Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

This is a government which is increasingly drunk with power. The longer it stays in office the more contemptuous of the national interest it becomes. There is always politics in public life, but this government is always only ever about politics. We have a Prime Minister who wakes up every day thinking, ‘How is it that I can do over the Labor Party?’—a Prime Minister for whom the national interest comes a distant last. We heard a feeble rebuttal from the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry. You would have thought he would say something—just something—about how this government may have governed in the national interest or give some defence of the national interest, but we got nothing. He was absolutely threadbare.

Why do we believe that this is a government which is not governing in the national interest but only looking after its own political interest? In the first place, there is the use of taxpayer funds for Liberal Party political advantage. We have had a massive government advertising binge with over $1 billion spent in the course of the last decade. Indeed, when we examined Senate estimates in May we discovered that a staggering $250 million in advertising was proposed for expenditure in the lead-up to the next election. That includes over $50 million for the private health insurance campaign, $47 million for the smartcard awareness campaign—you can write to every Australian household many times with $47 million—$36 million for child support reforms and $15 million on independent contractors. This $250 million comes on top of a $130 million advertising placement spend for the current financial year, so you are looking at a $380 million campaign all up. This is a breathtaking abuse of taxpayers’ money. In the run-up to the 2007 election campaign, taxpayers will be footing the bill for political advertising, not the Liberal Party.

The Australian public should brace themselves for wave after wave of propaganda on the scale of last year’s IR campaign. That campaign raised the bar of government advertising and the government clearly has no intention of lowering it. The smartcard campaign is supposed to be about reminding people to register. If you sent out reminder letters, we would all get six letters each. Drunken sailors would be dipping their lids at this level of spending. Hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars will be torched on government spin and propaganda in order to try to get the coalition re-elected.

That campaign has involved Liberal Party advertiser ‘Lucky’ Ted Horton and has essentially reconvened the Liberal Party advertising dream team, with the involvement of Liberal advertiser Mark Pearson and also the former Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister, Graeme Morris. This is a campaign which benefits Liberal Party mates and it is unacceptable. Frankly, with apologies to Winston Churchill, never before in the history of government advertising has so much money been hosed up against a wall by so few in so short a time.

We have had a dodgy process associated with government advertising—inadequate tendering and a whole series of arrangements in which proper process had not been followed. FOI documents reveal that the government acted against departmental advice that its Work Choices advertising campaign should not start until after the legislation had gone through the parliament.

It is not only about spending taxpayers’ money; it is also about the damage that this government has done to transparency and accountability. Over the last decade the government has almost doubled its number of advisers to 445. This has greatly assisted ministers where they have chosen to neglect or abuse their position of trust. Their growing staffs have provided politically devoted service. This sort of development underpins the unaccountable nature of the Howard government. Issues concerning proper conduct can no longer be dealt with by this parliament. Advisers have the capacity to shoulder blame and responsibility for a minister’s action or inaction without any fear of real consequences. Parliamentary secretaries cannot be questioned during question time and ministerial advisers cannot be questioned by Senate estimates or other parliamentary committees. What we need is better legislation—freedom of information law being updated so that ministers, their advisers and their departments cannot delay or withhold information on the basis of their political interpretation of public or national interest.

The mother of all accountability failures has been the AWB scandal. These failures have included the pitiful response which this government made to the request by the UN Chief Customs Officer, Felicity Johnston, for Australia to investigate allegations that AWB was paying kickbacks to Saddam Hussein and the government’s failure to notice the dramatic escalation in trucking fees being paid to Alia. They went up from $US12 a tonne in July 2000 to $US44 a tonne and subsequently $US55 a tonne by December 2002. This was when petrol in Iraq was 10c a gallon and the real cost of inland transportation was estimated at less than $6 per tonne. There was also the government’s failure to investigate the front page of the New York Times, which specifically indicated that Iraq was running a pay-off racket, and, of course, the failure of Australian diplomats in the Middle East to pick up what was common knowledge about the use of Alia to circumvent UN sanctions.

The question is: faced with such monumental failures which led to this massive scandal—the payment of $300 million to Saddam Hussein—what action has the government taken by way of response? Ministers say, ‘We were misled by our advisers,’ but they take no action to penalise them. The only rational conclusion from such ministerial inaction is that ministers are not sincere. Either ministers did know more than they are telling, more than they are letting on, and will not punish advisers for fear of having the whistle blown regarding their real state of knowledge, or they approve of not being advised and want to maintain this system of ministerial ignorance and plausible denial. If ministerial responsibility and public accountability are to mean anything in this country, this system must be cracked open and the public should no longer be expected to tolerate such miserably low standards of ministerial performance.

This practice of the government of putting politics first instead of the national interest has been causing damage to us. It was interesting to read in the Australian recently that the United States says that it now has 72 per cent of the Iraqi wheat market. Prior to the war Australia had 90 per cent of Iraq’s wheat trade. The government’s desire to put their own political interest ahead of the national interest has led to this debacle—we have basically lost the wheat trade to Iraq. We have Australia’s trade and foreign policies being steered by ministers whose surplus of hubris and deficit of steering skills are reminiscent of Toad of Toad Hall. Little wonder our trade deficit has grown and our international reputation has shrunk.

Finally, we learned in the last couple of days that the government have moved to increase the printing entitlements for members of the House of Representatives from $125,000 to $150,000—again, putting their political interest ahead of the national interest. $125,000 is already too high and this 20 per cent increase is totally unjustified. It gets worse. MPs will now be able to roll over unspent entitlement to the tune of 45 per cent or $67,500. That would bring next year’s entitlement up to $217,500. So 2007 will see a rerun of You’ve Got Mailonly it will not be starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan; it will be starring a Howard government MP in a marginal seat near you! They have so many leaflets they will probably call out the RAAF to do an aerial leaflet drop.

This reflects the determination of the Howard government to use the benefits of incumbency to build a moat around their sitting MPs and turn each government electorate into a fortress. This is consistent with their attitude to the tax deductibility of election campaign donations and their government advertising binge. If it were happening in countries like East Timor or the Solomons, Australia and the rest of the world would be giving them a lecture about democratic practice and culture. This abuse of taxpayers’ funds for political advantage is a blot on Australian democracy.

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