{"id":16673,"date":"2014-04-01T13:33:28","date_gmt":"2014-04-01T02:33:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nofibs.com.au\/?p=16673"},"modified":"2019-04-13T23:58:10","modified_gmt":"2019-04-13T13:58:10","slug":"if-youre-feeling-the-vibe-vote-green-senatormilne-speech-on-wavotes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/if-youre-feeling-the-vibe-vote-green-senatormilne-speech-on-wavotes\/","title":{"rendered":"If you\u2019re feeling the ‘vibe’ Vote Green: @senatormilne speech on #WAvotes"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MILNE\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Senator Christine Milne<\/strong>, Leader of the Australian Greens
\nNational Press Club Address, 1 April 2014<\/em><\/p>\n

I begin by acknowledging the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples the traditional owners of the land on which we meet and acknowledge their elders past and present.<\/p>\n

And in doing so, I commit to the constitutional recognition of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and reject immediately any question over the need to retain aboriginal history as part of our curriculum. Can you believe it, we have a national effort to close the gap between aboriginal health, education, life expectancy and the wider community and, at the same time, a Government that is set to remove indigenous history from our classrooms, abandon the Gonski education reforms which direct funding to the children most in need and repeal laws that protect people from racial abuse.<\/p>\n

It is any wonder people are asking: \u201cWhat on Earth is going on?\u201d<\/p>\n

One of the most loved lines to make it into our collective culture in recent decades was from the classic Aussie film, The Castle<\/em>,<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the constitution, it\u2019s Mabo, it\u2019s justice, it\u2019s law, it\u2019s the vibe, and … no that\u2019s it … it\u2019s the vibe. I rest my case.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And that is what I am here at the Press Club to explore today as Western Australia goes back to the polls in an historic Senate by-election. The vibe.<\/p>\n

The vibe of the nation right now is something you can’t quite put your finger on but it’s there, it’s real, it’s powerful, and it’s building.<\/p>\n

It is manifest in the thousands who gathered at the March in March rallies.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s in the 850,000 people who have watched our WA candidate Greens Senator Scott Ludlam\u2019s inspiring speech to the Senate admonishing Prime Minister Abbott for his hollow three word slogans and the intolerance, discrimination and climate denialism embedded in them.<\/p>\n

It’s in the conversations I have been having in offices, on the streets, in markets, taxis and hospitals. People are telling me they are despairing, how they have stopped reading papers, or listening to the news because they can’t stand what the Abbott Government is doing to our country and the speed with which it’s doing it.<\/p>\n

It’s there in the thousands who are standing up against coal seam gas and for farmers right to say no; it’s there in the hearts of millions who have woken up today feeling good that the ICJ has ruled to stop Japanese whaling, but distraught by what\u2019s coming with climate change, and it’s there in the laughter and ridicule of the millions who now see Tony Abbott with his knights and dames and climate denial as yesterday’s man.<\/p>\n

The vibe is manifest in the reaction to the call for door knockers and campaign volunteers for the Greens in WA. More than 27,000 doors have been knocked on and 30,000 phone calls have been made by hundreds of Greens volunteers, with more to come in the lead up to Saturday. These are people who care about our country, who know what defines us as a nation is hanging in the balance in this period of government. These are people who are committed to taking strong immediate action to address climate change. I know you are there in Perth today with Senator Scott Ludlam and Senator Rachel Siewert and I say go for it!<\/p>\n

It’s to all of you and to the thousands of others sitting at home genuinely worried about the way Australia is going that I am appealing today.<\/p>\n

Don’t give up, don’t despair. Instead, as German poet Bertolt Brecht said, \u201cdon\u2019t start with the good old things but the bad new ones”. Get active and help bring home the vibe to the heart of the Parliament, to the Senate. Make the WA election the turning of the tide; make it the defining moment where Tony Abbott’s radical, extreme agenda is stopped. Make it the moment, as Scott Ludlam said, \u201cwhen we take our country back\u201d.<\/p>\n

In the seven months since the election there has been a wholesale assault on Australian values. We\u2019re starting to see Tony Abbott’s real agenda unfolding. Things that people regarded as certainties, like our rights and our values, are being trampled.<\/p>\n

First is love of country, our natural places that are too precious to lose. Abbott and his Government are there for the big end of town tearing up environment protection in the name of getting rid of red tape.<\/p>\n

Wherever we live, we all love the Great Barrier Reef, now under pressure as never before, from the consequences of climate change and coal mining. Our Reef is dying as Tony Abbott gives the tick to the dumping of dredging spoil from Abbot Point coal terminal; adding to pollution from Clive Palmer\u2019s nickel refinery and agricultural runoff, on top of the coral bleaching and acidification from warming seas heated by burning the very coal we are digging\u00a0up.<\/p>\n

Tasmania’s magnificent high conservation forests listed in 2013 as World Heritage are to be delisted and logged if Abbott has his way, in addition to high country grazing in Victoria’s National Parks, and shooting in NSW and now considered okay for WA’s national parks. Shocking but hardly surprising as our Prime Minister has said that “the environment is meant for man”, an insight into Tony Abbott’s Old Testament, Bob Santamaria philosophical view.<\/p>\n

Farmers and rural communities across Australia continue to be pushed aside by the Abbott Government for coal mines, coal seam gas and non-conventional gas regardless of the contamination of ground water supplies.<\/p>\n

Tony Abbott is delivering for big mining companies and his big business mates, sending the profits of the big three iron ore miners (RIO, BHP, Fortesque Metals) soaring with collective half yearly profits of more than $US14 billion from their West Australian iron ore mines.<\/p>\n

All this made worse by Tony Abbott handing back environmental oversight powers to state premiers, like Colin Barnett whose Government has a proven record of conflicts of interest in approving destructive developments like\u00a0James Price Point and whose cruel drum lines are killing sharks as I speak. It has to stop.<\/p>\n

Another value under assault by Abbott\u2019s cruel, secret and tricky Government is our love for our community and our belief in decency and respect in the way we treat each other. Australians do think of ourselves as decent, compassionate people who will help one another out in hard times.<\/p>\n

Reza Berati’s murder on Manus Island was a line in the sand.<\/p>\n

Things have gone too far. The secrecy, driven by Scott Morrison\u2019s refusal to allow lawyers and journalists onto Manus Island, on top of cruel failures to investigate claims of maltreatment by the armed forces, the removal of legal support services, and news today that the AFP has refused to send officers to help interview suspects in Reza Berati\u2019s murder has deepened misgivings that there is a shocking ‘cover up’ going on.<\/p>\n

Australia’s refusal to support a UN war crimes investigation in Sri Lanka and not to hold an authoritarian regime to account for war crimes and crimes against humanity is wrong. Forcibly returning more than 1000 asylum seekers to Sri Lanka in the past two years, exposing them to continued persecution, and gifting two patrol boats to boost its anti-people smuggling capability\u00a0shames our nation. We are becoming a global pariah in Human Rights, environment, and climate and now relations with Indonesia are at an all-time low.<\/p>\n

People are beginning to be frightened of a reckless, cruel, out of touch government, and a maverick PM. They’re asking where are we headed as a nation? Are we headed back to the 1950s era of racist, anti-gay Australia where women were treated as second class citizens, where LGBTI people hid, where abusive racist name calling was okay, an era dominated by ‘old rich white men’ born to rule, as Mona Eltahawy said on Q&A<\/em> last night, who wanted to be knights in a colonial aristocracy looking to London.<\/p>\n

We have a Government with its head buried in the 19th and 20th centuries without a plan for the nation in the 21st century.<\/p>\n

With no plan for the future, Tony Abbott will fail as Prime Minister.<\/p>\n

No one can lead at this moment without a plan to address global warming. It is a defining characteristic of leadership to identify the risks and threats to the nation and lead people to address them. The IPPC has made it clear. Time has run out, we are suffering already and are on track for 4 degrees of warming and we are not prepared. The Greens are the only party in the Australian\u00a0Parliament who recognise the two possible futures, as the IPCC has said:<\/p>\n

One of inaction and degradation of our environment, our economies, and our social fabric. The other, to seize the moment and the opportunities for managing climate change risks and making transformational changes that catalyses more adaptive and resilient societies where new technologies and ways of living open the door to a myriad of health, prosperity and job- generating benefits. The path of tomorrow is undoubtedly determined by our choices today. We must decide which path to follow.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Greens have chosen the future of transformational change \u2013 the Government has not.<\/p>\n

Nowhere is this lack of a plan for a climate change dominated future more obvious than in WA.<\/p>\n

Yesterday\u2019s report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change emphasised the enormity of the global task to avoid climate. In WA, the south west of the state is drying out, and Perth recently recorded its second hottest summer on record and sweltered through their hottest night on record ever, at 29.7 degrees, life will get harder with more heatwaves and extreme fire danger days resulting in loss of life and reduced productivity.<\/p>\n

Tony Abbott is a fool to pretend climate change is not happening and even more foolish to try to prevent action that would help people, create jobs and create a future for WA, and the country, after the mining boom.<\/p>\n

People around the nation are worried that they already work hard yet things are getting tougher. People are worried about everything from casualised jobs, long commutes to work, congestion, fly in fly out, too little time with their families and anxiety about the future as construction gives way to production and lost jobs.<\/p>\n

In WA people without work or who are underemployed worry that they won’t be able to afford to rent a place to live and see the waiting lists for crisis accommodation blowing out. WA has one of the least affordable and most pressured housing markets in the whole world.<\/p>\n

Two weeks ago, I visited Foyer Oxford in Perth, which has the capacity to house up to 98 young people, including 24 young parents and their children. The youth I spoke to who are living there think it is awesome but the service providers are left high and dry with no guarantee of a new partnership agreement on homelessness. Abbott\u2019s last minute stop gap measures on the weekend do not provide the certainty of funding over the forward estimates\u00a0which is needed and could be viewed as a cynical exercise to neutralise the issue before this Saturday\u2019s poll.<\/p>\n

Abbott says, trust me, but why should they when so much of what he says is hot air. People\u2019s gut instinct is telling them something is not right. When a PM says only to believe it when it\u2019s written down, and even then it is still negotiable.<\/p>\n

Trust your gut instinct fellow Australians. Don\u2019t trust Prime Minister Abbott to deliver for you.<\/p>\n

The Abbott Government is not governing for all Australians. He is governing for the greedy few, the vested interests of yesteryear, not the Australia of tomorrow, like a CEO delivering for only one division of his company.<\/p>\n

Make no mistake this is the Abbott, Murdoch, Rinehart collaboration directed and promoted by the Institute of Public Affairs. Abbott said in April 2013, \u201cthat is a big ‘yes’ to many of the specific policies you urged upon me\u201d referring to the IPA\u2019s 75 radical ideas to Transform Australia which are being delivered so fast that they\u2019ve had to add another 25. Do we really want to live in an Australia fashioned by Rupert Murdoch, Gina Rinehart and a forelock tugging Prime Minister?<\/p>\n

Take the big four banks and what they stand to gain from the Future of Financial Reforms for example. Give a few political donations, and what do you get? \u2013 \u201cto not act in the best interest of the client.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Financial Services Council has donated over $42,000 to the major parties over the last few years.<\/p>\n

Two decades of unprecedented boom and what do we have to show for it? The mining boom is being squandered. Seven in ten WA voters don\u2019t feel Tony Abbott has a plan for new jobs in Western Australia in light of the mining boom slowing, and they\u2019re right.<\/p>\n

Take the mining tax as another example. Abbott is governing for the wealthy,\u00a0billionaires, and overseas mining companies and letting every day Australians\u00a0take the hit. Joe Hockey said \u201ceveryone in Australia has to help to do the\u00a0heavy lifting on the Budget\u201d \u2013 everyone except the big miners and polluters\u00a0who benefit from fossil fuel subsidies, polluting for free and maximising profits.<\/p>\n

If \u201ceveryone has to take a hit\u201d Joe Hockey, then release the Commission of\u00a0Audit now!<\/p>\n

If Abbott repeals the mining tax, he will strip 353,613 West Australians of around $27,000 of retirement income by repealing the low income superannuation guarantee.<\/p>\n

If you want to create jobs in Australia the best way to do it is to fix the mining tax so it does raise revenue for all Australians and use the income to create the Australia of tomorrow.<\/p>\n

So where does this leave Australia with a new Senate due to take office in just a few months? A Senate in which the Government will have to rely on an inexperienced, uncertain, and policy free few.<\/p>\n

At last year’s election the community voted against the incumbent government. People voted, as Rupert Murdoch railed, to \u2018kick this mob out\u2019.<\/p>\n

Rather than voting \u2018for\u2019 what Abbott offered, they voted against the Rudd- Gillard-Slipper-Thomson spectacle. That showed up clearly in the Senate vote.<\/p>\n

Having voted Liberal in the House of Representatives, people wanted insurance against Abbott getting total control of the Parliament. What the 25 per cent of the population didn’t and couldn’t have known was how voting for a raft of\u00a0micro parties would play out. Instead of stopping the Abbott Government getting total control, the gaming of the electoral system made the Senate and the nation vulnerable to the very thing people voted to avoid.<\/p>\n

Australia is now subject to the whims of people who secured less than 1pc of the vote and who will be tempted to give Abbott everything he wants in exchange for who knows what?<\/p>\n

The Senate crossbench is now a right-wing circus. Even before the results of the WA election are known, we have:<\/p>\n