RANN ADMINISTRATION

The Hon. D.W. RIDGWAY (Leader of the Opposition) (15:26): This afternoon I want to talk about connections. The horse racing industry has connections. The Mafia has connections. We read in South Australia about people connected with bikie gangs. But I want to talk about electrical connections and about Mike Rann, the worst premier South Australia has ever seen, whose administration was mired in personal scandal and professional incompetence, and who, together with his hapless treasurer, the truly inept Kevin Foley, set South Australia on the path to poverty.

Mike Rann came into power on a lie. He lied to Peter Lewis to secure Lewis as Speaker of the House of Assembly. He resisted, together with his unfit attorney-general, Michael Atkinson, the establishment of an independent commission against official crime and corruption. His contempt for democracy and the rule of law saw people able to be gaoled on the basis of hearsay and untested evidence. His prisons became overcrowded under his rack 'em, stack 'em and pack 'em policies. The United Nations found that his children's gaol broke the UN Charter on the Rights of the Child.

This contemptible man has now been appointed by the Labor Party in Canberra to a $55,000 a year position as chair of Low Carbon Australia. What is Low Carbon Australia, you might ask? It is a creature of the federal Labor government, set up as an independent company with over $100 million of Australian taxpayer dollars, which it doles out to 'facilitate the transition to a low carbon economy'. So, not content with wrecking the South Australian economy, he now has a mandate from his Canberra Labor cohorts to create havoc federally, because the relationship between Mike Rann and the so-called low carbon economy is like the relationship between a leech and a vein.

In 2006, Mike Rann ordered the installation of mini wind turbines on city office blocks and schools. He ripped $331,000 out of the pockets of hard working taxpayers in suburbs like Salisbury, where families were struggling with their own electricity bills, so that he could pay for these wind turbines. The first one was put on the roof of his own office block in Victoria Square. None of them worked properly. The one installed on the Victor Harbor High School roof was such a dud that Rann's education minister had to admit that it had turned into an education project more than a generator.

South Australia has more than half of the nation's wind power. South Australia has one of the most wind-intensive power systems in the world. It all happened when wind power generators became donors to SA Progressive Business, which is the Labor Party's fundraising entity. In rolled the dollars and out rolled the wind farms. The government gave them major development status to get around local planning laws.

Next, Rann gave renewable energy companies massive tax breaks, rebates on payroll tax: up to $5 million for each solar project and $1 million for wind. If you wanted a blow-hard at the opening of a wind farm in South Australia you just rang Mike Rann. Babcock and Brown did before it collapsed in a heap of debt—bad debt. Mike Rann opened Babcock and Brown's Lake Bonney wind farm near Millicent in 2005. He spruiked the company as it went down. Babcock and Brown owed $3.2 billion in interest-bearing debt to local and international banks. The last thing that Mike Rann did as premier—his very last act before he departed his sullied office—was to change the law to allow wind farms to be built within a kilometre of anybody's house. That is twice as close as the minimum distance just over the border in Victoria.

Rann's changes also limit the liability of communities to challenge current and future developments. Why would he do that you might ask. It was to stop what he called the nonsense of the existing legal and democratic process. What better tutor could he have had for that than former UK prime minister Tony Blair. This year, Blair appointed Rann to the International Leadership Council of The Climate Group, so Rann will spend his honorariums, his large parliamentary pension and gratuities zipping between Canberra and London, burning up CO₂ as he jets wherever the wind blows. Mike Rann, political donations and self-aggrandisement—that is the connection. It is time we pulled the plug.