This post was first published at ABC's Unleashed site:

With the global financial meltdown meeting the climate meltdown head on, the potential to deal with both crises using the same solutions has been gaining support.

Last month, the United Nations Environment Program joined with Deutsche Bank and others to promote a 'Green New Deal' based on investing billions of dollars in the four pillars of renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean transport and ecosystem protection, reducing greenhouse emissions, building infrastructure and creating millions of new jobs. World leaders such as US President-elect Obama, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon have publicly embraced the proposal, with Obama listing a $150 billion clean energy plan as his top priority.

The 'Green New Deal', taking its inspiration from Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 'New Deal' to build the USA out of the Great Depression, is only the most recent embodiment of strategies put forward from Hobart to London over the last few decades, recognising that investing in protecting the environment is the only sensible economic plan.

There are increasing concerns that the Government's Forward with Fairness legislation will not be delivering sustainable fair workplace laws but rather will be serving up Work Choices-lite.

The Greens have already argued the award modernisation process will result in a deterioration of minimum conditions of work, particularly affecting workers who are not able to access genuine collective bargaining.

On 12 November 2008 I read out in the Senate the stories of women workers finding life difficult under the current laws and wondering what life will be like under Forward with Fairness. The Greens strongly believe the voices of disadvantaged workers must be heard in the upcoming debate.

Yesterday the Rudd Government demonstrated very clearly where its climate and energy priorities lie - not with the proven renewable energy solutions, but with the geosequestration pipe-dream that Al Gore has recently called "too imaginary to make a difference in protecting either our national security or the global climate".

Fresh from burying Christine Milne's feed-in tariff Bill with a majority Senate Inquiry report saying it's a "great idea, but let's not do it", the Rudd Government went on last night to push through a Bill which gives a huge benefit to those who seek to bury CO2 under the sea floor - letting them make profits without having to carry the liability. This is a recipe for a new sub-prime crisis, telling industry that they can make significant profits safe in the knowledge that they will not need to carry the can for more than 20 years.

The debate on this bill is worth reading in its entirety if you have time. It exposes quite how blinded by industry rhetoric the Government and Opposition both are. Perhaps the pinnacle of this is to be found in

What an extraordinary day! That the American people have elected - by a large margin - Barack Obama to be their President is something I can scarcely believe!

Bob Brown has welcomed the election result here.We must all hope that this can and will herald a new era for global politics - an era of hopeful, positive, visionary politics.

Now what will happen?

The thing I’ve found most fascinating about the responses to the Treasury’s ETS modelling
released yesterday is how, all of a sudden, a pile of big coal’s
biggest fans are agreeing with us that coal with geosequestration isn’t
going to come cheap!

Malcolm Turnbull, for example, told the media yesterday
that “The cost of carbon capture and storage is probably the biggest
single assumption in this whole analysis… There is no full-blown
demonstration plant employing carbon capture and storage so estimates
of its costs are speculative.”

Well-known climate naysayer, Brian Fisher, writes in today’s Australian
that “The Treasury’s assumptions on the capital cost of construction of
a CCS-ready coal-fired power plant appear to be about half those
estimated by well-qualified industry experts.”

This is a speech I delivered to the Sydney Institute last night. You can also listen to it here or download a pdf here.

Sydney Institute, October 27th 2008.

Green Politics, the Balance of Power and the Green New Deal.

Good evening. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this evening about Green Politics, Balance of Power and the twin global meltdowns of climate and finance. There has never been a more critical time to be a Green and there has never been a time when the philosophy and experience of Green politics - based on forty years of environmental, social justice, peace and democracy campaigning - has been more important. The decisions that will be made in the next five years are crucial for the future of life on Earth.

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.

We're pleased to present some new features here on GreensMPs - this new site for the Greens Senators was always a work in progress, and we still have a few things up our sleeve.

You'll notice a few additions to the site;

• Events - keep up to date with functions, events & important dates.
• Forums - take part in discussion on a variety of topics.
• Petitions - put your name to important petitions run through GreensMPs.
• Polls - make your vote count here on various issues.
• Tip-offs - keep your GreensMPs informed on important issues, totally anonymously.
• Links - branch out into our best picks of the world wide web.

The last three days have been quite a revelation of exactly what's going on in Tasmania's forests. Regardless of the rhetoric of sensitive management of the forests, the real story is one of wantonly sending species towards extinction and viciously attacking those brave souls who stand up for protection.

On Monday, Bob Brown launched a new report by Margaret Blakers and Isobel Crawford into the state of the Swift Parrot

On Monday, Waleed Aly had a superb opinion piece in the SMH which sadly went largely unnoticed. In the piece he argued persuasively that the biggest long-term impacts of major economic crises are the changes to the socio-political terrain that they tend to trigger.

The prime example, of course, is the dramatic shift towards fascism and other forms of xenophobic politics triggered by the Great Depression, not only in Europe but across the globe.

Aly's great fear is that the current economic crisis could well lead to a new xenophobic politics. This is a fear which rang a deep chord within me, as one whose political views were shaped significantly by a Holocaust survivor grandfather.

Last Thursday (Oct 9th), a large number of police participated in a raid of the Kunoth town camp in Alice Springs. Officers jumped over fences to enter the camp, displayed rifles, pushed and abused residents and trained a laser on the chest of one man.

Police claimed they were looking for weapons, following a tip off from the fire brigade that there were guns in a car that drove back to the camp. A miniature toy gun was later found on the dashboard of the car.

I've just seen this excellent video that I felt was worth posting. It is from Van Jones talking about his new book, The Green Collar Economy, putting a concise argument for spending half the money that was spent on the Wall St bail-out on delivering an economic and environmental boom.

In excellent news this morning, The Age reports that Christine Milne's amendments to the Luxury Car Tax, exempting fuel efficient vehicles from the levy, are already having an impact!

Ian Porter writes:

"THE changes made to luxury car tax have already started to influence the design of premium cars, with Audi announcing plans to install smaller diesel engines in some of its models so they consume less than seven litres per 100 kilometres - and become exempt from the tax."

Audi Chief Joerg Hofmann is quoted as saying:

It's not hard to imagine what life in one of Australia's big cities in 2020 would be like if we keep going with the roads obsession of successive governments. With peak oil and carbon pricing driving petrol costs through the roof, battling worse air pollution and worse congestion, there would still be no real alternative for those who want to get off the oil addiction and get out of their cars.

But, just for a minute, imagine if the State, Federal and local governments decided to change direction.

Picture living in a thriving community, a clean city, with regular, fast, safe trams, buses and trains running around a well-constructed network, planned around community needs and desires. A city of 5 million people or more running smoothly, cleanly and happily!

The Victorian Greens have done us all a huge favour by setting out not only what this future would look like for Melbourne, but also how to get there! By 2020,

I'd like to introduce you to our new Greens MP in Queensland - Ronan Lee, the Member for Indooroopilly.

Ronan became Queensland's first Greens MP hours ago when he resigned from the Labor Party, and joined the Queensland Greens.

Ronan has joined the Greens because he feels, as I do, that so much more can be achieved for a greener way of life in Queensland.

This article by Christine Milne was published in New Matilda on 24 September

In one of those perfect ironies, Prime Minister Rudd's announcement of his $100 million push to make Australia the global coal hub last Friday came on the same day that yet another so-called "clean coal" project, Santos' Fairview operation in Queensland, was scrapped.

The Fairview collapse "was to do with getting the funding balance right", according to a Santos spokesperson quoted in the Australian Financial Review last Friday. That, of course, is code for "we want more money from governments", tactfully argued by a company whose last half-year profits were $304 million and whose project has already been handed $75 million in taxpayer funds.

The Rudd government has continued this week to fail the 1.2 million Australian aged pensioners, as well as those on disability and veterans benefits.

On Monday, the Greens moved an amendment to the Coalition's bill to increase the aged and veteran pension. The amendment would have seen the $30 a week income boost go to disability pensioners as well, but this was not supported by either the Government or the Coalition.

The momentum to gain an increase for Australia's 1.2 million pensioners seems to be at a peak, with all political parties, except Labor, now supporting at least a $30 rise.

Dr Brendan Nelson this week will introduce to Parliament, a private members bill that will seek to raise the single aged pension by $30 a week.

While the Greens have stated that they will support such a motion, we believe that it has no chance of succeeding given the Opposition's numbers in the House of Representatives. It also appears a little hypocritical of the Coalition to suddenly support the plight of pensioners given that their struggle was ignored in 11 of the Howard Government's budgets.  Peter Costello, in his new book, describes how just a year ago this was not a priority for the Coalition when their party room knocked back the idea of an increase.

It was a relief that Professor Garnaut's defeatist proposal last Friday that we effectively give up hope of preventing runaway climate change was received with some scepticism and disbelief in much of the mainstream media. Journalists weren't overly enthusiastic about an approach that kisses goodbye to the Great Barrier Reef. When I raised with them on Monday an array of other impacts, including loss of the Tibetan glaciers that feed all the major rivers of Asia, they were even less impressed.

So I was extremely pleased to see three of Australia's top climate scientists - David Karoly, Bill Hare and Amanda Lynch - come out swinging yesterday, saying Garnaut had gotten it wrong. The Age's Adam Morton did an excellent job getting that story out, and it ran across the media all day. Here are Christine Milne's comments from yesterday on it.

But perhaps the most powerful revelation of the day was that, when push comes to shove, Prime Minister Rudd would rather fall back on climate sceptic-style lines than confront the need for real change.

This piece from Christine Milne ran in today's Crikey email.

After all his careful statements of the prisoner's dilemma, Ross Garnaut has blinked.

Garnaut restates the problem in today's report, making the point that we cannot go to the global climate negotiations and plead a special case. He goes so far as to say that:

There will be no progress towards an effective international agreement if each country lays out all of the special reasons why it is different from others, and why it should be given softer targets. When climate change negotiators from any country list reasons why their country has special reasons to be treated differently, and take them seriously, we should be quick to recognise that the negotiators, and the countries they represent, intentionally or not, are inhibiting effective international agreement.