming our way. A strong vote for The Greens in this election will help the Liberal and Labor Parties adopt some better policies too.
Summary (1 minute)
Instead of mega tax cuts for the rich, I want more for public education, public health and dental care and indigenous Australia; I want to stop native forest woodchipping and rescue the Snowy River and I want genuine solutions on climate change, not the so-called clean coal or nuclear.
The Greens got top score in the National Rural Health Alliance election survey – beating the big parties hands down.
Greens Senators have been standing up for decent treatment of refugees, a better deal for local government, rights of same sex couples, indigenous rights, we want more realistic student allowances and we’ll scrap university and TAFE fees.
And I’m asking people to go Green in the Senate. We need Senators like Bob Brown and Kerry Nettle there to hold the big parties to account. We can’t get rid of WorkChoices without them.
You can vote for me, send a message to the big parties. Your vote will be counted twice, because your preference, your choice, will flow on at full value