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7:30 Report - Senate Panel featuring Nick Xenophon, Steve Fielding and Bob Brown 6:45pm

GreensBlog moves 3:11am

Greens welcome WA's new renewable energy feed-in laws 2:57am

Brown calls for Senate negotiation 1:56am

Greens ‘New Century’ Australia Senate Agenda 11:27pm

School truancy measures are punitive, not progressive: Greens 10:09pm

Greens query tax on hybrid cars 7:26pm

Wild Tasmania - Bob Brown interview 7:03pm

New Senate in 2008 9:00am

Greens on budget 9:00am

GreensBlog

Welcome to GreensMPs 11:06pm

Welcome to the all new, singing, dancing and blogging GreensMPs website.You'll find a range of web based systems designed to better inform you of the Australian Greens Senators' work, including newsroom, galleries, videos, parliamentary achives, info and our collective GreensBlog.Those of you coming through from our old blog site will notice we have switched blogging platforms - please update your links and rss feeds. We are extremely confident that this new GreensMPs site will provide you, the users, with a much better service in terms of both finding out the Greens' position in detail and commenting on it, making your views heard, contributing to the democratic process. We will be cycling out the Senators' old sites, bringing everything together here as we become an officially recognised party in the Parliament.We're far from complete here either - in the coming months we'll be adding a whole range of interactive features designed to make your involvement with the Greens Senators and their work both inside and out of the Parliament much easier.In the meantime, we encourage you to have a browse around, check out some of our new features and continue to stay involved in GreensBlog at its new home here on GreensMPs. If you do come across any errors/problems/concerns/comments, please drop us a line at webeditor@greensmps.org.au.

Explaining the lull - new GreensMPs website coming soon! 7:31pm

It's been noted a few times - in comments and in direct emails to the moderators - that there has been quite a lull in the use of GreensBlog recently. This is sad but true, and I just wanted to briefly explain it.

As well as working with the new Senators and their teams and preparing for the avalanche that is about to come with the shifting balance of power in the new Senate, a fair chunk of our time recently has been dedicated to preparing a new website for the 5 Greens Senators that will encompass each of their sites, an umbrella site, newsroom, galleries, videos, parliamentary archive and, of course, the blog itself.

We are extremely confident, as the new site begins to take shape, that it will provide you, the users, with a much better service in terms of both finding out the Greens position in detail and commenting on it, making your views heard, contributing to the democratic process! It will also, I might add, be a lot easier for us to use than our current outdated mishmash of sites...

As you can imagine, there's a heap of work involved in getting this happening, which distracts us from being able to update the blog as frequently as we'd like. But please don't go away, and we'll be back very soon with GreensBlog fully integrated into the new GreensMPs website!

Thanks for your support and understanding!

The Tims

Feed-in Bill Senate Inquiry: last call for submissions 8:47pm

The Senate Inquiry into Christine Milne's Private Member's Bill for a national, comprehensive, gross feed-in tariff for renewable energy is closing its call for submissions this Friday, August 15.


Those of you who would like to see a strong, supportive policy framework for renewable energy in Australia, I would strongly recommend that you put in a submission to the inquiry as a matter of urgency.


Christine's last post on the issue, setting out what the Bill would achieve, is here, and you can find all the details about the Bill and how to make submissions here.

Zero Nuclear Weapons 4:59am

August 6th is the 63rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city of Hiroshima. I've just spent four days in a city where the memories are not only fresh, but engraved in stone, protected in world heritage-listed monuments, and taught urgently to young and old, local and foreign alike.
The Japanese have a word for the survivors of the twin atomic attacks on August 6 and 9, 1945. They call them Hibakusha, those for whom nuclear weapons signify something other than peace marches.

An elderly gentleman stood at the front of the workshop room yesterday and took us back there, smiling, exquisitely polite. A warm morning in 1945. A brilliant white flash. Thunderous darkness, moments of blind unconsciousness. Waking in bewilderment in the remains of a building thrown sideways. He describes columns of silent ghost people, streaming out of the ruined city with skin and clothing hanging in shreds, a firestorm rising behind them.
One bomb, a whole city erased with 16 kilograms of highly enriched uranium stolen from Native American lands. 90,000 people murdered in an instant; incinerated or pulverised in the blast wave of a single weapon detonated 600 metres above the domed roof of the Industrial Promotion Hall. Three days later, with Imperial Japan still reeling in confusion, another nuclear weapon opens up the sky above the city of Nagasaki. All told, perhaps a quarter of a million people are felled in the blasts or succumb in the coming days and months to the unknown horrors of radiation sickness.

Much of the world has forgotten August 1945. Buried beneath our collective consciousness in the shallowest of graves, lies the uncomprehending knowledge that humanity now shares the planet with 26,000 nuclear weapons, most of them vastly more powerful than the devices of the 1940s. It is bad enough that they are in the hands of at least nine states, but unknown quantities of potential weapons-grade materials are also seeping through the porous borders of the world's black economy. The crucial bomb fuel, uranium, is being sold freely by Australia, Canada and others to nuclear weapons states under a fictional safeguards regime.

It is time we took a proper look at the reality that confronts us. Unless they are formally abolished, one day, nuclear weapons will be upon us again; either in the tip of a cruise missile or in the back of a truck parked in some familiar city. The correct number of nuclear weapons on a small planet facing big challenges, is exactly zero.

The May 2005 review conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) was perhaps the lowest point in the history of the campaign to rid the world of nuclear weapons before they rid the world of us. The Bush Administration crashed a thirty year dialogue to the dismay of the tight knit community of officials, diplomats and activists who have made it their lives' work to wrench some progress from these tortured negotiations.

The Bush presidency is now little more than a cruel joke, and the global abolition community is re-emerging with a new determination. There is a change in the air.

Senator Barack Obama has put the abolition of nuclear weapons on the agenda of a US Presidential race for the first time. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has put Australia into the frame with a proposed new Commission on nuclear weapons. Japanese campaigners are particularly interested in how the collaboration between their government and ours will work. Announced after Rudd’s visit to Hiroshima, the Commission will be chaired by former Foreign Minister Gareth Evans, and co-chaired by former Foreign Minister of Japan, Yoriko Kawaguchi. The Australian peace movement has a crucial role to play as watchdog and adviser as this commission unfolds.

The 7000 participants in the World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs here in Hiroshima are focussed on the next opportunity for decisive action: the April 2010 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in New York. We have a twenty month deadline to disarmament, which will be characterised by a new wave of peace efforts, petitions, demonstrations, fundraisers and planning all around the world. In Australia our job is to ensure that our delegation to New York is given a crystal-clear mandate to bring the age of nuclear weapons to a close.

Today we witnessed the memorial ceremony in the Hiroshima peace park. We watched as the names of 5,100 additional people who died in the last 12 months were added to the cenotaph. The total number of dead: 258, 310 officially recognised Hibakusha.

It is hard to describe the sense of unswerving determination that the dignified elderly Hibakusha have instilled in the representatives of the global peace movement this week. There are now three generations of Hibakusha speaking up: those who witnessed the blast first-hand, their children and now their grand children. The subtle permanence of the damage wrought by radiation on the human genome mean that the impact of atomic warfare is cross-generational. And so it is with the campaign to abolish these weapons.

Spurred on by dedicated local campaigners, the international community has had the foresight to ban chemical and biological weapons. The abolition of landmines and cluster munitions are advanced works in progress. Nuclear weapons are next.

A Nuclear Weapons Convention – already drafted by expert non-government organisations – shows us how. Until the job is done, the Hibakusha will be here to remind us why.

Collateral Damage: housing and heritage on the line in the Pilbara 9:56pm

For most of the country the mining boom is a good news story of mining royalties and economic resilience that has carried us – so far - through the turbulence on world financial markets. However from close-up in the coastal Pilbara, the resources boom has distorted the local economy beyond recognition. Some are making and taking a great deal of money out of the region; others are struggling to survive.

On my recent visit to Karratha, I heard incredible stories from angry and frustrated people. A modest four bedroom house now sells for more than a million dollars and rents are out of control, stretching from $1500 - $2800 per week. People are sleeping in cars, tents and clapped out caravans, with temperatures soaring regularly into the 40s through much of the year. Petrol is nudging $2 per litre and fuelwatch is a joke when the nearest alternative servo is hundreds of kilometres up the road. Women in labour rush to the Karratha hospital only to be told to drive three hours to Port Hedland because there are not enough nurses and doctors.

All conversations here lead back to housing: unless you own your own place or are employed by the mining industry you simply can’t afford to live here any more. Small businesses, government departments and non-government organisations are well past desperate and running out of ways to hold on to staff.

In the absence of robust social or community infrastructure that provides adequate health care, policing, education or cultural activities, there are fewer and fewer incentives for families, particularly those with adolescent children, to stay. In the face of these difficulties, flying workers in and out from Perth or Brisbane makes more sense, which is absurd in an increasingly carbon conscious world.

In April a Senate select committee investigating housing affordability visited the town. They have called for a ‘high level emergency task force’ to make up for years of premeditated inaction on behalf of state and federal governments, but folk up here have had enough of taskforces, reports and recommendations.
Karratha needs 2000 affordable beds, yesterday, to prevent the complete hollowing out of the community. The situation in Hedland and other Pilbara communities is similarly acute, but the cluster of townships around Karratha seems to be worst hit. These are communities literally collapsing under the weight of the boom.

Why? To find some of the answers, we look to the low range of rust-coloured hills across the bay from Karratha: to Murujuga, the Burrup Peninsula.
Murujuga, virtually unknown to the world until a few years ago, is the world’s oldest and largest work of ceremonial art – an entire landscape given over to unbroken cultural narratives stretching back nearly 30,000 years into the late Pleistocene. Along the main peninsula and across the islands of the Dampier Archipelago, up to a million petroglyphs – rock carvings – are distributed across tens of thousands of sites, amidst an enigmatic network of standing stones, boulder terraces, prehistoric campsites and shell middens.

Words can’t quite do justice to this otherworldly landscape of deep red granophyre, steeply incised valleys and shaded rock pools. Along some valleys, nearly every surface is engraved with a riot of archaic faces, birdlife, animal figures, footprints, outstretched hands and wildly abstract geometries.
It is humbling to spend time in this landscape with people who know it well. You quickly realise that we’re almost completely illiterate to the thousands of stories that these rocks have been telling since before the last ice age.

Nowhere else on planet earth do we have a continuous record of human cultural endeavour stretching back this long. Twenty five thousand years before our ancestors assembled the megaliths at Stonehenge, the first complex archaic faces were being carefully worked into the diamond-hard boulder piles of the Burrup.

In the 1960s, the iron ore port of Dampier was established, erasing unknown thousands of petroglyphs and blowing a town-sized hole through the fabric of the rock art province. In the 1980s, the construction of the Woodside onshore gas plant flattened a square kilometre of the central peninsula, dumping displaced rock art into a lonely fenced compound described by one Elder as a ‘cemetery’ and establishing the Burrup as one of Australia’s most important industrial areas.

Since then the gathering momentum of fossil capitalism has treated the Peninsula as an industrial sacrifice zone, scarring the silent terrain with roads, infrastructure corridors, pipeways, power lines and quarries. One of the world’s largest ammonia plants squats in the floodway between Hearsons Cove and the ruined landscape of King Bay, one cyclone away from a public health catastrophe.

Until recently, the highest point on the landscape has been the flare tower on the Woodside plant, but all that is about to change.

Despite a hard fought campaign by local activists, Traditional Owners, rock art conservators and a cross-party alliance of MPs, in 2007 the Western Australian Government signed off on a massive new gas plant – Woodside’s Pluto Project. The Federal Government stood back and watched, declaring the whole Archipelago a National Heritage property while agreeing that specified leases should still be blasted flat for more heavy industry. As elsewhere in Australia, Indigenous voices were silenced by a combination of poverty, overwhelm and recondite legal agreements removing their right to public dissent, which makes their continued resistance all the more extraordinary.

Pluto is being bulldozed into existence on the northern flank of the Peninsula, on an artificial plateau that will be visible for miles in every direction. Forever hereafter, the ancient Burrup will be dominated by this architecture, when at the stroke of a pen the WA Government could have demanded that Woodside locate their plant on the flat coastal plain that stretches for hundreds of kilometres in either direction.

The Burrup’s growing supporters are now gathering their strength to fight for the relocation of an avalanche of new development proposals: a quarry expansion; a huge explosives plant; another gas plant to handle Woodside’s Browse field; an energy hungry desalination plant.

It is no coincidence that Karratha’s economy has been pushed past breaking point – it is simply impossible for a town to expand fast enough to accommodate this breakneck pace of construction.

These ‘developments’ are the logical conclusion of an economic mindset that seems determined to liquidate Australia’s non-renewable resources as fast as possible. Unless sanity prevails and we transition toward a conserver economy, within a generation we will have drained the north-west gas fields, stripped the Pilbara of its ancient ironstone resources and permanently ruined the Burrup. Karratha’s survival at this point would be an open question; a visit to the spooky Goldfields ghost towns should be mandatory for anyone contemplating the future of the Pilbara under our present development model.
Even posing these questions is likely to see us accused of being blindly anti-development, but in fact we are only against blind development. At this pace, there will be nothing for the children of the Pilbara to inherit.

So let’s get emergency housing resources into Karratha to help people out of the caravan park. While we’re at it we also need to take a good hard look at where this rollercoaster ride is taking us, and whether it might not be a good idea to apply the brakes while we still can.

Rudd and Wong’s emissions trading choice 12:32am

This piece was originally published in today's Crikey email.

In the coming months before the emissions trading legislation comes before the Senate, the Rudd Government needs to think hard about what it is trying to achieve.

Does it plan to buy into the lowest common denominator populism of the Coalition? This approach drags the debate backwards, undermines the global climate fight, and risks alienating a significant portion of Labor’s own base who voted for leadership on climate.

Or will it lead from the front, inspiring Australians to embrace this challenge to rebuild, upgrade and retool for a zero emissions future? Will it appeal to people’s best instincts, articulating a positive vision of preparing ourselves for the future by investing in a systemic roll-out of energy efficiency, mass transit and renewable energy?

The final answer will be in the 2020 target that is promised in the legislation by the end of the year, but the signals from yesterday’s Green Paper were decidedly worrying. The Paper was framed entirely around costs and cash compensation instead of the opportunities for transformation we Greens have been advocating.

The Canberra insider view, surprisingly articulated even by the eminently sensible Bernard Keane last week, is that, while the Greens position makes perfect sense, it is politically unacceptable and won’t pass muster with the electorate. This is a leftover from the Howard years where good policy was abandoned in favour of pandering to special interests and appealing to base populism was seen as effective politics.

I don’t believe that that is the case anymore. The Canberra insiders are completely misreading the level of anxiety in the community about the science of climate change and the awareness that, if we don’t act now, there will be nothing that we can do to avoid runaway climate change when the politicians finally wake up.

All around the country, I and my colleagues are accosted by people demanding to know what we are going to do to help them reduce their emissions. Why isn’t the Government helping them install insulation and solar water heating, they want to know. Why isn’t the Government embracing the smart, baseload solar technologies that we are exporting to the US and Spain? What are the Greens going to do about it? They feel that hading out cash compensation while doing nothing to bring on alternatives is cruelly setting them up for a fall when the crunch comes.

Voters were outraged by the capturing of the Howard Govt by the greenhouse mafia. They will be equally outraged by the Rudd Government’s capture and storage in the pockets of the coal sector. This is the one and only case where I am hoping for leakage!

Emissions trading is supposed to go hand in hand with a suite of measures to unleash creativity and innovation and stimulate investment in the zero emissions alternatives. Instead, we have every mechanism imaginable to protect existing investments. The Green Paper even proposes free permits and cash handouts to protect investment in coal generators. This will deaden any stimulus to invest in the much-needed new infrastructure for renewables and energy efficiency.

Just as with increasing the price of petrol with one hand and decreasing it by the same amount with the other, the Government has put its foot on the brake and accelerator at the same time. The wheels are spinning madly, we’re burning up fuel, and we’re going precisely nowhere.

Prime Minister Rudd and Minister Wong would do well to read Nelson Mandela’s first lesson of leadership, in last week’s Time Magazine: “courage is not the absence of fear, but the ability to inspire people to move beyond fear.”

Rudd and Wong are so paralysed by fear that, for all their talk of transformation, they are clinging to the past. The community has moved well past the Government towards the Greens position, opening the field for courageous leadership.

Rudd and Wong would do well to consider this before bringing legislation before the Senate that gets the support of the Coalition but loses the community.

Green Paper sends no signal for change 1:52am

The Rudd Government's Emissions Trading Green Paper can now be downloaded from the Climate Change Department website here.

I've been trying to get to do a post on this since 12.30, but I'm alone in the office with Christine and the phone's been ringing off the hook - which is a good thing!

We will do a proper detailed post, but in the meantime, here is Christine's release from this arvo.

The upshot is that the Government has put their foot on the accelerator and the brake at the same time. The leak this morning about essentially keeping petrol out of the scheme (raising the price with one hand and dropping it by the same amount with the other!) is symbolic of the whole thing. An emissions trading scheme is about driving new investment, but this proposal would protect existing coal investments, shutting the door on efficiency and renewables and mass transit and alternative fuels.

Professor Garnaut is likely to be very unimpressed indeed today. His hard work has just been utterly trashed.

Update on the Tokyo Two 1:02am

In an update on our previous post, we now have more information on the two Greenpeace activists who were arrested in Japan following a four-month investigation into activities onboard the Japanese factory whaling ship and what happens to the whale meat that is processed following their 'scientific' research.

Greenpeace intercepted one of many boxes of whale meat smuggled off the Nisshin Maru disguised as personal baggage, exposing the fact that choice pieces of whale meat were being given to certain crew members for personal gain and that Japanese taxpayers were footing the bill. Once the Greenpeace investigation had been finalised, all the evidence - including the box of whale meat, was handed to the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor, who began a formal investigation.

The Australian Greens are extremely concerned that these activists are being held without charge by Japanese police; it would appear these actions are politically motivated to shut down the successful Greenpeace campaign. It is hard to think otherwise when the Japanese Authorities sent in forty police to raid the Greenpeace offices and seize all computers and financial records. This is a disproportionate reaction to this matter.

Human rights groups from inside and outside of Japan have commented on the arrests. The Japanese Lawyers' Network for Human Rights Observation around the G8 Summit (WATCH) issued a statement on June 28th in which they write:

“The arrest of the two activists is not only a human rights violation with regard to the unjustifiable arrest, detention and investigation, but also a challenge against the freedom of expression. Police repression against the activists' denunciation obstructs the legitimate activities of both Japanese civil society and international society and is therefore internationally unacceptable and subject to global criticism as an affront to humanity.”

On July 9th, 2008 Transparency International posted a statement on their website which reads:

“Transparency International (TI) expresses its solidarity with two Greenpeace activists detained after publishing a report alleging corruption within the Japanese sponsored South Ocean whaling programme, and asks for clarity about the motives of these arrests. The two detained Greenpeace activists Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki had investigated and documented activities onboard a Japanese whaling ship and the resulting sale of whale meat processed during the scientific research undertaken on board. TI requests to release the two at once because it is unnecessary to bind them any longer. TI denounces attempts - even unintentional ones - to intimidate or silence NGOs and nonviolent civil society actors. TI expresses its concern about the drop by the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor of its investigation into the Greenpeace allegations of assumed corruption published in the above mentioned report. The authorities in charge should take the necessary steps to either reintroduce the investigations or clarify the reasons for abandoning the case.”

Jeremy Hobbs, Executive Director of Oxfam International, wrote in a letter to Greenpeace on July 4th;

“Oxfam International supports calls to the Japanese authorities to release the Greenpeace protestors Junichi Sato and Tori Suzuki, who have been detained for several days without charge. We believe that this lengthy detention is unnecessary and excessive, given the fact that they are protesting about an issue of public interest rather than pursuing personal gain.”

The Australian Greens respectfully request the Japanese Government investigate these allegations and consider whether procedural fairness and due legal process has been pursued in this instance under Japanese law.
We are concerned that evidence was presented to Japanese Authorities showing that whale meat had been used as ‘gifts’, that a significant amount of meat had been thrown overboard and that meat from diseased whales was being processed.

Further, the Greens want to express concern that the people who brought these allegations to the attention of the international community are currently being held without charge. Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki have cooperated with police in Aomori and with the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor, giving written statements and offered to present themselves to the police at any time. Their arrests therefore appear to be arbitrary.

The Working Group on the modernisation of the IWC will convene in September to begin the discussions surrounding the future direction of the commission. At this time, there has been no commitment from Japan to stop its 'scientific' whaling operations. Good faith and trust building has been asked for by all sides, but it is difficult to believe that the Japanese government is acting in good faith given that it has not yet agreed to end its Southern Ocean whaling program. Rather, it continues to hold two of its own citizens without charge for questioning the activities of this tax-payer funded program and has chosen to investigate the whistleblowers rather than the activity itself.

The Greens will be writing to the Japanese Prime Minister, requesting that Japan investigate these allegations, as well as putting forward a motion in the Australian Senate expressing concern over the issue, and urging immediate action.

You can read the full Greenpeace report on the evidence collected and sign the petition to the Japanese Prime Minister and Foreign Minister to demand the activists’ immediate release.

Award modernisation - what’s going on? 6:16pm

This piece was first published yesterday by Larvatus Prodeo.
Massive upheaval is occurring to Australia’s standard employment conditions and minimum wages, with little to no understanding or public attention.
The ‘award modernisation’ process currently underway in the AIRC, following a request from the Workplace Relations Minister, Julia Gillard, will impact on all Australian workers … either directly through loss of conditions or indirectly through lowering the base from which agreements can be made.

While the Rudd Government likes to compare its IR policy with Work Choices (…so it can say things are slightly better than they might have been), a better way of evaluating their policy is to look at the industrial relations system that existed in Australia before the aberration of Work Choices. On this test the Government is failing to provide adequate protection for workers.

Surprisingly, when it comes to stripping awards, this ALP Government is going further than Howard and Reith were able to (before the Coalition had the numbers in the Senate) in reducing award conditions and fundamentally changing the nature of the award system.

The award system, while not perfect, provided a comprehensive safety net of wages and conditions which for a century underpinned the rights of workers and preserved the relative equity of Australian society.

The term ‘modernisation’ hides the reality of a reduced safety net, continuing AWAs by another name (ITEAs) … and the politicisation of our minimum standards of work.

The key changes being made to the award system by the ALP government are:

• Reducing the number of conditions in awards to 10 (awards often have up to 30 conditions);
• Reducing the number of awards;
• Introducing a ‘flexibility clause’ into all awards;
• Ensuring the AIRC will only be able to alter awards in accordance with a request from the Minister, or at four yearly reviews; and
• Removing the ability of the AIRC to hear and determine cases on appropriate award conditions.

The reduction in the numbers of awards and the number of conditions in each award will lead inevitably to a reduced safety net, with some workers not only losing actual conditions but also having their safety net conditions watered down. There is no other result possible – some workers will lose conditions, including take home pay.

The ‘flexibility clauses’ which are mandatory in all awards (and collective agreements) effectively create an ‘AWA-Lite’. They will allow employers to enter into individual agreements to alter certain award matters, including penalty rates, overtime rates and allowances. We have been told that these agreements will be subject to an overall no-disadvantage test, although there is no word yet on how this will be enforced.

This is a worrying development for a couple of crucial reasons.

Firstly, award workers are by definition low-paid and face significant barriers to participating in fair bargaining (…that is why they are award workers and not on another form of agreement). These clauses operate like AWAs for these workers, and given that they can affect penalty and overtime rates, they can potentially lead to even less take-home pay.

While Work Choices AWAs received the most attention, AWAs existed before Work Choices, and used a similar no-disadvantage test as that in the proposed flexibility clauses. Prior to Work Choices, AWAs weren’t used very much across most of Australia, but we picked up more in my home state of WA after the Court Government’s state-based individual workplace contracts were overturned.

The evidence shows that these pre-Work Choices AWAs also led to reduced conditions and take home pay for workers.

Secondly, individual agreements undermine the safety net. Can we really continue to call it a safety net when key conditions can be bargained away?

There are serious questions of fairness about these clauses and how they will work. Most of the conditions Australian workers enjoy in the workplaces today came about through the award system – annual leave, sick leave, carers leave, parental leave, penalty rates, overtime rates, termination and redundancy rights and pay … and more recently, rights to flexible hours on return to work after maternity leave.

The value of the AIRC determining contemporary community standards though award ‘test cases’ lay with the open, transparent and independent way in which they were processed, with stakeholders able to bring application for changes that were then evaluated by the Commission.

Awards will now become static instruments. However, our workplaces and our society will remain changing, dynamic systems, far from static. We need to ensure there is sufficient ability in the new system to respond to changing circumstances.

From what we can gather from the ALP’s policy, new modern awards will only be able to be changed by Fair Work Australia following a request from the Minister or at 4 yearly reviews.

This process politicises our minimum conditions. Do we have faith that federal governments will respond appropriately to changes in workplace and our labour market into the future?

The continued lack of paid maternity leave suggests Governments are not particularly willing to adopt new standards in workplace conditions even when there is significant support for a new measure.

There can be no question that our awards need to be updated. Many awards do not reflect contemporary work practices or standards, and the award system languished in the decade under Howard. However, there is a huge difference between genuinely updating awards to reflect modern workplaces … and stripping conditions out of the safety net.

The process being undertaken by the AIRC is also of grave concern. It is a huge task to re-create a new award system – yet insufficient time is being given to this task. In the rush to simplify awards by 2010 to appease big business, the Government is leaving workers behind.

In the end we have an ALP Government accepting in large part the fundamental ideological shift made by the Howard Government to abandon conciliation and arbitration along with the role of worker and employer representatives in that system.

The ALP is not “ripping up” Work Choices or even significantly rolling it back – rather this Government is explicitly accepting the basic architecture of the Howard plan, including the trashing of the award system.

It will be interesting to see how much longer Australian workers and their unions continue to put up with it…

Key issues for the emissions trading Green Paper 1:44am

So the day after tomorrow (ah that hoary old Hollywood chestnut...), Penny Wong will finally release the government's Green Paper, to which Professor Garnaut is one of many 'inputs'. Most of the others being big business.

While it won't be anything like final design, and it won't include any emissions targets or trajectories, the paper should give us a much better idea of what the government's thinking is on emissions trading. We'll have more of an idea of whether it'll be something The Greens can support with amendments. The signs thus far are that it should be supportable, but there is still the chance that it'll be so full of holes that we'd be better off without it.

Here's some notes we've put together on some of the key issues with emissions trading that we'll be looking out for.

To be environmentally and economically effective, the Green Paper must:

1. Acknowledge that emissions trading is only one policy among many:

• The Green Paper should explicitly recognise that emissions trading is only one among many policies that will be required if we are to rebuild Australia for a post-carbon economy.
• Just as high petrol prices have not driven major change, neither will emissions trading without strong investment in the alternatives. Without such investment, the ETS will simply drive up the cost of living without helping people find alternatives.
• Policies such as feed-in laws for renewable energy, funding for mass transit and the roll-out of energy efficiency are more important than emissions trading and, coupled with an ETS, would make it both more environmentally effective and more economically efficient.
• Introducing an ETS without removing systemic support to coal, oil, roads and energy-intensive activities makes it less environmentally effective and less economically efficient.

2. Deliver compensation by reducing carbon debt:

• Emissions trading is about raising the prices of greenhouse-polluting activities and products so as to change behaviour. It is vital that those people facing high costs, most particularly Australia’s poorest people, are compensated for these rising prices. However, it is also vital this compensation boosts, rather than undermines, the point of the scheme.
• Cash handouts (tax cuts, welfare cheques, or free permits) will reduce the effectiveness of the scheme, will be inflationary, and will be temporary relief from a permanent price hike.
• Revenue from permit sales can be used to permanently reduce people’s increasing carbon debt by investing massively in energy efficiency (insulating homes and providing solar hot water, and helping the commercial and industrial sector invest in energy saving equipment), bringing forward renewable energy alternatives, and shifting funding from roads to mass transit and cycleways. These investments must be systemic, not hand-outs to a few.
• Instead of compensating hugely profitable multi-national coal corporations with free permits, we should invest ETS revenue in helping the workers and communities who currently rely on coal to shift to cleaner options – seeding new industries and retraining the workforce in places like the Latrobe and Hunter Valleys for green collar jobs.

3. Implement stringent targets without delay:

• Climate action is urgent. We must move Australia into the post-carbon economy as fast as feasible, reducing emissions to at least 40% below 1990 levels by 2020.
• Costs under an ETS will rise until you reach a tipping point in solutions being implemented, after which time they come down. A fast and stringent target will bring that tipping point forward, while a lax target and delayed implementation pushes it further away. Various studies have shown that extremely swift action can be cheaper than slower action.
• There is no need to delay the ETS – we have been talking about these policies for decades and more talk will only give polluter more time to plead their case, rather than yield policy breakthroughs. Let’s put our noses to the grindstone and get working.

4. Provide broad coverage:

• The more of the economy an ETS covers, the more evenly the cost will be spread. If some sectors are shielded, others will carry a greater cost burden.

5. Set penalties to ensure compliance:

• Only a penalty set at a level that will be higher than the market price for permits will ensure compliance. A low penalty will act as a safety valve for the economy at the expense of environmental integrity. Penalties must include a ‘make good’ provision, to ensure emissions reductions not achieved in one year are achieved the following year.

6. Auction all permits:

• Auctioning permits, rather than grandfathering (allocating based on past emissions profiles) makes the polluter pay, instead of giving big polluters a windfall, and removes the potential for political interference and deliberate gaming of the market.