Deterrence does not work

Christine Milne
Australian Greens Leader

Richard Di Natale
Greens health spokesperson

Tuesday 30 October 2012

Press conference

Transcript

Subjects: Asylum seekers, Nauru, superbugs, alcohol tax reform.

CHRISTINE MILNE: It’s time the Government abandoned its political surplus. People have been talking about this around kitchen tables right around the nation and the Newspoll is just the most recent to confirm that the community is saying it’s time to prioritise what we need for nation-building in this country. What we need to do in the face of an economy weakening is to actually recognise it’s a very, very bad strategy to drive more people into poverty. The decision by the Government to cut single-parent support was bad enough but now its failure to recognise that so many people are in casual work, there is a big churn between people being put out of casual work and going on to Newstart and Newstart being way too low and confining people to poverty. In this country we ought to be looking at what we can do to reduce the gap between the rich and the poor not actually entrench it. For all Wayne Swan’s talk about taking on the big miners, the billionaires, it has come to nothing in terms of actually redistributing income. What has happened though is it’s on the back of and at the expense of our poorest and most vulnerable people. Today I’ve met with the Catholic Social Justice providers, their concerns are about what’s happening to people in the community through homelessness, what’s happening as a result of the mental health issues in rural and regional Australia, poverty is actually stalking the country and we need to actually say let’s abandon this political surplus let’s return to the surplus over the economic cycle but let’s actually invest in what we need to do for a fair and decent country and also get ourselves on to the front foot in terms of education and training. Now is not the time to be cutting research and development budgets, nor is it the time to be delaying and delaying the investment in education that we need because it is that investment in education which will see this country better positioned in the Asian century.

Speaking of our position in the Asian century Prime Minister Gillard has done what even John Howard couldn’t do and that is Prime Minister Gillard has wiped Australia off the map when it comes to our global obligations under the Refugee Convention. John Howard tried this but even he couldn’t get away with it. His own backbench revolted and people around Australia back in 2002 just stood up to him and said that is just way too far you can’t take away Australia, pretend it doesn’t exist as far as the UN Refugee Convention is concerned and our obligations under international law. This is even more critical now not just because of the appalling treatment of people on Nauru and Manus Island but Australia has just been elected to the UN Security Council, we’re going to be under scrutiny as we have never been in terms of our human rights record and now is not the time for the Gillard Government to humiliate Australians, to wipe us of the global map when it comes to issues of responsibility under international law and responsibility for refugees. Having said that the Government should also now actually do as we ask them to do when this went through the Parliament and that is make transparent the contracts associated with Transfield and the running of the detention centres outside Australia. How is it that the Australian Government is allowing people on Nauru to be paid $4 an hour when an equivalent job in Australia exactly for the Australian government will be paid $40 an hour? What’s going on here, who is making the profit? Is it the Federal Government making the cost savings or are we allowing a global, a multinational company to make even greater profits at the expense of the most vulnerable people in the world? Critical issue. Everyone thought John Howard was the most extreme you could possibly get in cruelty and in embarrassing Australia in global fora. Well Julia Gillard has gone further. At least John Howard’s backbench stood up and said no. The Labor Party it seems has rolled over.

Speaking of nation-building, we need to invest not only in education, in research and training, in a more equitable level of opportunity for Australians, but we also need to invest heavily in health and Richard is going to make some comments in relation to that.

RICHARD DI NATALE: I’ll be brief. Christine’s absolutely right. The Government has got to put aside the short-term politics of surplus, of boat people, and it’s got to start looking to our long-term future. And one area where there has been huge concern amongst the medical community has been the issue of superbugs and antibiotic resistance. This is an issue that’s been of concern for me for some time. Prior to taking this job I was a medical practitioner myself and it’s been very clear for many, many decades that the problem of antibiotic resistance and superbugs has been growing apace, and we recognised this 10 years ago. 10 years ago we set up an expert committee. The expert committee looked at the issue, set up a terrific strategy for how to deal with it and it was completely ignored. Completely ignored. So I’m going to be calling for a Senate enquiry into the issue of superbugs and antibiotic resistance so that we don’t make the same mistakes again. We’ve got to ensure that we take a long-term view, put aside this short-term politics that’s (inaudible)… alcohol research and education where they make it very clear that the Henry tax review was absolutely right, we do need to reform the way we tax and price alcohol, that it’s a no-brainer both in terms of the savings in healthcare, the savings to the community at large in terms of the prevention of harm to others. It makes perfect sense to have a much more rational approach to the way we price alcohol. At the moment the taxation system – it’s a dog’s breakfast. Henry recognised that and that’s why he proposed that we change the way we price alcohol. It’s not just good for public health, it’s also good for the industry. At the moment we have these perverse incentives that drive the production of really cheap wine and this damages our international reputation. What we should be doing is supporting the production of quality products, supporting those small businesses, the small wineries that produce really quality Australian wines, that have given us this international reputation overseas but it’s been slowly tarnished because of this irrational taxation system, so we want to see the work done by the preventative health agency which will be calling for pricing reforms and we look forward with interest to seeing this debate progressed by the Government.

JOURNALIST: Senator Milne, just in regards to the migration zone, Labor argues that it’s just following the recommendations from the Houston review and to discourage asylum seekers from travelling to Australia, a longer distance than say Christmas Island, do they have a point?

CHRISTINE MILNE: Deterrence doesn’t work, it should be clear to the Gillard Government now and to the whole Australian community that all this talk about Draconian measures, punitive measures deterring people is just that, it’s talk, it’s political spin, it is not what actually happens. We’ve had more people arriving in Australia seeking asylum since the introduction of these draconian measures than before. So it makes no sense. What we need to be doing is, as the Greens have been saying, and supported by the United Nations and international law and that is let’s invest in Indonesia in assisting the UNHCR to process people and assess them as refugees more quickly, let’s provide a safe pathway, let’s increase the humanitarian intake and let’s actually address what needs to happen to make people’s lives safer. All that we’re seeing here is a response to the politics. This is about the Government trying to outdo the Coalition in how punitive you can be. How cruel is it to be able to send an unaccompanied child to an offshore detention centre indefinitely. How cruel is that? We’ve already seen the early footage of the consequences of the big rain events as they’ve been occurring on Nauru and the unhappiness and the mental health issues that are going to emerge from this treatment of people who ultimately overwhelmingly are found to be refugees in end up coming to Australia in the longer term. So let’s have some rational discussion, let’s think about what sort of people we are and surely Australians think of themselves as pretty decent, and yet I don’t think many people could be very proud of the way we are treating people who are seeking to make a new life in our country.

JOURNALIST: If you describe it as more extreme than John Howard what Julia Gillard is now proposing to do, would it ever prompt you to rethink your agreement with the Government?

CHRISTINE MILNE: The problem we have is that Julia Gillard is going even further than John Howard and Tony Abbott is happy to go with her. It seems like Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott do not have any barrier as far as they go to the right. It seems that Genghis Khan is a pretty moderate figure when it comes to how far Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott will go. So they’re interchangeable on their policy on asylum seekers and that’s where the Greens have stood up very strongly for the right thing, for helping the most vulnerable people and for international law and our obligations under the human rights convention and I think increasingly globally people are going to start asking some very serious questions about the level of disrepute that both Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott are putting Australia in in a global context.

JOURNALIST: Would this cause you to rethink your alliance with Labor?

CHRISTINE MILNE: When you talk about agreements to form government, they are there in order to deliver on the outcomes. We’ve done that in most cases but are you saying that the Greens ought to exchange the extreme position of Julia Gillard for the even more extreme position of Tony Abbott? It’s not as if there is a choice between them, the choice in Australia at the moment is between Abbott and Gillard and no barrier to how far they’ll go on the right, and the Greens have an alternative view.

• Christine Milne
Australian Greens Leader

Press conference

Transcript

Subjects: Afghanistan, asylum seekers, human rights, Sri Lanka, Joel Fitzgibbon, RET, ACT elections, Newspoll

CHRISTINE MILNE: The Prime Minister today has made an important speech about Afghanistan, but she hasn’t told the Australian people that our troops are coming home as quickly and as safely as possible. What she has in fact presented to the Parliament is no plan to end the engagement of combat troops in Afghanistan. What she said is the SAS troops will continue and stay on there and it will continue to have a wrong combat role. People in Afghanistan want foreign troops out of the country. It’s no use the Prime Minister trying to continue the line that by supporting the Americans in Afghanistan we are keeping it as a safe haven from terrorism. The terrorists have left Afghanistan, they are now in Yemen, across North Africa. Terrorism has spread to other parts of the world. Our troops are being killed in Afghanistan. The green on blue attacks continue. It is a very dangerous situation our troops are in and as Major John Cantwell said recently having overseen operations there, there is no good reason for our troops to stay in Afghanistan. It’s not going to change in Afghanistan between now and 2014, but it is going to make a huge difference to our troops who are there and what’s more the Australian community recognises we are in an uncomfortable situation we need to get out and we need to get out as soon as possible. Civilians are being killed in Afghanistan, when we hear about the casualties Australia has lost 39 troops in Afghanistan and there have been at least 30,000 Afghan people killed since 2007. It’s not going to change in the short term, the Prime Minister should bring our troops home as quickly and safely as possible. The future of Afghanistan needs to be determined by the people of Afghanistan.

It’s also interesting that the Prime Minister cited very clearly upfront the relationship with the US, the US alliance as been a major reason why we are in Afghanistan. It‘s also relevant that in the Australia in the Asian Century White Paper that she asked Allan Gyngell to come in and rewrite it at the last minute because the Government didn’t feel there was a sufficient recognition of America and America’s role in the region. That already undermines our position in the Asian region. People are saying they want Australia to have an independent foreign policy. How independent are we looking to our Asian neighbours when we have as an agreement for American troops in Darwin, where we have a statement upfront that our American alliance is a major contributor to our staying in Afghanistan and now a rewriting of the White Paper.
In terms of our relationship with the Asian region and the rest of the world, we’ve now been elected to the UN Security Council, so what Australia does will become of greater interest and we will be under a lot more scrutiny than we have been previously. Our treatment of refugees and asylum seekers and our refusal to adhere to international law, to the Refugee Convention by excising the whole country from the migration zone is not going to be lost on people around the world. We’re on the Security Council but we’re saying that we’re not prepared to uphold human rights and the Refugee Convention. That will undermine our capacity to be able to speak loudly and strongly for human rights in the region and around the world.

In terms of human rights and asylum seekers, we have a tragedy with one of the Sri Lankans asylum seekers in hospital I understand, having been told he would be sent back to Sri Lanka. The British have already put an injunction through the court there to prevent asylum seekers being sent back because of recognition that there are human rights abuses going on in Sri Lanka at this time. Through the Estimates process I have asked the Government about the extent of human rights abuses and what we do to track people when they are sent back to Sri Lanka to make sure that they are not tortured or abused in any which way. We really have a responsibility to make sure that if we say we value human rights that we actually pursue it not only here in Australia but in the region and excising ourselves from our responsibilities under international law is appropriate, it is a shame. As Mr Bowen had said previously, it’s a stain on national character. It is now a stain in the character of the Labor Party that they have so badly abandoned our responsibilities under international law and our responsibilities to vulnerable people.

On another issue Joel Fitzgibbon, or Coal Fitzgibbon as he probably should now be known across the Parliament, is really out on a limb with the ALP Right now wanting to undermine the Renewable Energy Target. Just after the Climate Change Authority has come out having reviewed the RET and said it’s really good policy, we complimentary policy to emissions trading to drive transition in the energy sector, here you have and the right of the Labor Party coming out and saying that they want to change the RET, reduce the RET, or in the case of Coal Fitzgibbon, it is get rid of the RET altogether. What this shows is you simply cannot trust the Labor Party to run a consistent line when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, or indeed on asylum seekers, or on the environment. We have seen today threatened species responsibilities to be handed over to the states and who would want Campbell Newman or Lara Giddings to be responsible for our threatened species, you cannot just the Labor Party on environment either.

JOURNALIST: Senator can I just ask about the result of the ACT poll, it looks like the Greens have lost about three quarters of their representation in the parliament. I’m just wondering whether you think this shows that the Greens representation is vulnerable to small swings. I know you are worried given Newspoll is about 10% now down from about 11.8 at the last election.

CHRISTINE MILNE: Well certainly it’s true that there was a swing to the Liberals in the ACT and a swing away from the Greens and we did lose representation, but equally if you look at the Melbourne and Victorian council elections this last weekend there was a big swing to the Greens as high as 10% for example in the area of Richmond, in the Yarra Council which also was incredibly well for Adam Bandt, showing that the Green vote in areas that overlap in the seat of Melbourne is very strong and growing. So whilst every political party is subject to swings and roundabouts in terms of votes what we are going to see is a renewed effort across the Greens vote in the ACT and around the country to keep building our vote between now and the federal election.

JOURNALIST: How much do you think local factors have come into these sorts of things? To be clear the Greens have a broad political philosophy, do you think that broad political philosophy is being weakened and we’re seeing local factors come into play and play a more decisive role now?

CHRISTINE MILNE: Well it’s not surprisingly in local government elections you might have local issues on the go or indeed in the ACT elections that there would be ACT specific issues but what was really interesting in the ACT is far from abandoning the Green principles and Green policies and people moving away from them, the ALP actually grabbed those policies and agreed that they would implement light rail, that they would move to a huge greenhouse gas reduction target in the ACT. So what we saw here was the Territory Government decide to take on Green policies because they were popular. So I don’t see a swing away from core Green principles because this century they’re going to be even more important. Sustainability in the face of climate change is going to be the major issue we all have to deal with and trying to make it go away or pretend it’s not happening is not going to prevent the natural world from actually delivering extreme weather events, not only here in Australia but elsewhere in the world.

JOURNALIST: Senator you mentioned Mr Fitzgibbon and the New South Wales Right and you link that more broadly position in New South Wales Right. Just given the Senate ticket dispute in South Australia with Senator Farrell as well, do you think that there is a factional problem in the Labor Party that needs to be addressed and how soon does that need to be addressed?

CHRISTINE MILNE: Well the Labor Party will identify its own problems and it has the power to deal with them. I certainly think that it’s a very bad sign for Labor that the right is flexing its muscles in the way it has, we have seen in New South Wales a major attack from the New South Wales Right on the Greens in July, we’ve seen that carry on throughout the country, but it’s not just an attack on the Greens, it’s an attack on policies like clean energy, on reducing recent greenhouse gas emissions, these are the dinosaurs of the Labor Party who want to stick to very conservative social policy and who want to go back to maximising fossil fuel energy in Australia and minimising renewable energy and that’s where the New South Wales Right, in fact the right of the ALP right around the country is at complete odds with what the Government says, that it’s interested in when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It is internally divided and that is a bad place for Labor but they have to address that, whereas the Greens clearly understand that climate change is the overwhelming challenge and getting to 100% renewable energy as quickly as possible is something that the whole country would benefit from and would be so excited by because it brings so many jobs and so much innovation.

JOURNALIST: Doesn’t Mr Fitzgibbon just have a point with demand going down 4000 gigawatts per hour target isn’t it he is right that it is effectively going up, that that target is going up to about 25-26%?

CHRISTINE MILNE: Unlike Joel Fitzgibbon I think the whole country will be celebrating the fact that we set ourselves a target of 20% renewable energy by 2020 and with the rate things are going with demand falling and the bringing on of renewables, we are likely to meet about 25 or 26% of our energy by 2020 from renewables, that means that we can get to 100% even faster. The Greens want to see set a 2030 target for at least 50% if not more by 2030, we don’t want the target to end in 2020, there’s now going to be a review I think in 2015-16, and we’re hoping that will lead to long-term target. So I think the Greens with the rest of the country are celebrating that in 2020 we set ourselves a target of 20% and we’ve gone so much further. What excitement there’ll be when we get 100%.