Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

This is an arrogant government with total control of this parliament. It is an arrogant government out of control in its behaviour. It is drunk on its own power and its own self-satisfied arrogance. It is governing now in its own political interests. It is not governing in the national interest. Democracy is under threat from this arrogant, out-of-touch government, drunk with power, as I said, and using that total power now to attack democracy. Accountability, fairness and honesty: they are the casualties of this government’s 10 long years, and its victims are the hardworking families of Australia.

When I say 10 long years, it has been in office now for a very long period of time, and it is not unusual for a government that has been in power for this long to develop a shorthand way of dealing with the democratic processes, a shorthand way of dealing with the truth and a propensity to utilise the public funds of this nation in its own political interests and to assume that there is nothing wrong with what it is doing. That is when a government needs a very big wake-up call.

Generally speaking, and in the case of this government, it will get it from the electorate. However, what it will not get it from—unlike most governments in the country in the political lives of most of these members of parliament—are the checks and balances which the Senate has from time to time managed to provide. There was always a situation when we were in office where the Senate would hold us accountable, and now the capacity to do that is no more. It is not possible for the Senate to do that at precisely the point of time the government feels free to give free rein to the worst of its ideological prejudices and obsessions—we see that in industrial relations—at a point of time when the government is most conscienceless about the way in which it handles public funds—and we see that in the utilisation of government advertising, which I will get onto—and at the point of time when the government is most haphazard with the truth and its willingness to mislead, confuse or, as Laurie Oakes would say, obfuscate as it seeks to evade any form of accountability for the actions it has taken and as it puts in place legislation which is manifestly against the interests of the Australian people.

A bulldozer has been put through the industrial relations system. Absolutely nothing of what has been done in industrial relations was foreshadowed by this government during the last election campaign: not the removal of penalty rates, not the removal of leave loadings, not the removal of shift allowances, not the removal of the no disadvantage test from the AWAs, not the determination to deprive workers in companies of up to 100 employees the provisions of unfair dismissal—nothing. Absolutely none of this was indicated to the Australian people during the course of the last election campaign. Indeed, when he was questioned on the possibility of this, Howard, the Prime Minister, was absolutely certain to make sure that anyone with whom he spoke got the view that the opposite applied.

These were parts of the settled elements of the way in which Australians were remunerated in this country—the settled elements of the way in which Australians were rewarded—but a bulldozer was put through that in a state of maximum deceit from this government of the Australian people. It was a complete collapse of any form of accountability, and now in this place the government seek to mislead repeatedly, as we raise these issues with them, as to the real consequences of the actions that they have taken. They use the fact that, in question time, they get the last word to produce grossly misleading information as they seek to explain away the various contracts and events described here in question time. That is the only place where this unaccountable Australian Prime Minister appears to argue the case for what he has done on industrial relations. Twenty-one debates in this chamber in the aftermath of the introduction of that bill, and not a single word from the Prime Minister in any one of them. Question time, where you have the right of reply, where you can say anything you like and you have the numbers behind you, is not accountability.

That bulldozer which went through the industrial conditions of the Australian people has now gone through the parliamentary process. The government that hid its punishing, divisive IR agenda from the Australian people in the last election is now driving that same bulldozer through democratic principles. It manipulates the electoral regulations to stop kids from voting. It did not get much commentary in this place. There are many elements of our society, I am afraid, that are loath to hold the government accountable in these things, and often it seems too hard to sit down and properly analyse the consequences of what government does. A certain ennui, a certain boredom with politics, has well suited the agenda of John Howard over the course of the last 10 years.

What happened when that legislation went through was as close to a political crime as you could conceivably find. Recollect this: the government, with its propositions on AWAs, has basically hit first and hardest at new employees joining the labour market. They are the youngsters coming out of training. Just as the youngsters come out of training to work, so the youngsters come out of their teenage years to vote. What happens to them now, under the changes that are being put in place? The government has determined that the rolls will close the day the writs are issued. Four hundred thousand people at the last election enrolled or re-enrolled between the day the writs were issued and a week later when the rolls were closed. The vast bulk of those 400,000 were young people. Note the cynicism of this government: as it attacks their wages, it attacks their capacity to vote!

In addition to that, the government determined that the origin of political donations up to the amount of $10,000 could be concealed and that those $10,000 could be arranged in a multiplicity of donations in a way that would permit a great deal more than $10,000 to be concealed. This is corrupt. There is no other way of describing it. You know that, when you are in office, you have a special opportunity to sit down and have conversations with people about their interests, and this government does that frequently. Now it has an opportunity to accompany those discussions with an implicit assumption that very large sums of money can pass across into the hands of that political party and help it secure a propaganda effort during the course of an election. These are large sums of money and, when they are capable of being dealt with in multiple ways, they sit at the heart of a very great set of potential acts of corruption.

This act moves away from two decades worth of improving and enhancing the accountability of political parties in electoral acts. It also has to be seen alongside other acts of shutting down accountability in this place or of using power to enhance personal interests. $1 billion has been spent on advertising this government’s position. When the industrial relations act was introduced, $55 million was spent in three weeks—more than all political parties spent in the entire last election period and campaign. That is simply theft. There has been $1 billion worth of such instances. We also find in the way other forms of accountability are handled that laziness that comes with 10 years in office and the sloth and determination to avoid proper scrutiny. We see that, of course, in the terms of the commission of inquiry into the weapons for wheat scandal, which effectively excludes any judgment on the role of ministers, the involvement of ministers or the ability of ministers to uphold their obligations under their terms of office. Those judgments have been removed from the commission of inquiry and any questioning associated with the detail of the issues before that commission of inquiry has been removed from consideration by the estimates committee process in the Senate, which is necessary to take in the way in which these accountability mechanisms have been undermined at each level.

All these things are interrelated; they are not events that need to be seen in singular terms. The commission of inquiry does not have the appropriate powers. The estimates committee process in the Senate, which previously has been the most effective mechanism of accountability in this place, is not permitted to handle those issues. The single greatest instance of corruption in federal politics and the ministerial turning of a blind eye to it at a minimum—culpable neglect by ministers—is not subject to analysis in any place. That was an ad hoc act against the authority of the Senate estimates committee process, and the ad hoc act has now been joined by a systematic attack. The mechanisms of accountability through which governments are placed under scrutiny—put in place when we were in office, with the strong support of the Liberal Party at that point in time—are now removed and the Senate is gutted at precisely the right point in time, a year before the next election.

That laziness which goes to an unwillingness to render themselves accountable also goes to the way in which they conduct themselves in areas of much greater importance in many ways to the national honour and interest. I think of their performance in reclassifying the mission of the Army in Iraq. Yesterday we witnessed here in question time a minister in government prepared to change the mission and place our forces in arguably much greater danger with simply a dorothy dixer in the House as the statement. The Prime Minister in the end was shamed into agreeing to make a public statement on this, but he had no intention of doing so. We know he had no intention of doing so because the Minister for Defence sat there red with embarrassment. He looked like a bottlebrush planted on the front bench of the Liberal Party as he recognised he had been humiliated by the Prime Minister. But how extraordinary it is that when they place in danger the armed forces—which are utilised for so many photo opportunities by the Prime Minister and his minister—there is no explanation, no parliamentary statement, no answers to questions about the capacity of those troops to be supported properly in country and a dismissal of any form of revelation in broad detail of the intelligence estimates associated with the position in which they placed them.

For me, as a former Minister for Defence of this country—I suppose we all have our own prisms by which we assess growing arrogance, sense of entitlement and determination to avoid accountability—I guess I look at a lot of that through the prism of the handling of the defence forces, and that prism presents a very ugly refraction indeed. It is time this arrogant government had its comeuppance. (Time expired)

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