auspol | scott ludlam

Failing the climate: senate speech on the CPRS

Senator LUDLAM (Western Australia) (1.17 pm 24 November 2009) – I rise to add my remarks on the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Bill 2009 [No. 2] and related bills with a sense of deja vu, because we were here a couple of months ago debating not just the same bill that we are now confronted with but, evidently, we are debating a bill that has been made substantially worse as a consequence of the horse-trading and deals that have been going on behind the scenes.I would like to acknowledge that we have been joined by a couple of school

24 November 2009

Coal or Food: 48 hours on the floodplains

One moment last week sums up why I wouldn’t swap this job for anything. At about 11am on Tuesday morning the Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts (ECA) Committee is confronted with an unusual sight in the Felton Valley, about 20 km south of Oakey on the Darling Downs in southern Queensland. A crowd of people have taken over the road; a sea of green T-shirts and triangular yellow placards, kids lined up with banners, hand-made signs; all the essentials for a home-grown demonstration.

5 October 2009

Question time fail: net filter shapeshifts again

Net filtering got a run in senate question time again yesterday. See if you can spot the difference:

25 September 2009

A fortnight in the red room

The September sittings opened and closed with unplanned symmetry. Opened with a line in the desert sand drawn by Aboriginal elders refusing any further compromise with the uranium miners. Closed with the tabling of a meticulous two hundred page manifesto for the rapid abolition of nuclear weapons, signed by the ALP, the Greens and the Coalition.

25 September 2009

Untangling the laws of terror

It’s rare to hear the phrase “war on terror” these days — it has been seemingly purged from the official lexicon as the superficial certainty of the Bush/Howard years gives way to darker and more ambiguous terrain. Australia is still a nation at war: one and a half thousand troops on the ground in Afghanistan, backing NATO’s installation of a brittle democracy in a violent failed state where the distinctions between friend and terrorist change by the day. But something is going on at home as well: a determined, coordinated expansion of the internal security estate that is permanently

19 August 2009

“A crisis is a terrible thing to waste”

These are turbulent times. The catastrophic bushfires may have wiped it off the front page, but last week saw the passage through federal parliament of the Government’s $42 billion ‘economic stimulus package’.

15 February 2009

…so that was estimates

One of the few advantages of being new to this job is appreciating it’s strangeness with fresh eyes. Three times a year, while the Senate is in recess, an intriguing and largely overlooked ritual takes place in the airy committee rooms of Parliament House in Canberra. Senior public servants, heads of departments and a highly qualified army of advisers and minders converge for five days of cross-examination in front of the Senate’s eight standing committees.

27 October 2008

inaugural speech

I’m the fifth Greens Senator that Western Australians have despatched to Canberra. Four strong women led the way in here, which is a wonderful political lineage.

16 September 2008

Collateral Damage: housing and heritage on the line in the Pilbara

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.

21 July 2008