Mr BAYLEY (Clark) – Thank you, Madam Speaker. I start by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land upon which we meet and the Tasmanian Aboriginal community and pay my respects to Aboriginal elders past and present. We do indeed meet on stolen Aboriginal land. This is land that was never ceded. This is land that was taken at the point of a gun, and a treaty that was undertaken with the original peoples on their exile to Wybalenna at Flinders Island and was never honoured by the state, the Crown, and still remains unfinished business when it comes to our relationship with Aboriginal people here in this parliament as we swear allegiance to the King and act on his behalf.
I think we would all do well to reflect on the words of Dewayne Everettsmith in the Chamber on the opening day of this parliament, as he unpacked for us the innate connection between Aboriginal people and the land, sea and sky country. In fact, in front of a portrait of Queen Victoria, I think we have to accept exactly how generous Dewayne was, not only with his time but also with his stories and sharing everything up to the creation story of palawa with the people in that Chamber.
For a community that does not universally accept or necessarily participate in our system of governance, for Dewayne to come into that place and offer that wisdom and knowledge, I think was a true gift that we should cherish and accept. We should also accept that there is so much more that needs to be done in terms of reconciliation, recompense and repair when it comes to Aboriginal people. After 10 years of lofty words from the government, starting with former premier, Will Hodgman, wanting to reset the relationship, we are still lagging behind woefully when it comes to meeting the needs of Aboriginal people.
Dewayne talked us through the challenges and issues to do with identity and the responsibility of the Aboriginal community to identify and acknowledge their own people. He was probably more circumspect about some of the other actions that this House has consistently failed when it comes to Aboriginal people, and by that, I mean enacting some legislation that can truly give effect to protecting Aboriginal heritage in this state.
Shamefully, for this parliament and this government, it is now three years since the relevant minister came into this House and tabled a report into a review of the Aboriginal Heritage Act. Three years ago, he said it is clear that the act does not provide effective mechanisms for protection, nor does it adequately consider the significance of Aboriginal heritage in the Aboriginal context. That means that the Aboriginal Heritage Act does not work, and it is incumbent upon us as parliamentarians and lawmakers to ensure that it does.
I find it appalling and I think Aboriginal people will find it galling that this parliament and this government promises to act to retrospectively amend a coastal policy to accommodate a massive, industrial, foreign-owned development at the drop of a hat, while we have been waiting three years for anything that looks like draft legislation to amend the Aboriginal Heritage Act. It is shameful and needs to be remedied in this term of parliament.
So too does the return of land. There has been no land returned to Aboriginal people for 20 years or thereabouts. Over the last couple of years this parliament has snubbed an opportunity to return land as a new Aboriginal-owned national park tenure in kooparoona niara. We must do better.
Then there is the Pathway to Truth Telling and Treaty report, at the moment sitting dusty somewhere on the Premier’s shelf after being written by two eminent Tasmanian professors, an ex-Governor and a professor of law, with very little action taken as yet to enact it. I implore you all, as members of this House, to step up in our responsibilities to take our roles seriously and make life better for Aboriginal people and to deliver equity, justice, dignity and the return of land.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I have not had the opportunity to congratulate you on your election to your role and I congratulate any other members who have been elected to official positions in this House. I congratulate all members, and particularly new members, for their election to this Chamber.
I thank the Tasmanian Electoral Commission for their diligence and professionalism when it comes to conducting the election. It was a difficult election, with extra houses, extra seats, a different ballot and more numbers needed, and clearly it was carried out comprehensively, diligently and professionally.
In advance of the 51st parliament, I also want to acknowledge and thank the clerks and all the parliamentary staff in this place who make our life so much easier when it comes to the passage of the work of this place. Thank you in advance and we look forward to working with you and ensuring that funding to the House is adequate to meet the needs that we, with an additional 10 members, are placing on the services of the House and the services we demand, such as the library services, Hansard, the cleaning services and so forth. We will continue to watch that carefully and make sure this House is adequately funded to do the work it needs to do to support us to do the work.
To Rosalie, thank you for leading us into the election and congratulations on your re‑election, and to Cecily and Tabatha, congratulations. It is absolutely fantastic that you have joined us in this Chamber, and we are so proud to be five in here. We are five because Helen as well has been elected. Helen, I wanted to leave you last because two seats in Clark has been an aspiration of the Greens for many decades, and in 2024 we finally achieved it. Thank you, congratulations, and similarly, I am looking forward to sharing this electorate and sharing the workload with you. Well done to all.
As with every other member in this place, I need to thank the campaign staff, the volunteers, for doing the hard yards on getting us elected. We also went not only from this election to the House of Assembly, but many of us, particularly here in Clark, went on to campaign for the Legislative Council elections as well in terms of Hobart and Elwick. I congratulate our candidate Janet Shelley for the campaign she ran in Elwick, albeit unsuccessfully, and thank all of her volunteers as well.
I also want to make mention of Cassy O’Connor on her first day on the job today in the other place, who was much loved and so effective in this Chamber for many years and has now been elected to represent the Greens in the upper House. We are a completely focused team of six that will be taking our agenda forward with positions that are consistent with our party values and the policies we took to the election, and we are so looking forward to that.
I also want to leave an acknowledgement and a thanks to our families because, as has been mentioned in many inaugural speeches already, we cannot do the work we do without the support, the love and the endorsement of our families, acknowledging that they make a sacrifice alongside us as well.
I was elected in August 2023 and am now humbled to be elected in my own right. I have to say it does feel different to be elected in your own right as opposed to a recount. I want to reflect on the last six months of the last parliament because, for me, perhaps it looked a little bit normal. I was sitting here watching and I knew no different, but I am told and can see now how completely and utterly chaotic it was, all the way down to the very last day when the House was adjourned with business still on the paper. I think we even still had a condolence motion for Fran Bladel to be dealt with that was just cut off at the knees and left behind.
We went to an election to try to restore some certainty and some dignity to this House. The rest is history. The numbers speak for themselves and despite the fact that they carried on like pork chops that they had won the election, the Liberals have only ended up with 14 seats and have to look to the crossbench in order to deliver the level of confidence and supply that this parliament needs for it to do its work. I find it both surprising, interesting and a little bit galling that the so-called 2030 Strong Plan for Tasmania’s future appears to be a fait accompli. It appears that this government thinks it can deliver that so-called strong plan as if no negotiation is needed, as if everything should be delivered because it is an inherent right of this government, because it has 14 seats. Clearly, that is not the case. Clearly, there is going to be a strong role – not only for the Labor opposition and the Greens opposition, but the crossbench – to scrutinise the agenda going forward; to pull out the most odious bits and to add value where it is possible. There were odious bits in that 2030 so-called strong plan that were aimed entirely at winning votes that did not materialise.
Things like the 40,000 hectares of high conservation value forests. Opening up these reserve forests to give back to an industry that itself, at the time of that policy announcement, said they did not want it; that they rejected this policy. Things like the youth crimes strike force, something the government’s own Commissioner for Children and Young People has utterly rejected and is inconsistent with anything the commission of inquiry rejected. These are the odious bits of the 2030 Strong Plan that we, as the Greens, and I am sure with the support of others in this House, will work very hard to make sure they are struck out of the agenda going forward.
Then there were the unbelievable bits of the 2030 Strong Plan. Things like capping the stadium spend. What a crock to think that a project no one believes can be delivered for $715 million. We learn now, confirmed again, that the Federal government’s contribution is for things other than the stadium, like wharf upgrades, like housing. Tasmanians are on the hook for every single dollar of cost overrun when it comes to the development and construction costs of the stadium. Yet we are led to believe that somehow the government can cap expenditure at a certain amount and let the private sector take over from there. They are the unbelievable bits.
We Greens will be scrutinising the stadium very strongly. We will be making sure the numbers are on the table, that there is transparency and accountability when it comes to the costs associated with this stadium and the process related issues. Making sure that stakeholders, important stakeholders, long cherished stakeholders like the RSL, are heard and their interests are protected as part of the process going forward.
When it came to the 2030 Strong Plan, there was also the absent bits; completely absent bits. Things like a cable car up kunanyi/Mount Wellington. When it was knocked off by the planning tribunal several years ago, the first thing the Premier did was write a letter to the cable car proponent offering support; ‘How can we help you build your cable car?’ in his State of the State speech. Opening parliament in 2023, the Premier made it very clear he was willing to act to further facilitate a cable car up kunanyi, but, missing in action, no mention of anything like that in election campaign context. We are yet to see whether that is to materialise. I am not encouraging it, but I am raising and highlighting the fact that if and when it does come, it will be completely outside of any electoral context, utterly undeclared in the electoral context.
I will give you a little bit of credit on the government side of the benches because there are some positive bits of the 2030 Strong Plan. It is great to see the Liberal Party, and the Labour Party, finally coming some way to accepting the relevance of arguments long preferred by the Greens and going some way to adopting policies. Things like Airbnb: finally accepting there is a critical problem when it comes to the stripping of whole home rentals out of the rental market into Airbnbs and trying to do something about it. We are yet to be convinced the policy approach that has been put forward is going to do anything, however it is welcome that you have accepted that there is a problem.
Things like half price public transport. The Greens have a policy of free public transport going forward, full stop. That would cost as little as $12 million to the budget every single year. It is very welcome to see the Liberal Party, matched by the Labor Party, half the price of public transport for a year. It is only a year; it is only going to do so much but, at least, it is something. It is great to see the Liberal Party come some way toward the Greens agenda regarding renters’ rights and pets; having a pet in the home is very welcome. Having reform to the Residential Tenancy Act to allow that is going to be a positive change. However, it is not enough. It clearly is not enough and more needs to be done.
We Greens will stick to our agenda. We will anchor everything that we do back to our party values: ecological sustainability, grassroots democracy, social justice, peace, and nonviolence. To speak to that, the two bills we have already tabled: bills like donation reform. Making sure the long talked about, the long promised – including endorsed by the Labour Party – reforms to donation disclosure and thresholds are finally enacted so that we do not go through another election, just like the last one, where we do not know who pays the piper. If the Greens and independents can have the capacity in real time to post donations on the website then, surely, the major parties can as well.
It is fantastic to see the member for Lyons, Ms, Badger, table today, the Police Offences Amendment (Begging Repeal) Bill 2024. Repealing begging as a crime is utterly consistent with our social justice values. We will be looking forward to that debate going forwards.
During the election campaign we promised to introduce legislation so that we have an EPA; an Environmental Protection Authority that actually has teeth. We continually see the situation where we have an EPA that just gums away on the problems the fish farming industry has. It has no capacity to actually deal with areas of environmental non-compliance and environmental degradation.
In in my portfolio areas, I am very much looking forward to taking forward on behalf of the Greens, initiatives and arguing initiatives, when it comes to properly protecting renters. Rents are going through the roof across the country and around the world; Tasmania is no exception. We need to make sure that we end no-cause evictions. We need to increase minimum energy efficiencies and we need to make sure that renters have genuine rights so that they cannot be evicted with no cause.
We need to make sure that our development is indeed sustainable, whether it is the EPA or whether it is fighting off changes to things like the coastal policy. We need to be making sure that economic development is sustainable development. Just because something is so-called renewable energy, it needs to be in the right place, it needs to be assessed through the right process and it needs to have the endorsement of the local community.
We want to see free public education. We want to make sure that our public schools are properly funded and schoolchildren who go to those public schools actually can do so for free, relieving cost of living pressures for their parents and making sure they can have a decent education that is not going to cost them an arm and a leg.
We need to respect and support our veterans. The cenotaph issue, as evidenced in the stadium debate, is a case in point as to how we are failing in that regard. The minister, to his credit, does a lot of work lifting up veterans and supporting their cause but here is a case where the rubber hits the road. Here is a case where the Cenotaph and the impact and the values of the Cenotaph are genuinely impacted by a big major development. Where is the government? Missing in action on that.
I am passionate about the arts. I want to see the arts supported. I want to see artists have a living wage. I want to see facilities in the arts like the lift in the Salamanca Arts Centre – how simple is it to have functioning infrastructure in this place?
To finish, we need to make this parliament work. We intend to collaborate and cooperate. There will be challenges; we will not always agree. The Liberal and the Labor parties are increasingly hard to tell apart. Luckily, we have a crossbench that is bigger than the Labor opposition and can organise and can achieve good outcomes for the Tasmanian people in its own right. That is where our commitment lies, and we will be going forward on that basis. Thank you very much.
