Blow the Truth

Senator Nicholas McKIM Senate Speech 9 Nov 2020 (Tasmania—Deputy Leader of the Australian Greens in the Senate) (10:39): The National Consumer Credit Protection Amendment (Small Amount Credit Contract and Consumer Lease Reforms) Bill 2019 (No. 2) effectively copies, word for word, the government's 2017 draft bill to better regulate payday lending. Of course, we do need to better regulate payday lending in order to protect people from rapacious lenders and, on that basis, the Australian Greens will be supporting this legislation. Unfortunately, after releasing a draft bill in 2017, the government walked away from any reform of payday lending, until it decided to include a new set of reforms for payday lenders in its recently announced package. Again, unfortunately, the government's recently announced package basically blows up the entire system of consumer credit protection in this country so that the banks can continue to profit at the expense of the lives of so many Australian...

Senator Nick McKim Matter of Public Importance Climate Change Chamber Senate : McKim: As I was saying, this evening we had Senator Canavan and Senator Ayres erect some of the biggest straw men I have seen in my time in politics. I'm not going to waste the very short time I have to make this speech in demolishing every single straw man that they put up, but I will say to Senator Ayres: the Greens have a fully costed set of policies that clearly lay out a pathway to drive Australia's emissions down in line with what the climate science is telling us, which is that we need to start reducing our emissions now, not at some indeterminate time in the future, as proposed by the Labor Party. Senator Canavan said that we didn't cost our policies. Every single policy that we took to the last election was costed in the independent rigorous process of the Parliamentary Budget Office. He shouldn't mislead Australians about what we put before them at the last election. We will again...