Greens MPs

The Greens have consistently stood up for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander rights and I'm proud of the action we're taken in the Senate on such things as the Stolen Generations, opposing the NT intervention and the roll out of income quarantining, on health services, petrol sniffing, stolen wages and kidney dialysis.

Australians in PNG begin to cast their votes this week as polling for Australian elections has started in Australia Foreign Missions around the world. The PNG Greens Party in support of the Australian Greens has called for Australians in PNG and the Pacific to vote for Australian Greens.

Many people have been asking about the Greens position on reform of the National Electricity Market - the NEM.

While this is not a topic that is of much interest to mainstream media, it is hugely important because the design and regulation of NEM fails to create any incentive to improve energy efficiency - in fact it creates barriers to energy efficiency and peak demand reductions, as well as both large renewable energy generators and small distributed co-generation systems.

This is a problem because electricity prices, which have already jumped significantly in recent years, are expected to rise by up to 42 per cent over the next few years (even before the imposition of carbon pricing). This is because the monopolies that manage the electricity grid are planning to spend more than $40 billion on expanding and augmenting the network.

Rather than spending billions on more generators and expanding the electricity grid to meet increasing demand, what we should be doing is investing in energy efficiency to avoid the need for new generators and grid augmentation in the first place. From the broader economy point of view, this is the much cheaper option.

As TV programs from Masterchef to Food Safari show, we Australians love our food. But many of us, including our governments, are complacent about where it is grown and who produces it.

While people discuss the threat of obesity in the suburbs and in the seat of power, nobody talks about the threat of global food scarcity. No one in Government seems worried about where the world will source its food or the consequences of shortages. Few are concerned about land being bought by overseas interests, about farmers being driven from the land by low farm gate prices and trade rules which discriminate against Australian growers. In fact, the Labor government in its 2010-11 budget cut programmes for natural resource management and land stewardship in the face of climate change and peak oil.