Ms BADGER (Lyons) – Honourable Speaker, I rise today to give my first budget reply contribution. We are in a cost‑of-living crisis, a health crisis, a climate crisis, a biodiversity crisis and a housing crisis. Every single one of these crises was created by poor political decisions, so they can be overcome by good political decisions. These crises can be overcome by prioritising the long-term wellbeing of Tasmania’s people and our magnificent island environment.
Unfortunately, the Liberals’ Budget continues on the trend of poor political decisions, to favour chocolate fountains and stadiums over upscaling investment for protecting and restoring our environment. Where is the funding for bridging the state’s digital divide or for boosting funding for frontline services working on the prevention of the national crisis that is family, domestic and sexual violence? We have heard repetitively this week about the intergenerational infrastructure coming from this Budget. What needs to be said loud and clear is that this non‑essential intergenerational infrastructure comes with intergenerational debt and intergenerational climate collapse. This Budget offers an underwhelming prioritisation of investment for the two biggest threats facing Tasmania, and indeed all humanity: inequality and the climate crisis.
Young Tasmanians are being screwed over by this Liberal government. I have friends, hard‑working friends –
The SPEAKER – Sorry, I will ask you to rephrase that.
Ms BADGER – Sorry. Young Tasmanians are being cut short by this Liberal government.
The SPEAKER – ‘Done over’ would be fine.
Ms BADGER – I have friends, hard-working friends in good jobs, paying exorbitant rents to live in unstable share houses because they cannot afford their own homes. People are sick of living in shabby share houses with no insulation and heaters that may as well not exist. Renters are also sick of being kicked out of their homes just so the building can be turned into another Airbnb. The cost of living has gone through the roof and it is hitting young Tasmanians hard. After all, most of us never had the chance to put savings aside for a rainy day. In this Budget there are a couple of small cost‑of-living measures, but they are barely a drop in the ocean of the increase in food prices and everyday bills.
There is also the rise in anxiety from the lack of climate action. Tasmania’s young people are wide awake to the fact that they are inheriting an increasingly uninhabitable planet and that the extreme weather events we live through will only worsen. The Australian Bureau of Statistics has found that the rate of depression and anxiety in people aged 15 to 35 has doubled in the past decade. Is it any wonder? By the way, mental health services are also critically underfunded in this Budget.
What does this Budget do for young Tasmanians? There is no revolutionary program for housing. It is the same old, which is evidently failing. There is certainly nothing serious on the climate front. What it provides is an enormous debt which will be carried by every single Tasmanian but, hey, at least we will have a chocolate fountain.
Tasmania has a huge role to play in tackling the climate crisis, but that fact is absent from the Budget as subsidies to the unsustainable forestry industry continue, and big industries are still using our natural environment to turn a profit free of charge. We should be taxing million‑dollar industries. If we can no longer see the state government pay for what is rising insurance fees for community groups to operate out of public buildings and to run public events, then we cannot justify giving big industry a free ride here in Tasmania. In the Greens alternative budget, mining royalties are lifted by 40 per cent. This simply aligns Tasmania with the national average.
In our alternative budget, there is investment into climate mitigation through the restoration and protection of the environment. Ecosystem restoration investment at sufficient landscape scale is absent from the Liberals’ Budget. This is a massive loss for Tasmania. Ecosystem restoration and land management creates jobs and social cohesion, and it comes with mental and social benefits for all involved. These are invaluable, intangible benefits also not captured in a regular budget.
Unsurprisingly, the late State of the Environment Report clearly shows the need to upscale ecosystem restoration. We are still losing primary forest, woodlands and critical habitat for rich biodiversity. Restoration can help fix the vegetation fragmentation issue, build environmental resilience, and be a key driver in alleviating the worst impacts of climate change. As recommendation 4 of the State of the Environment Report highlights, Tasmania needs to reform its resource management to the standards similar to those at COP 15, including targets to protect biodiversity and restore nature.
This will require investment: funding that is not in the Budget but should have been. With any restoration or protection measures we must adequately deal with destructive invasive species. We have seen an enormous failure to manage invasive species. This is resulting in uncontrolled population causing significant damage across the state. There is no clearer example of a failure on invasive species than on feral deer, which have been allowed to trample sensitive environments in national parks and our World Heritage area. New evidence that was just released last week showed the invasive species had also been damaging the endangered Miena Cider Gums at the Central Highlands. At least the State of Environment report now highlights what environmentalists have been endlessly calling for: to remove the protections on fallow deer.
It is not just the environment suffering due to invasive species. In Mole Creek, rabbits are causing significant damage to public infrastructure. The local school and community association are being forced to use their own resources and funds to address the problem. Not only is there no adequate rectification of the fauna issue in the Budget, but there is also no meaningful action at the scale that we need on invasive flora. The Weed Management Fund is disappearing from any obvious budget line.
With the Greens alternative budget, we have invasive species eradication plans. We have a professional program of eradication in Tasmania’s reserves to develop an invasive species eradication plan. This also involves monitoring, and programs to prevent the spread of fungal diseases such as Phytophthora.
The Liberals’ budget, not surprising, is also not funding new public protected areas. Recommendation 10 of the State of the Environment report says that we need to expand our terrestrial protected areas. This is not a surprising recommendation. It is something that the Greens have been calling for years. We have budgeted to expand the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA) to encompass the universally outstanding Spero‑Wanderer Wilderness, for recognition of the takayna/Tarkine, the West Coast Range, the Vale River catchment, Granite Tor Conservation Area and Research Bay.
Our national parks in TWWHA are some of Tasmania’s greatest safeguards against biodiversity loss. The Liberals’ Budget does not even contain sufficient funds for the core basic management of our parks in TWWHA as is currently needed. There is a continuum of the $100 million increase to Parks and Wildlife funding from previous years, but not more.
Meanwhile, $2 million is awarded to take tourism to the next level. Great, but knowing a large percentage of visitors who come to this state are visiting our national parks, we must ensure that parks are fully resourced to undertake their core work of conservation. In the Greens alternative budget, we have funding for parks infrastructure and upgrade, funding for maintaining existing tracks and visitor infrastructure, new gateway infrastructure and visitor education and interpretation. There is funding for a large recruitment of park rangers, field officers, and critical workers to undertake the maintenance of tracks in lutruwita/Tasmania’s parks. We have accounted for these basic parks investments along with the expansion of the TWWHA by abandoning insulting parks processes such as four-wheel driving in conservation areas of cultural significance, the Cradle Mountain Cableway and the Tyndall Range resort complex walk.
The latter two projects are, miraculously, or through some creative accounting immune to the inflation that all other major projects have seen right around the planet. The Tyndall walk is budgeted at $40 million, which was its original optimistic cost. That is despite the fact that we now know that the build will be more expensive, yet despite the addition of new private pods and project delays already occurring thanks to the inclement western Tasmanian weather, it is still somehow line costed at $40 million.
Similarly, the fanciful Cradle Mountain cableway, part of the Cradle Mountain experience, was estimated to increase in cost from the initial $60 million to $190 million. In the state Budget it is listed at $61 million through the lines, so does that mean there is more federal funding attached to the project after the first grant was withdrawn and that Tasmanians simply have not been told about it?
The RAA reform funding was listed in past budgets but is not explicitly highlighted now, right when we expect to see the review after public comments were received to become public. Our Greens alternative budget sets out high-yielding, low to no-impact tourism opportunities for Tasmania. As announced during the election campaign, key areas of low-impact nature-based tourism deserving of investment include agritourism, which is burgeoning, tall tree tourism and regenerative tourism, and I am delighted that the Islander Way project which is leading the regenerative space on Flinders Island is funded in the Liberals’ Budget.
A staple of these low-impact tourism ventures is declaring the Southwest National Park’s Southwest Sky Country an International Dark Sky Sanctuary. Tasmania has extraordinary views of the night sky but we have missed a key opportunity for environmental protection and a tourism opportunity by not protecting our sky country sooner. New Zealand has just declared its third Dark Sky sanctuary in their pursuit to become a Dark Sky nation. Tasmania could do better. Let us get on with protecting sky country, creating new jobs and business opportunities and sharing even more of what makes Tasmania special with the world.
Numerous small businesses, many of whom rely on the visitor economy, have come forth lacking confidence, given the government’s inability to manage infrastructure projects. They feel that there needs to be much more communication and clarity about all the infrastructure projects coming forward. This comes at a time as they are just recovering from the vast impacts of the COVID pandemic, when they most need certainty to be able to create a clear plan and fully recover from those impacts.
Tasmania has a growing digital divide. As other states met the federal government’s match funding for fibre-optic cable rollout in the past decade, Tasmania has not come to the table.
Ms Ogilvie – Yes, we did.
Ms BADGER – Great, I would love to hear about that in budget Estimates, minister. Our ageing Bass Strait cables will soon need renewing and with new undersea fibre-optic cables comes greater data ability too. The Greens have $20 million as a state contribution to be matched by the federal government and private investment for a total of $60 million. Such a cable investment goes further than we have previously seen, as it would not just connect the north of the state, but provide backup for the south too.
Private investment is a key component to entice a variety of telecom companies, creating a competitive market in Tasmania and helping break any possible monopolies. Greater digital connectivity can ensure regional Tasmania does not fall behind to offer people the ability to run businesses and work from home with the effective bandwidth in busy times as well, and it can also help transform our agricultural industry.
On the topic of future-proofing our infrastructure and industries, we cannot miss any key opportunities to fully invest in the agricultural industry in ways that are perhaps underappreciated. There are things like investing in more regenerative farming. There is always more room for funding in future industries like hemp.
We also need to see further investment in future-proofing energy infrastructure such as community batteries to build resilience and decentralise the grid and underground power lines in high bushfire-prone areas that repetitively disconnect, sometimes multiple times a year, like Dolphin Sands in my electorate of Lyons. The technology exists, we just have to invest in it.
In the face of increasing climate-induced weather events, it is critical that we equip our emergency services. They will be facing more frequent and more severe weather events. They will face exhaustion and the growing need for higher resourcing. They must be kept safe at work as they keep Tasmanians safe. Under these emergency services, I would also include those from Parks and Sustainable Timber Tasmania who respond to bushfires. The Greens alternative budget includes 30 new remote rapid response firefighters, which we partially funded by dropping the government’s contradictory youth strike task force.
The request of $35 million of cuts to police over the next four years is ridiculous during a time when we must ensure there are fully staffed teams all around, especially detectives and the forensic teams who play a crucial role in crime solving without being the ones doing the arresting. They are the staff who are dealing with the national crisis of family and domestic violence and with child abuse.
On that note, did TasCOSS receive the requested additional $500,000 to finalise the family violence peak body to the standards that they wanted from their alliance? Such a body was part of the commission of inquiry recommendations. If it is funded, where is it hidden in the budget lines?
This Budget widens the divide between the haves and have-nots in Tasmania. It passes on larger debt to future generations instead of setting them up for a better, more equitable life in our state.
When the $4 million chocolate fountain contribution was announced, it was done so on the premise that every Tasmanian child had a right to visit Cadbury’s to have that experience. That announcement is emblematic of the attitude that went into drafting this Budget. Instead of budgeting to mitigate climate change and fix the inequality crisis, Tasmania is left footing the bill for handouts to big industry and some inessential infrastructure. Flowing chocolate is not a fundamental necessity for every Tasmanian child. A safe, sustainable, livable future in Tasmania and on this planet is the basic right for future generations.
We can do better. Even the Greens have put together an alternative budget, demonstrating that we can turn this ship around. Maybe ‘turning the ship around’ is a poor turn of phrase given the Liberals’ issues with ships, but this Greens alternative budget, whether you agree with it or not, is proof that we can make good political decisions so all Tasmanians and our magnificent island can enjoy a healthier, fairer, greener future.
