Christine Milne, Senator for Tasmania
First Speech - 10/08/2005
Senator MILNE (Tasmania) (5.40 pm)—
It is a great honour and privilege to take my
place in the federal parliament as an Australian
Greens senator standing up for the place
I love: my home, Tasmania. I am standing up
for its wild forests, its undeveloped coastlines,
its endemic species of plants and animals,
and its people. Seventeen years ago, I
joined the farmers of Wesley Vale who, for
the first time in Australian history, took to
the streets on their tractors ablaze with the
slogan ‘Save our soil, sea and sand; Protect
the land’. It was a courageous stand about:
… a people’s right to exercise some control over
their destiny …
It was a stand for country against a huge
kraft chlorine pulp mill which would have
polluted some of the best agricultural land in
the country, carved it up in railway corridors
and destroyed a rural community’s way of
life.
Wesley Vale is my place. It is my country.
It is framed by the Dial Range to the west,
Mount Roland and Cradle Mountain to the
south, Narawntapu National Park to the east
and Bass Strait and beyond to the north. It is
where I was brought up in the fifties and sixties
on a small family dairy farm. As was the
wont of country children then, I roamed
around the farm with my father, catching
tadpoles and rabbits and watched the changing
seasons and the wild ducks leave and
return. I got to know the way the light fell
across the paddocks on late summer afternoons
and the way people helped each other
out and the way they argued in milking sheds
and sale yards about whether it would rain
and whether the local team would win.
It was knowing and loving that country,
Wesley Vale, its stories and way of life and
standing up for them that was the crucible of
my political life. I thank all of those in that
community and my family, who are here today
in the gallery, especially my mother,
June, and son James, my other son Thomas
in London, my nieces and my extended family
in Tasmania and my friends for their support
in my journey. Through it, I came to
realise that my own experience was not
unique; that all over the world people like
the Wesley Vale farmers are struggling to
hold onto their special places, their country,
their values and their way of life.
The ‘son of Wesley Vale’ now threatens
the forests, the Bass Strait and the Tamar
Valley. It is a tragedy that the same struggle
has to be fought all over again. Through
Wesley Vale, I realised that the struggle of
the people at Ralph’s Bay for their coastline
and for the habitat of migratory birds is the
same struggle as those who campaign for
wetlands in Saemangeum in Korea; that the
struggle to save native forests and ecosystems
all around Tasmania from the Weld Valley,
South Sister and the Blue Tier, from the
Tarkine to the Styx valley and from Reed
Marsh to Weilangta is the same as the struggle
for forests in Papua New Guinea, Borneo
and Amazonia; that the fate of the Tasmanian
devil is the same as the fate of the mountain
gorillas in Africa. Both are dying from disease
because of human impacts. I came to
realise that you need to know and love a special
place in order to empathise with other
people’s special places and that to stand up
for one special place is to begin the process
of standing up for them all. It is the beginning
of becoming a global citizen.
It seems fitting, therefore, that I should
have begun my service to the Australian
community here in the Senate by standing up
once again for the land, by being driven on a
tractor to the Senate doors today by the next
generation of young farmers from the very
same district in which my own roots stretch
back over five generations. These Tasmanian
farmers and the processing workers who depend
on their ability to stay on the land and
produce high-quality food are the human
face of the free trade agreements that Australia
has signed. They are the victims of globalization
and the downward pressure on
prices, wages, human rights and environmental
protection that such agreements have
wrought on this nation. The Greens have
opposed them all and last year, when both
major parties supported the US-Australia
Free Trade Agreement, I was overwhelmed
by the scale of the sell-out and all I could
think was, ‘Poor fellow my country.’
This nation needs to have a full, frank and
inclusive debate about values, about what it
means to be Australian. It is imperative that
this struggle to define what our major national
values are is named and reclaimed by
the community as a fundamental debate in
Australian politics, for whichever set of values
emerges dominant from the current debate
will define who we are as Australians
for decades to come. It will shape the lives of
each and every one of us, our children and our grandchildren, our environment and our
global standing as a nation. Indeed it is already
doing so. Not to engage the debate
means that the mean-spirited mediocrity of
today will by default become our national
character tomorrow.
It used to be that every political party
could be defined by values, by the values it
prioritised in the hierarchy, but it is no longer
clear which values underpin mainstream
politics. Every political decision is a values
based decision, from tax cuts, which prioritise
individual self-interest over the common
good, to the slashing of incomes for single
parents and people with disabilities. This is a
matter of justice and justice is something that
you either value or you do not. The abolition
of student unionism is being dressed up as an
issue of freedom of association, but isn’t it
more an issue of equal opportunity for young
Australians?
There has been a concerted effort to quarantine
the values debate to matters of private
and personal morality, deemed ‘family values’,
in order to avoid a values debate on
public economic and social policy. The prosperity
gospel has been adopted to legitimise
consumerism and materialism and to advance
the economic rationalist agenda of
conservative governments. The notion of
‘family values’ is confined to a narrow range
of values to suit a particular agenda. Where I
grew up, honesty, kindness, respect, justice,
fairness, tolerance, love and forgiveness
were family values. Discrimination against
and vilification of minorities, lying, misrepresentation
and meanness of spirit were not
family values.
This quarantining of the values debate in
such a narrow way is designed to do two
things: firstly, to send a signal to the electorate
that the government has a strong values
base; and, secondly, to declare that all other
issues are value free, so that it seems possible
to have strong values and at the same
time trample the very values of honesty,
equality, freedom of speech, compassion,
tolerance and a fair go which Australians
hold dear and which are at the heart of all the
world’s great religions and humanist philosophies.
We have to ask ourselves how we can collectively
save the world’s climate when the
world’s superpower, the United States of
America, and our own country fall back on
the principle of national sovereignty to justify
refusing to take any action to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions that will require a
change of lifestyle or a commitment to fixed
targets. This government condemned the
Kyoto protocol for its modest targets, and yet
it has entered into an arrangement that has no
targets at all and which relies on unproven
technology and so condemns our children
and our economy to massive disruption in
years to come if their gamble fails.
How can we as a global community uphold
human rights if we do not do so in Australia?
As long as our Indigenous people suffer
high rates of infant mortality, low life
expectancy and poor health, as long as we lie
about ‘children overboard’, as long as we
detain asylum seekers and put innocent people
behind razor wire, as long as we ignore
the Geneva conventions and tolerate torture
at Abu Ghraib prison and Guantanamo Bay,
we have no moral authority on human rights.
How can we protect global biodiversity if
our own Environment Protection and Biodiversity
Conservation Act fails so abysmally
to protect biodiversity and fails so spectacularly
to authentically domesticate our global
obligations under the Convention on Biodiversity
and the World Heritage Convention?
How can we protect our borders and our
ecosystems from alien invasive species and
disease and promise farmers around the
world biosecurity—including those vegetable, apple and pear and salmon farmers from
Tasmania—when the provisions of the free
trade agreements prioritise trade over biosecurity
and ecological integrity?
How can we strive for world peace and at
the same time join a coalition of the willing
to invade Iraq on a false premise? How can
we say, this very week, ‘Hiroshima: never
again’, and wag our finger at Iraq and Iran,
whilst at the same time negotiating a nuclear
cooperation agreement with China to increase
our export of uranium?
How can we accuse other nations of corrupt
behaviour and label them failed states
and insist on governance reform when we in
this country engage in a politics:
… in which no one responsible admits responsibility,
no one genuinely apologizes, no one resigns
and everyone else is blamed.
There are those who would argue that we can
do all of these things and invoke Australian
nationalism and coopt all our national symbols,
including the Anzac spirit and the flag,
to justify them. They say that they are standing
up for Australia and the Australian way
of life. But it is they who are selling out the
country. It is they who are suffocating the
spirit of Australia.
Australians do not feel good about themselves
when the government acts as if our
bank balance and consumption patterns can
and should be secured at the expense of other
people and other species. The community
understands the global boomerang effect of
fear and oppression, of driving down working
conditions and environmental standards
and ignoring human rights. They are worried
about what happens in China today because
they know that it will happen in Australia
tomorrow. They know the consequences of
the war in Iraq and that our involvement in
the war will rebound on us. But equally the
spirit of the nation does rally when the government
acts in a way that makes it proud.
The recent reaction to Japan’s attempt to reintroduce
commercial whaling is a case in
point.
What gives me hope is the increasingly
loud and urgent cry from the hearts of Australians
everywhere for a return to what we
know in our heart of hearts is ‘country’—a
return to the spirit of the land and the expansive
values of goodness, honesty, justice,
fairness, equality, generosity, freedom and
ecological stewardship that are for Australians
inherent in the concept of ‘country’.
The second thing that gives me hope is that
democracies are self correcting and the campaign
to rescue the Senate is well under way.
This concept of ‘country’ that I am talking
about is a precious insight we have learned
from our Indigenous people. It incorporates
the land and their stories. It is not jingoistic.
In talking about country, I take this opportunity
to acknowledge that we are gathered in
Ngunnawal country and I pay tribute to the
traditional owners. Just as we must as a nation
progress reconciliation with Indigenous
people, we must also progress our own reconciliation
with ‘country’—our own sense of
place and identity.
The Tasmanian experience can assist in
that process. Change comes from the periphery,
not from the centre. From Tasmania has
come a new way of seeing the world, a new
way of identifying country. Greens politics
globally began in my home state with the
establishment of the United Tasmania Group
in 1972 as a response to the drowning of
Lake Pedder. At the outset, it was a politics
of values, a new ethic. It recognised that at
the same time we are citizens of local communities,
nation-states and one world in
which the local and the global are interconnected.
It is a politics dedicated to bringing
forth a sustainable society based on a respect
for nature, universal human rights, economic
justice and a culture of peace and participatory democracy. These values underpin the
Greens vision of reconciliation between humans
and the natural world.
WB Yeats once said, ‘In dreams begins responsibility’.
The formation of a political
party to achieve that dream of reconciliation
was an acknowledgement that the founders
of the UTG were prepared to take responsibility
for the earth and future generations. I
honour the memory of Dr Richard Jones as I
honour all the founding members of the UTG
and all those people who have supported the
Greens vision in the intervening years and
have made it possible, 33 years later, for me
to join my colleagues Senators Brown, Nettle
and Siewert in this parliament, and others in
dozens of parliaments around the world, as
the Greens representatives.
We are the only political party at the beginning
of this century that is global in its
reach, global in its thinking and global and
local in its action. Such a global perspective
is critical for decision makers in every parliament
of the world. In the absence of a democratically
elected, global decision making
forum, each national parliament is charged
with coming to terms with a world community
interconnected by ecosystems but struggling
to resolve the contradictions and seemingly
intractable problems thrown up by a
combination of a global population of six
billion, global warming, the unprecedented
movement of people and goods around the
world and the increasing scarcity of environmental
resources like fresh water and uncontaminated
soil. The need for global democracy,
cooperation and multilateralism has
never been greater. How 2½ billion people in
India and China exercise their right to develop
will be the key to whether or not
global ecosystems can continue to sustain us
all.
That is why the Green Charter, based on
the Earth Charter, is so important—because
it provides us with a framework in which to
think. Whilst it does not promise right or
wrong answers, it allows the questions to be
asked in such a way as to elicit an ethical
answer. But an ethical answer can only be
found by inclusive, vigorous public debate
and not by silencing dissent. It can only be
found where academics feel free to speak
out, where public servants are free to speak
out without the threat of losing their jobs and
where the community can speak out without
fear of being sued. The notion of cooperative
and inclusive politics does not sit easily in
the Westminster system, but the arrogance of
absolute majorities, one ideology and simplistic
solutions, does not sit easily with the
complex thinking required to address our
common future.
This is the philosophy I brought to the
Tasmanian parliament during my 9½ years
there, six of them as leader of the Greens. By
doubling the size of the Tasmanian Wilderness
World Heritage Area, in saving 22 small
schools from closure, in achieving gay law
reform and in driving the process for gun law
reform and a tripartite apology to the stolen
generation, the Greens were able to demonstrate
that you do not need to be in government
to drive change and innovation. We
will not disappoint the nearly one million
Australians who voted for the Greens at the
last election.
In this Senate the Greens will continue to
innovate. We will work with the Australian
community to find not only solutions that we
as Australians would want to live with but
also solutions that we would be happy to
have imposed on us. If fear, indifference and
greed can have such powerful ramifications,
imagine what hope, compassion and generosity
might do for Australia and for the
world.
In Canberra in 2001, I was privileged to
be chairing the plenary session of the Global Greens Conference when, with a resounding
standing ovation, the Global Greens Charter
was ratified. The moment was captured by a
young Nigerian environmentalist, Nnimmo
Bassey, when he said:
That men women and youth could join hands
across the oceans and other divisions of this
world to face our common challenges was simply
encouraging and empowering. It gave us hope
and with hope we can face the future.
It is hope for the future and empowerment of
the many that the Greens bring to this Senate.
It is to be the voice of those who feel
that they have not been represented that the
Greens take on the role of advocate.
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