Senator BOB BROWN (Leader of the Australian Greens) (5:04 PM) —I just want to respond to a few things that the minister said. Firstly, I made it clear that lobbyists had clobbered moves in Germany that Angela Merkel had put forward. What he is finding is exactly consistent with what I said.

When it comes to this being not about the four big banks but about a range of institutions in Australia, no, that is not so. The ABIP is being founded upon contributions from the four banks. I note that this legislation does not come from this minister; it comes from the Minister for Finance and Deregulation. This minister is simply handling it on that minister’s behalf in this place. I quote from the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, against the background of the international credit situation. He said:

That means, of course, the Commonwealth. The minister continued:

So the government may end up guaranteeing up to $30 billion in financing.

The move by the Greens here is to simply require some quid pro quo from the CEOs and, in particular, those taking more than $1 million a year were they to draw on this facility. We have said to the Treasurer that we would be happy to go so far as to limit this to the developers who are unnamed, faceless, not specified in here and who would want to be guaranteed by public moneys for their shopping developments, for example, and who we hear are doing very well at the moment, by the way. I simply put it to the chamber—I am not going to get into a further debate, because the government has no intention of having the internal fortitude to make a stand on this in the public interest—that those developers ought to have their salaries capped. The minister made the clear point that the Obama administration has been able to put caps on companies that have been bailed out by government loan injections.

We are saying that if that happens under this process where a developer does take government-guaranteed millions to keep finance going then let the cap come into play. There is nothing extraordinary about this. We are simply saying that, if the public largess—money that could be going to hospitals, for example—is going to be drawn upon to help developers who cannot get new financing when a foreign developer, for example, refuses to refinance a loan, let us make sure those developers are not taking home more than $1 million, three times the Prime Minister’s salary, while that loan facility of public money is being offered. The Rudd Labor government says, ‘Oh no, we cannot do that.’ Obama can but Rudd can’t. We are not going to simply say, ‘Oh well, we tried.’ We are making a stand on this issue.

I note, by the way, that the minister said he is seeking an assurance from the Senate that the Senate will move ABIP bills if they are required at some future time. Fair crack of the whip—to quote an authority. The government is now refusing to put any cap on the CEO salaries of developers in this country, many of whom are on the 200 richest list.

Senator Sherry —Fair suck of the sauce bottle.

Senator BOB BROWN —Senator Sherry says it is a ‘fair suck of the sauce bottle’. I think that is another way of putting it. The government says it wants the Senate to come in here and pass these bills if some developer gets into trouble in the future but is not prepared to ask for some sort of restraint on that developer. Come off it! The Greens will deal with each situation on its merits. Let me forewarn the government that, if at some future time a developer gets into trouble and seeks a bailout important enough to rescue the workers who are employed by that development—and that is where we are concerned—but still wants to pocket multimillion dollar salaries under those circumstances, it will need to bring in a CEO salary cap for those developers.

We will always act in the interests of working Australians in a matter like this, but we are simply not going to, as the government intends to, accede to any developer who comes along on a fat, inflated, unfair, unwarranted, multimillion dollar—and, in some cases, tens of millions of dollars—development taking an amount of money off the people of Australia in circumstances where that developer will have failed and is calling on the public largess. This is the exact circumstance that worried Obama, where CEOs were being rewarded for failure. The government is saying to the Greens and, presumably, the opposition, ‘We want to guarantee in advance that you will reward CEOs who have led a development corporation into failure with a public guaranteed loan and with no requirement of a salary cap.’ The Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the minister are going to have to rethink that. Sure, in those circumstances, we will move to help the workers who are involved, but we are simply not going to throw away, as this government wants us to do, our responsibility to ensure that CEOs also pull in their belts under those circumstances.