Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Deputy Speaker, it gives me pleasure to rise on this first MPI for this parliament to talk about a government for all Tasmanians. It is acknowledged that that’s what all Tasmanians want. They want a government that’s representing their interests, that’s in their corner, and that’s standing up for the things that matter to them.
The challenge is that no two Tasmanians are the same. We are not cookie-cutter creatures and different Tasmanians have different sets of values and prioritise things differently. That is the challenge that we as parliamentarians have to acknowledge and have to accept and have to confront: we represent different people. We represent people with different interests and different priorities. In that context, one of the things we’re really looking for is a parliament for all Tasmanians. A parliament that can actually get things done. A parliament that’s not necessarily going to deliver one way for one group of people or one way for the other, but is genuinely working for everybody, that’s negotiating collaborative outcomes, that’s talking, and that’s ultimately delivering for all Tasmanians.
That’s why we Greens strongly support or prefer a power-sharing parliament such as the one we have now. A parliament where government doesn’t have a majority in its own right. It can’t bulldoze ahead with legislation in its own right, and it can’t just simply do the things that it wants to do because a small handful of electors or a small handful of donors want them to do it.
A minority parliament, such as the one we’ve got at the moment, that’s built on foundations of goodwill, built on elements of stability and a commitment to last a full-term, and ultimately built on a sense of collaboration is welcome. We Greens will be doing our best, as we have done already, to deliver outcomes for everyone through negotiation, through collaboration, and through debate in this Chamber, and holding ourselves to a standard of behaviour that we would expect of others. That is our commitment to this parliament and to Tasmanians.
Of course, this does present challenges. I mentioned before, donors, and we still have an outstanding issue whereby government, coming back to government, doesn’t necessarily have the interests of Tasmanians at heart because it is potentially too heavily influenced by the donations of major corporate players. This has played out significantly. That’s why we Greens and others in this place are committed to reforms when it comes to transparency about political donations. We’ve now got, thanks to Greens legislation, transparency around political donations over $1000. On 1 July this year it came into place and the Tasmanian Electoral Commission has now got information on its website about who donates to who, which individuals donate to individual members or individual political parties, which of the organisations and businesses. This is a real challenge for public policy development across the world, but especially in Tasmania, because we still see a situation where donations that really shouldn’t be eligible are being made to political parties and that is potentially having an influence on policy outcomes that are not necessarily the best for Tasmanians.
One of those issues is short-stay accommodation. Everybody knows short-stay accommodation is a critical issue in Tasmania. It’s stripping whole home rentals out of the market and delivering them into short-stay hotels. On the TEC website we see that Airbnb, one of the main providers, has given money to both the Liberal and Labor parties. The question that raises in our minds and in many Tasmanians’ minds is well, is whether government governing for all Tasmanians and delivering decisions that are the best for all Tasmanians, or is government governing for Airbnb?
We could say the same thing about pokies in hotels. Both the Labor and Liberal parties have taken donations from Federal Hotels and the hoteliers association and that begs the question of the government backtracking on its commitment from a mandatory precommitment card. Why is that? Does it truly believe it’s not in the interests of Tasmanians or is it because it’s receiving donations from vested interests? Government for Tasmanians? Yes, that’s why we need to reform our political donations laws so we are actually making decisions in the interests of Tasmanians.
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