A division of the Liberal Party of Australia
Your voice does count! - Address to the Townsville Independent Retirees Association
04 December, 2009
Sign Up for free e-mail updates!
‘Your voice does count’
Association of Independent Retirees (Townsville Branch)
Friday, 4 December 2009
Townsville RSL
Thanks very much Ken and good morning ladies and gentlemen. It’s always a pleasure for me to be with you all and I’m not far off sitting there with you watching the various guest speakers you have coming through.
But I do want to acknowledge Lois as your Acting President, Bob Johnstone your Secretary and sorry Bob for the nervousness I’ve given you over the last week on whether we would be here or not. It’s there by the grace of God I guess and Tony Abbott that we are here or we might have still been sitting in Canberra. To your Executive and as I say to all of you it’s a real pleasure, it’s always a pleasure, it’s something I look forward to every year, coming along and having a chat to you.
Ladies and gentlemen 2010 actually marks my 20th year anniversary of being in the Senate, and in that time I’ve been very, very privileged to have been able to serve my fellow Queenslanders and I’ve witnessed first hand a number of very significant historical events in Australian history.
I’ve seen four Prime Ministers come and three of them go, I’ve been there when the Mabo land rights legislation was introduced a quite dramatic and whole new approach to the way we dealt with Aboriginal Australians. I’ve seen the Port Arthur massacre, the gun control that followed that, I’ve seen the introduction of a new tax system, the GST and I’ve seen the advent of terrorism and a war which we in western democracies fight but fight in a very, very difficult way. It’s not an enemy you can see in front of you and shoot at. Terrorism is all around us and so it’s been a dramatically different way that we have faced the world.
And in the last week I have seen things in a political party that I hope I never see.
But there are two events in 2009 that I think truly demonstrate the strength of our democracy in Australia and I’m sure will go down in history, perhaps not so much as the other things I’ve mentioned but they have been significant parts of Australian history.
These two issues are the Traveston Crossing Dam – which isn’t close to us up here in North Queensland – but it demonstrates a point I want to make, and the other one is the voting down of the ETS, the Emissions Trading Scheme or so called Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. And those two events I think should give heart to you as Independent Retirees and to your Association, in your dealings with State and Federal Governments in Australia.
Now I’m not going to get too political so don’t worry about that. But what I am going to talk to you about this morning is two aspects of those issues which quite frankly seem to have been overlooked by the mainstream media and by the Government.
And what they do demonstrate to me is that your voice does count. We’ve seen in the past, good old fashioned campaigns like those we used to have when Gordon Menzies was around and I remember as a very young child I might say, going along to the Wintergarden Theatre in Sturt Street in Townsville and hearing Menzies in possibly one of the last of those sort of Town Hall rallies where people spoke face to face with their politicians and hundreds of people would come along and interact with Menzies.
I still remember Menzies in Townsville that night. He was having a dispute with the wharfies at the time and I remember him as he got up to speak they started counting him down, one, two, three, four, five and he would sit there and he’d listen to them and they’d start one, two, three, four, five and he let them go for a while and then he said, isn’t that awful you know these people they obviously have never been to school they can’t count past five. It’s six, seven eight, nine, ten that comes after that fellas. Well immediately the audience warmed to him and he changed the whole tenor of what was going to be quite a heated debate.
But those sorts of interactions between politicians and the voters have ,I think regrettably, all but long since gone. And that’s how we did it almost from the Federation of Australia up to the 1970s. We have a fairly proud history of in those early years our politicians meeting face to face with the public but it’s unlikely that that sort of politicking will ever make a comeback because email and the internet have now taken over and give both the public and the politicians unprecedented access to each other.
When I first entered politics as a Councillor in Ayr in the late 1970s when a person wanted to get a message to me, if they could ring they would, if they saw me around town they would have a chat but if they wanted to give a detailed message they’d sit down and type out or write a letter, they’d have to go and buy a postage stamp, go to the Post Office and post the letter.
But nowadays if you see something on the television, on the nightly news, within a few minutes if you’re internet literate, computer literate, you can get on your computer and within five minutes there’s a message waiting for me in my inbox. And could I tell you that over the past two weeks I have had to my office here in Townsville over 6000 individual emails as well as that hundreds of phone calls and faxes both for and opposed to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme or the Emissions Trading Scheme the ETS.
And I won’t go into any detail with what happened in the Liberal Party room last Tuesday morning except to say that all of that communication from my constituents from Queensland and from people right around Australia did play a significant role in the decision of the Liberal Party to oppose this Emissions Trading Scheme - and to indeed change its leader.
In a similar way the communities that make up the Mary Valley in South East Queensland near Gympie came together and mounted over a period of two to three years a coordinated campaign to overturn the Traveston Crossing Dam proposal. You might remember that Premier Beattie when he was confronted at a press conference with what he was going to do about drought and no water in the Wivenhoe and the other dam that feeds Brisbane, seemed to me almost off the cuff to decide on the stop, oh we will build the Traveston Dam, with little consultation I came to find out later during a Senate Committee that inquired into that proposal.
But the individuals in that area mounted a enormous grass roots campaign. Meetings, canoeing down the river with the public, television news, emails, constant emails getting in touch with politicians right around Australia voicing their concern, not only at the dam but more particularly at the destruction of the social fabric of the Mary Valley and also, not incidentally, the destruction of Australia’s unique lungfish and the Mary River cod and the Mary River turtle.
So ladies and gentlemen, while the general public may feel at times disconnected from the political process organisations like your Association have the power to stimulate debate and influence and have an impact on the outcomes of issues that are of concern and are of interest to you.
And your Executive over the last several years, take every opportunity to come along and talk to me and to Peter Lindsay I know and the State Member of Parliament, about various issues that are there, but you yourselves do have a voice that increasingly is playing a real part in the way Australia is governed.
And I know that your Association had some success in the political arena recently when the State Government decided to join with other States and recognise interstate public transport discounts for seniors. This now means that you can receive those discounts when you travel interstate. You might recall that has been an issue your Association has been pushing for some while. It was important and had been brought into play in other States some years ago but not in Queensland but I understand that that has now happened and congratulations to your Association for the work they did. I know the Shadow Minister for Transport in the State Parliament, Fiona Simpson, supported you very much on that issue as I did as well.
In this digital day and age of course all sectors of society now have equal access to information in a way that has never been the case before and this access perhaps is something like when the church first printed the bible in English - although I don’t think any of you were around when that happened! I certainly wasn’t, but back three or four or five hundred years ago that in itself was a major step in providing information to the general public. I think in this day and age with the advent of computers, and I know many of you in this room are very literate when it comes to those things, it has meant information is more readily assessable to you than every before.
The reason I wanted to talk about the impact the general public has had on the outcomes of the Traveston Dam issue and the Emissions Trading Scheme is that there are some issues of significance to you as members of the Association of Independent Retirees that are being debated in the Senate. Although we’ve broken up for this year, as next year comes up you may want to make sure that your views and the views of your friends and family are known in relation to those issues.
It didn’t take long before we began to see a concerning trend in the current Federal Government, that is they seem to give out with one hand, very popular always to give out money, but then they seem to be, with the other hand, taking it back.
Many of you would have received (not all of you of course which was very strange), but a lot of you would have received that $900 given out with what we call the cash splash as part of the stimulus package. A lot of dead people and foreigners also got that $900 I might say, but that has to come from somewhere and you only get the money to pay that out if you increase taxes or borrow it.
And so in certain areas the Government has had to try to claw back some of its expenditure so that they can afford those cash splashes and there is no better example of this that when the Government decided to halve the Medicare rebate for cataract procedures and for certain arthritis treatments.
In October, the Independent Senators in the Senate Chamber joined with the Coalition to block the Government’s decision to halve the Medicare Rebate for cataract procedures from $623 per procedure to $340. That means a $600 increase in cost if you were having both eyes treated for cataract surgery.
The halving of the Medicare rebate will hit about 10,000 Australians – most of them obviously enough elderly, who have the procedure done within the private health system.
Now this is a huge imposition on elderly Australians who’ll be forced to make the decision to either pay the extra $600, or spend years waiting for the operation in the Queensland public health system.
So the end result of that has been that many thousands of Australians will be faced with a lower quality of life and will need to rely on others to get by. And unfortunately our Government federally has bumbled its way into this position as a result, I think, of poor economic management.
The cuts to Medicare are about just one thing, saving money. And as wasteful spending grows out of control, the Government is looking to where it can pay for that waste and the cataract surgery regrettably is one of the first on the chopping block. Now that’s been stopped by us in the Senate for the moment but it’s not a dead issue and it’s an issue that will rise again next year. This is where I think people like yourselves and your families, your Association can get involved and cause Governments to change their minds by advocating your position as those involved with the Traveston Crossing Dam and those who had a very firm view on the Emissions Trading Scheme, did.
Now ladies and gentlemen I don’t want to leave you today without just talking a little bit more about the actual Emissions Trading Scheme. It is obviously something that if you’ve read a newspaper or watched a television news or listened to a radio in the last three weeks you couldn’t have helped but hear something about the Emissions Trading Scheme.
Most people do believe that our climate is changing and they do believe that we as the human race should do something about it. They do believe that Governments should do something about it. But it’s what’s to be done that becomes the issue.
Now I’ve found that a lot of people, particularly young people, say yes look we should do something about the changing climate and you say to them do you want an ETS and they say yes and you say do you know what an ETS means? Haven’t got a clue they say. Do you know what it will mean, no, do you know how it will affect you, no but Mr Rudd says it will fix the climate change so yes we should have it. And unfortunately it is a very, very complex piece of legislation and a very, very complex scheme that’s been put up as a solution.
Now I just want to make my position very, very clear on this. I mean there are lots of accusations going around about climate change deniers and climate change sceptics and it almost seems in the Senate that being a sceptic is akin to being a criminal. I mean I’m surprised at that in itself. I’m not a sceptic mind you but I think that those who are sceptics are entitled to their view and to be accused almost of being un-Australian or a criminal for being a sceptic I think is an unfortunate trend in the parliamentary debate.
But I accept that the climate is changing. Indeed I don’t quite remember this myself but there was a time when the earth was covered in ice and even in more recent times when the centre of Australia was a rain forest and in another part of time when the centre of Australia was a sea and there was a time of course when Australia was connected to Asia and to the Antarctic. So clearly over many millions of years our climate does change. Perhaps those of us in this room have seen things change although I often laugh when people say there is more and more severe cyclones now. In my short lifetime I’ve seen as many cyclones as we see, now in the 60s and 70s. You of course hear more about them these days because every time there’s a cyclone the television cameras are in there and it beams around the world. But I’m not sure that there’s a hell of a lot more so far but anyhow some of the scientists says that there is so I accept that the climate is changing.
Is it man who is causing the change? Well that’s the issue where I simply say I don’t know. Because of the top ten thousand scientists in the world, about half of them say yes man is the cause and the other half, including Professor Carter from out at James Cook University, say no man is not the cause, this is a natural occurrence. Volcanos, sunspots whatever else and so I’m not a scientist, I’m a small town country solicitor or I used to be, that’s my training I don’t know whether man’s causing it, I’ve been to every lecture I could go to, I’ve had every meeting, the scientists have been down in Canberra in droves over the last twelve months and I’ve gone to as many as I can and I’ve listened and you listen to them all and they all have good arguments and in many cases they’re different arguments. So I simply don’t know but I take the view that if everybody else is doing it and if we can reduce particle emissions to the world then that’s not a bad thing. But if everyone else is going to do it yes Australia should be part of it.
But I do object to and this has been my view consistently for the past two years, and I’m pleased to say this is now my Party’s view, is that we should not be doing anything in advance of the rest of the world. Because it does mean additional costs and there will be billions and billions of dollars in costs going in the Emissions Trading Scheme. And that will be collected by the Government in huge bundles of money. The Government will then decide which industries they will give free permits which means practically they’re giving the cash back to them and they’ll also decide which people they will compensate. So you have this huge churn of money. The Government collects billions and billions of dollars which they’re not collecting now, takes it through a bureaucracy, through political decisions and then gives it out at the other end.
Now they’ll end up with a bit themselves of course because it’s always good for Government to get a bit extra cash, but a lot of this churn of money will go back but where it will go back to, will be decisions made not by you people who pay the money but by Governments and bureaucracy. It will also mean that we will have a huge new bureaucracy and that’s already started. The Department of Climate Change has only been going a year and it now has about 277 bureaucrats in it and is increasing quite rapidly, to administer this. The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was a very, very complex scheme which requires a lot of administration and what it was trying to do was penalise the big emitters and by penalising them getting people to reduce their emissions. And that’s not a bad idea. But then they were going to give a lot of the money back. They were going to let some of the big emitters keep emitting. Now my objection has always been that Australia emits less than 1.4% of the world’s greenhouse gases, less than 1.4% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions comes from Australia.
And if this legislation had been passed this week Australia’s emissions would have fallen by 0.2% down to 1.2% of world emissions. Now people who then tell me, as some people have tried to, that because I voted against it I am the cause of the Barrier Reef dying or I am the cause of more cyclones or more bushfires or more droughts is just ludicrous and it defies common sense.
Now sure if the big emitters like America which emits something like 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions or China which emits about the same or Russia which is 5% or South Africa or Colombia or Indonesia or Japan, if they all stopped emitting tomorrow then sure Australia should. If they all did it and we did it sure it may have an impact on bushfires and droughts and the Barrier Reef, although the Barrier Reef I think will adapt if all other things are equal but that’s another issue.
But sure if everybody else is doing it, if the big emitters are doing it, which means you will have less emissions to the world then sure Australia should be in it. But Australia going alone and first of those of our big trading partners simply puts up the price of our goods and makes them less competitive, what the coal miners were interested in and many of you will have family working in the Bowen Basin coalfields in Moranbah, Collinsville, Dysart down there, they would have had to pay something like $20 per tonne, others say it’s less than that but the miners used to tell us about $20 per tonne, would add to their costs of production. When they’re selling coal to Japan or China, their coal is $20 per tonne less competitive and that means that the multi-national companies which own the Bowen Basin coalmines, when they’re investing, when their Boards meet in Zurich next week and looking where they will invest to create new mines, create new jobs they’ll look at Australia and they’ll say well good coal, nice stable community but you know are we competitive?
Perhaps we’ll put our next investment in a coalmine into Indonesia which also has good coal. Not quite as politically stable but not bad coal. Or we’ll put it into Colombia or South Africa. And, so it means that we actually then export jobs overseas, and we export those industries to countries who don’t have currently the same sort of emissions regulations that we have.
Yabulu nickel factory which we in Townsville all know intimately because again it employs so many of the people we know, it’s a huge ???? to the Townsville and North Queensland community. It was going to shut down a few months ago and a white knight came along a bought it and kept it going. But you know where they get their nickel ore from the Philippines. They get it from an area which used to have a Nickel Refinery but it was pretty old, it wasn’t terribly efficient and it had no restrictions on emissions. They mothballed that. A lot of their ore now comes to Yabulu which is one the most efficient plants in the world. It has less greenhouse emissions than most other plants, so that works. Now, the owners of Yabulu were saying, if you saw the front page of the Townsville Bulletin, 1200 jobs in Townsville at risk if the CPRS goes through, because that would, rather than being, they’re not making big money at the moment, but they are making their bottom line is slightly in the black. This will put them under so they would then have to make a decision. We’ll stop doing that we don’t run a business to lose money, we’ll un-employ those 1200 Townsvillians and we’ll take out of mothballs the old gas-guzzling, smoke emitting factory in the Philippines where they’re never going to have an ETS and we will take the ore, put it in there and make the nickel, sell it and make our money that way.
Now they’re just a couple of examples of what I think is wrong with this. Ladies and gentlemen, I just wanted to explain that to you. Different people will have different views, I think all of us think that if there is anything we can do to help the environment, then we should do it but my view has always been not in front of the rest of the world and certainly forcing through legislation before the Federal Parliament in the dying days before Christmas of the Parliamentary term this year when the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference which supposedly is going to bring the world leaders through to the side that the world is going to do before they have a chance to meet and determine what exactly they are going to do. So, madam acting chair, can I with that again thank you for giving me the opportunity of speaking with you and being with you at this happier time of year around Christmas. I bought some Christmas presents in the form of little note books that I’ll leave here if you want to take them. If any of you are computer literate, or even if you are still using what the youngies call ‘snails’ mail’ but if there is information you would like to get from me, I think Clayton’s got a sheet there, if you’d like to get some information,put your name on the list and we’ll put you on our newsletters as they come out. You’ll probably be bombarded at election time but that happens to you anyhow. If you want that, please do it. There are some little Christmas gifts, I hope you’ll take one, we always need a note pad.
But, ladies and gentlemen, again, thank you for letting me be with you. I just want to again emphasise as I conclude the point of my speech to you and that was to always remember that your voice does count and it is demonstrated very clearly this year 2009 in the Federal Parliament where people exercising their right to make their views known has in fact changed partly the course of history. So never give up, keep at whatever you believe in and make sure that those you elect to represent your views in the various parliaments are aware of your views.
Again, thanks very much and my best wishes to you all for the future.