Instead of replying to the details of the Rudd-Swan Budget, I
decided this year to use their backward-looking, future-phobic
presentation as the launching pad for a broader discussion of what we
might do if we had a Government with the vision and guts necessary to
take on the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil.

Building that vision of a post-carbon world encompasses the process
of making our society fairer, better educated, happier and healthier.

This is a fundamental shift in approach that I am more and more
passionate about. Many of us have been working on this kind of
campaigning for years, but I think its time has really come now. I'd
certainly value feedback on how you think this speech works. Tim will
also post the full half-hour video once it comes through from the
Parliamentary Library.

Update: Christine's Budget Reply is also available on video or podcast.

Senator MILNE (Tasmania) (8.26 p.m.)-The arctic ice and the Saudi Arabian oilfields seem a long way from Australia
and Prime Minister Rudd's 2008 budget. But they should be at the
forefront of our minds as we consider what a real leader, a leader
contemplating the state of the world and the wellbeing of all people,
would have delivered for our nation in his first budget. Leadership
means having the courage and imagination to face up to the challenges
of the time and to formulate a vision worthy of the people, their
future and the situation in which they find themselves. It means
presenting that vision in such a compelling way that people are
inspired to be part of it.

Faced with the fear and crises of the Cold War and the space race, President Kennedy captured the imagination of his country when he announced that America
would put a man on the moon within the decade. He could not have known
if the moon mission would be successful in a decade or how much it
would cost, but he united Americans around a goal that fired their
imagination and he succeeded. The same can be said of Churchill,
when he exhorted Britons with those famous words, ‘We will fight them
on the beaches,' during the Second World War. The cost of not winning,
the loss of freedom and a way of life, made losing unthinkable in both
cases, and the people lifted.

The summer
arctic ice melt and the depleting oil reserves are representative of
the social and economic catastrophe that we now face from global
warming and peak oil-every bit as compelling as the challenge faced by
Churchill and Kennedy. The evidence is now clear that slow and steady
action is a recipe for ongoing disaster. We are already experiencing
dangerous climate change and may have passed peak oil. If we are to
avoid catastrophe, we must not only reduce emissions but halve them by
2020 and cut them to net zero as soon as we can. We must build a new
postcarbon economy and society and we must do it now.
Henry David Thoreau
once wrote: ‘In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore,
though they should fail immediately, they'd better aim at something
high.' If we try, perhaps we will succeed, and at worst we will fall
short of the target. But if we do not try we will certainly fail. A
true leader would try.

The 2008 budget demonstrates that we do not have
a leader, a Prime Minister, equal to the task. We have a manager for
business-as-usual times when we have already gone beyond
business-as-usual times. We have an accountant when we needed a fiscal
visionary.
This budget props up Third World
economic vulnerabilities by selling off our natural capital. The
government's expenditures, taxes and subsidies undermine instead of
unleash knowledge based industries and intelligent green growth. This
budget's plan for selling off natural assets does not represent a
strategy for responsible financial positioning. Giving the community a
few more dollars in tax relief to slightly reduce the significantly
higher costs of petrol, food and energy, driven in large part by
climate change and oil depletion, whilst living and working in the same
ways, does not deal with the problem. Superficial promises to cut the
excise simply delays the action that we need to take in oil-proofing
the country to address the underlying causes of high food and fuel
prices.

The world
as we know it is already permanently physically changed. It is shocking
to know that by 2013 growing scientific evidence suggests there will be
no arctic summer ice and the magnificent polar bear and numerous other
species will be close to extinct in the wild. The risk of the
thermohaline ocean conveyor slowing or stopping is heightened. The age
of cheap, easily accessible oil is over not only because we are running
out but also because we cannot afford to keep on using it if we are to
reduce greenhouse gas emissions. There is no going back. But how we go
forward will determine whether we experience a future that delivers
positive benefits for people and communities or one that delivers
poverty, scarcity and conflict.

Prime
Minister Rudd gave Australians the impression that he understood the
urgency and magnitude of climate change when he acknowledged that it is
the greatest moral and economic imperative of our time. Addressing
climate change was a key element of his election appeal. But now it is
clear that the Rudd government is just as negligent as the Howard
government. Global warming is not just another budget item. Oil costs
are not just a figure in the current account deficit. It is a figure
that will grow to $25 billion by 2015 and beyond.
Global
warming and oil depletion represent the biggest challenges that we will
face in our lifetime. But they also represent the greatest
opportunities to make our lives not only different but better. What is
required is total transformation of our way of life and the economy
that underpins it. As UN Secretary-General, Mr Ban Ki Moon, said prior to the Bali United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference:

We
have experienced several great economic transformations ... the
industrial revolution, the technology revolution, our modern era of
globalization. Now we are on the threshold of another revolution-the
age of green economics.

He then went on to call on nations to fight global warming and promote that transformation.

There
is an emerging consensus that nations and corporations that fail to
understand this imperative will lose competitive advantage, while those
that grasp the new opportunities it offers will prosper. Australia is
well on track to losing competitive advantage, not because we are not
blessed with fantastic natural advantages, not because we do not work
hard or because we do not have the capacity to be different, but
because we fail to grasp that imperative and that opportunity. As Albert Einstein said, ‘The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation.'

We
know we need to change. We are materially better off than generations
who have gone before, but is the price worth it? We are already living
the rat race that people who fought for and won the eight-hour day
would not believe possible. We have given up weekends in the name of
productivity and efficiency. We have to work harder and longer for
bigger houses full of stuff that we do not need and which are literally
costing us the earth. Our children have to work to get themselves
through university and are then saddled with HECS debts. And our aged
are lonely and undersupported with families who have little time to
visit or care for them. How fair or sensible is it for people to go to
bed with their mobile phones and be required to be available 18 hours a
day? Tired people are unhappy people, yet so many adults and children
go to work and school in the dark and get home in the dark, having
wasted four hours or more in traffic jams. How many of us do not know
our neighbours and have no time to walk anywhere or grow anything in
our gardens? How many of us can offer to do community voluntary work or
play amateur sport and engage and be part of the local community? We
live day to day with a nagging uneasiness about living in a rich
society where many are poor, homeless and sick. How many of us buy our
families more consumer goods to make up for the time that we cannot
spend with them? How many of us regret that fruit and vegetables come
from all over the world when local farmers are struggling to survive?
How many people, when asked, answer that what would make them happy is
more time? The treadmill seems inescapable.

But
the surplus generated by the resources boom has given us a one-off
opportunity to change. And global warming and oil depletion make it
impossible not to do so. Australia
has a choice. All that is holding us back is the lack of imagination
and the political will to change. What needed to happen in the budget
was for the government to fund a vision for transformation, but instead
it squandered both the opportunity and the surplus in tax cuts, reduced
services and slashed research. Whilst there are education, health and
infrastructure funds, there is no climate fund, with nothing for
disaster readiness. We have spent $10 billion on counterterrorism since
September 11 but only $500 million on emergency relief capability. We
are not immune in Australia from massive natural disasters caused by climate change. As one of the wealthiest countries in the region, Australia
should establish a global disaster relief centre to coordinate civil
and military aid responses to disasters like cyclones, floods,
bushfires, earthquakes and tsunamis at home and abroad. Imagine how we
would be feeling today if we had a real vision for a sustainable future
such as that painted by the Greens. Imagine if the Prime Minister,
through his Treasurer, had said what a Greens Prime Minster would say.
Here is what we would have heard:

‘We
as a world and a nation are living beyond our ecological limits and
suffering global warming and oil depletion. Our land is sick and, in
spite of our surpluses, in spite of being materially better off than
our forebears, we are not as healthy or happy as we could be. We need
to aim for a higher quality of life-to be happier, healthier and more
fulfilled with greater environmental, social and economic resilience in
the face of the challenges before us. It is time to face up to climate
change, time to embark on a great new Australian initiative. It is time
to make imagination Australia's
natural resource of the future. We must reconcile our humanity with our
economics. We need transformation-a wave of environmental, social,
technical and economic innovation that will touch every person,
community and institution such that we change from a resource economy
to a knowledge economy living in harmony with the land, rediscovering
our connection to life. And we need it urgently. To that end my
government, with your help, will make imagination the resource of the
future. We will make Australia sustainable by 2020-ecologically, socially and economically sustainable by 2020.

We
have delivered a transformative, enabling budget that will make it
happen. To reach our goal of sustainability we will need every one of
us to bring to the task all of the brainpower, innovation, creativity,
and nation-building capacity that we can muster. We have designed a
budget strategy that by 2020 will: (1) deliver all of Australia's
electricity from renewables; (2) maximise the energy efficiency to all
of the nation's businesses and industries and homes; (3) heal our
country by ending the logging of the remaining native forests and
clearing of savannahs, restoring and building resilience in ecosystems
and maintaining the carbon they store; (4) redesign and revitalise
Australia's cities into urban villages linked by rapid mass transit and
cycleways; and (5) produce more of our own food sustainably.

To
do this we need a healthy society and a well-educated one. We need to
increase our spending on education, research and innovation at every
level from schools, TAFE colleges to universities and research
institutions. We need free public preschool for all children, 12,000
new teachers, a 50 per cent increase in capital and maintenance
investment, and a rise in teachers' salaries. We need to make teachers,
especially in the TAFE system, permanent again. A knowledge nation
values its teachers even more than it values its sports stars or
celebrities. After a decade of denigrating public schools, we need a
national empowering public schools program to encourage and resource
excellence and promote enrolment in local schools.

Local
schools strengthen local communities, and local communities will be the
backbone of a sustainable society. Sustainability must be incorporated
into the curriculum and in all vocational courses. To rapidly achieve
the transition to a postcarbon economy, we need every person to
understand the values that underpin sustainability. This is not the
time to slash $63 million from CSIRO funding. Science is critical to a
sustainable future. We cannot drive a revolution on the scale we are
talking about on a scale greater than the IT revolution, for example,
without science and energised students.

We
will abolish HECS. Instead of tax cuts for the rich, we will provide
students with a living allowance so that no student is forced to work
during term time. Doesn't that make for happier families, healthier
students and a better educated population? We will have national
discussions about how we can work together to be healthier and happier
and share the changes and workloads to achieve these goals in a way
that reduces the gap between the rich and the poor, the overemployed
and the underemployed. We need to come to a national consensus about
how we can have a higher quality of life by redesigning our homes,
communities, cities and workplaces and our ways of life to be more
sustainable.

The
future is ours for the making. We embrace the challenge and look
forward to 2020 when we will look back and say that we were the
generation that set Australia
on the path to the healthy, happy and authentically sustainable nation
that it has become. We were the generation that did not disappoint our
children or steal their future from them.'

Mr
President, that is the speech Australians would have loved to hear. It
would have drawn a line under the past and made the future hopeful and
exciting, not daunting. But instead of such a speech, we had what can
only be described as a tweaking of the parameters of imagination and
thinking of the Howard
years. Whilst there have been welcome changes to try to reduce the gap
between the rich and poor and to alleviate additional costs of child
care and energy, they can only be seen as token against the backdrop of
the tax cuts. The increased tax on luxury cars will be offset for the
rich many times over by the huge take-home pay hike for the wealthy as
they pocket their tax cuts. The 30 per cent private health insurance
rebate, costing almost $5 billion a year, has not been touched.

A
person on $300,000 will take home $91 a week more, whilst a person
earning $30,000 will take home only $11. One tank of petrol or one
visit to the supermarket will absorb that and more for a low-income
earner. If the government was serious about a more equitable society,
it would have seriously addressed inequity by not proceeding with tax
cuts for those earning over $75,000. The Greens will move to amend the
budget accordingly.

The
current disparity between what the rich get and what low-income earners
get is stark when you consider that, by 2011-12, the cost of
superannuation tax concessions will exceed the cost of the age pension.
How can any Labor member of this parliament justify that? To suggest
that a one-off energy payment will satisfy pensioners' needs is
dishonest. The age pension is inadequate and must be increased.

While
the one-off payment to carers is welcomed, because anything is better
than nothing, the government has failed to deal with the long-term
wellbeing of carers. They urgently need an increase in carer payment
and a scheme to address their long-term disadvantage, for instance, in
superannuation. We cannot say that our society is sustainable if
carers' vital work, impacting on their own mental and physical
wellbeing, puts them in the lowest social wellbeing index.

To
address gambling or alcohol abuse we must ensure that taxes are
returned to address the problems generated. The $10 billion dollar
alcohol abuse problem will not be minimised by filling government
coffers with an undirected alcopop tax but by redirecting that taxation
revenue to education, counselling, access to services and by banning
advertising. That is what the Greens seek to do.

Funding
for Indigenous people does not match the government's rhetoric, nor
adequately addresses what needs to be done. Around $450 million per
year is needed for health if we have any hope of closing the gap
between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, yet in this budget
the spending is only $250 million for all programs and most of that is
misdirected through the government's discriminatory ill-targeted
Northern Territory intervention, spending another $69 million for
administration of the failing income quarantining debacle.

The
nation is in surplus. Surely now is the time to invest in making it
fairer. Whilst certainly not a Green budget, this is not even a
traditional Labor budget. It will benefit the already wealthy without
addressing the underlying causes of increased costs of food, petrol,
and energy which hurt everyone, but which disproportionately hurt those
who are already struggling.

So what of the five headlines of a green budget needed to deliver a sustainable Australia? How did they fare under the Rudd budget? Instead of hearing a vision that all of Australia's
electricity will come from renewables by 2020, we heard a deathly
silence on commercialisation or rollout of renewable energy
technologies. The Greens say: can we do this by 2020? Yes, we can. Ask
yourself whether, in 1995, only 13 years ago, you would have thought it
possible to have the world wired for instant global communication or
that our lives would revolve around instant messaging received by
telephones in our pockets. But a renewably powered Australia
by 2020 will not happen by paying lip-service to renewable energy
technologies and giving $500-plus million to support a coal technology
that does not exist and has no prospect of delivering any significant
emission reductions by 2020.

What
should have happened is as the Greens have advocated-a bold emission
reduction target for 2020, the establishment of a ‘sun fund' of $3
billion over 10 years to drive research development and
commercialisation, as well as the introduction of a feed-in tariff to
support these technologies that are ready to go but are not as cheap as
wind. A bill such as the one I introduced today is what is needed.

The
20 per cent mandatory renewable energy target is a good start but
should have been at least 25 per cent. It currently is most effective
for wind energy but has to be supplemented by a feed-in tariff for the
technologies that are market ready but not yet the least-cost
technology. The fact that the government do not understand renewable
energy or the realities of large-scale rollout of the technologies or
barriers to market readiness is no better demonstrated than by their
rush, within 24 hours of the budget, to try to fix the mess they have
made by giving everything to clean coal in 2008-09 and by flagging that
they will patch the gap by shifting $40 million from the Energy
Innovation Fund which was previously committed to solar energy storage
and hydrogen technologies and redirecting it to assist geothermal
energy companies with ongoing drilling costs.

Why
is the government trying to divide and rule the renewables sector by
taking from solar to give to geothermal when it should have taken the
funds from the coal industry's pipedream? Has the government decided to
destroy the solar sector? Any preliminary analysis or even a
conversation with the industry would have revealed that means testing
rooftop photovoltaics would lead to a complete collapse, and so it is
already happening. Within 24 hours of Minister Garrett's
myopia, solar companies are already calling my office, reporting that
potential customers have indicated that they will not be proceeding
with photovoltaics. There is serious speculation of industry-wide
collapse, taking down the government's Solar Cities program on the way
out. This is amateur hour for the government, and it will have to
reverse it. Did the government even consult the renewable energy
sector, or were Ministers Garrett, Ferguson and Wong too busy meeting with the coal companies to make time?

Another
Green headline: maximising energy efficiency across the country, from
huge industrial complexes to offices and to every home by 2020. Yes, it
is a big idea. It is a climate winner, an expansive jobs and
manufacturing industry driver and it is achievable. The Greens have put
forward a series of policies that would, given a sufficient investment,
drive systemic change of this kind across Australia. The first, the Energy Efficiency Access and Savings Initiative, or EASI, would retrofit all of Australia's
7.4 million homes over the course of a decade, rolling out home energy
audits, providing the service and paying the up-front cost, which would
be recouped through savings on energy bills. EASI
would require an up-front investment from the government that, at its
peak, would reach $22 billion. But it would more than repay itself, not
only through direct repayments but also through deferred investment in
new power stations and electricity grid infrastructure, reduced
emissions and greater household amenity.

We also have EASI programs, energy efficient programs, driving energy efficiency in commercial buildings across Australia
and in large industrial complexes, requiring them to implement the
energy efficiency opportunities that they have identified in the audits
that have been conducted to date. Instead of this, set against that
bold vision, what Rudd Labor promised in the budget is a confused
hodgepodge of small-scale investments targeted at achieving media
coverage now, a few photo opportunities down the track and very little
in the way of real emissions reductions. The Rudd government has broken
an election promise to spend $225 million over three years to 2010-11;
instead, committing only $126 million by that time.

The
government's green loans scheme is tokenism when what we need is
systemic change. With only $240 million allocated, a third of it not to
be spent until after the next election, it could give loans to as few
as 24,000 households if each chooses to borrow at the top end of the
$10,000 limit. The slow start, with no sense of urgency, means that as
few as 1,360 homes could benefit in the next year and only 16,000
before this government's term could be ended at the next election. What
is more, by only providing financial support, it ignores the other
well-known barriers to people taking up energy efficiency
opportunities; namely, lack of information and lack of priority.

The
Low Emission Plan for Renters is similarly tokenistic and ill thought
out. With only a $500 rebate available for landlords to install
insulation-less than half the cost in many cases-landlords still have
very little incentive to save their tenants energy and money. It also
has a slow and late start. Housing assistance is one way to permanently
reduce costs for low-income earners. All new housing initiatives must
meet high energy efficiency standards and be on public transport
routes. Immediate housing affordability is not seriously addressed, as
people are still struggling to find affordable rental properties or are
struggling to pay their mortgages. The Clean Business Australia
initiative, Climate Ready, the Green Building Fund and Re-Tooling for
Climate Change are more of the same: piecemeal, minimally funded, with
no sense of urgency.

Green
headline 3: heal our country by ending the logging of the remaining
native forests and the clearing of savannahs, restoring and building
resilience in ecosystems and maintaining the carbon they store. This
would be a climate and biodiversity winner, but instead the government
continues to drive ecological destruction and the destruction of rural
communities by slashing the environment budget and continuing to
subsidise logging and the managed investment schemes that are
destroying river systems and town water supplies as well as social
harmony in rural Australia. The carbon and biodiversity tragedy of the loss of old-growth forests in Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales can be sheeted home to the Rudd government just as much as to the Howard government. The Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts is just as responsible as his predecessor.

Under
Rudd Labor, Collins Street farmers are set to own the water in our
rivers and pay nothing for our groundwater. According to the
government's 2007 Tax Expenditures Statement, the tax deductibility of
forestry managed investment funds will cost $140 million in 2008-09,
$365 million in 2009-10 and $425 million in 2010-11. In other words,
the Rudd government plans to pay the rich to destroy our ecosystems,
forgoing almost a billion dollars over three years. Meanwhile, it is
taking $50 million away from the Department of the Environment Heritage
and the Arts and abolishing the Biodiversity Hotspots program.

Caring
for our Country is ad hoc and non-strategic, with no increase in
spending on the environment. It demonstrates that the government has
failed to learn the positive and negative lessons of the Natural
Heritage Trust. Once again, there is no understanding of the need for
landscape scale restoration or the urgency of the task. In the Murray Darling Basin, for example, long term targets for return of water to the Murray have still not been set and-amazingly-the Murray Darling Basin
lan does not come into effect until 2019. We will have a plan and no
river. The much vaunted reform has not overcome the conflict between
the states. The science says that 3,500 gigalitres of water must be
returned to the system if it is to have any chance of recovery. When
are we going to get it, Prime Minister?

Redesigning and revitalising Australia's
major cities into urban villages linked by rapid mass transit and
cycleways is the Green's fourth headline. This is not only a great
climate idea, it goes to the heart of the stress and obesity crisis
that we face. The Greens would invest heavily in public transport and
redesign our cities to be people-friendly rather than car-friendly. We
would allocate at least 25 per cent of the $22.3 billion AusLink 2
funding for 2009-10 through to 2013-14 to major infrastructure projects
that shift people or freight off roads and onto more climate friendly
alternatives. By 2014, the proportion of funding for low-polluting and
mass transit options should be greater than that for roads. But it is
certainly not going to be the case.

Imagine
the difference to people's quality of life if they could walk to work
or cycle in their neighbourhoods and move between neighbourhoods on
rapid transit. The oil crisis and the climate crisis make it critical
that jobs are taken to where the people are, rather than move people to
the jobs. This would mean that people have more time to enjoy their
lives-they would be healthier, breathe cleaner air and get to know
their neighbours. Instead, the Rudd government has invested only $78
million in dealing with congestion, and has continued with billions
into roads and freeways. No government that takes peak oil or climate
change seriously would spend only five per cent as much on rail as on
road funding in the coming year. The government has not even had the
courage to abolish the fringe benefits tax concession for motor
vehicles, the cost of which will be about $1.6 billion in this
financial year alone. Getting rid of it would have been a clear climate
winner and behaviour change driver. If an equivalent tax concession was
made for public transport it would take people out of cars and on to
public transport. Even with cars, we have no vehicle fuel efficiency
standards, and the Rudd Green Car program, much spun and publicised,
does not begin until 2011-after the next election.

The
Greens would expand the AusLink funding guidelines to include urban,
intrastate and interstate public transport infrastructure projects. We
would ensure that AusLink's corridor strategies would address the
issues of oil vulnerability and greenhouse gas mitigation.

Finally, the Green's fifth headline for a sustainable Australia
by 2020 is ‘going with our own food'. Imagine if Australians produced
more of our own food and produced it sustainably. It is a high level
goal because it goes to the heart of our health and wellbeing, the
interaction in our neighbourhoods and our interaction with our rural
communities. The world's food production systems are becoming
increasingly frayed by ecological degradation and human rights abuses.
Every Chinese frozen vegetable that finds its way into Australian mixed
frozen vegetable packs is subsidised by environmental destruction and
low wages. Extreme weather events will drive shortages as land is
turned over to biofuels, cooking oils and plantation forests. In spite
of the free trade mantra, countries are now declaring food emergencies.
(Extension of time granted) We need a national food plan to
deliver food security in the face of the collapse of global free trade
markets, crop collapse because of drought, floods or fires and
displacement by plantations. We need to understand our food
better-where it comes from, what it takes to grow it and what carbon is
embedded in it.

Just
as the climate is approaching a tipping point, so too is society.
Revolutions do not occur when people are ground down as in the Howard
years-they occur when they expect things to be better and their hopes
are dashed. The Australian people want us to aim high in addressing the
overwhelming challenges of our time. They want of be part of the
solutions. The Greens provide that vision and the new thinking that
will actually solve these massive challenges. The climate will not wait
for governments which cannot imagine a different world and neither
should the people, for it is an uncharted, different world that we are
now a part of.