Andrew Southcott (Boothby, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Primary Healthcare) Share this | Hansard source

The opposition supported this amendment to the Australian National Preventive Health Agency Bill 2010 in the Senate and supported a similar amendment when the bill was last debated in the House. The National Preventative Health Taskforce recommended that the National Preventive Health Agency be an independent statutory body. It has been set up so that the advice and recommendations will be provided to the minister and the minister alone. That is why we thought—and Senator Xenophon and the Greens also thought, and it was originally Senator Xenophon’s idea—that the advice and recommendations from the CEO to the minister should be made publicly available. The amendment, as the Minister for Health and Ageing has said, states that it should be made publicly available within 12 months of being provided.

The Reserve Bank of Australia provides the minutes of its meetings within six weeks. The Productivity Commission makes its recommendations publicly available. This is an important step in transparency. The advice and recommendations from the CEO will be available for all of the parliament and for all of the public. We will be able to see the ideas, and if ministers do not take up those ideas then oppositions and others will have the opportunity to ask why not and might have the opportunity to take up some of those ideas themselves. So we support the motion to agree to the amendment and welcome the minister’s backflip on this.

Question agreed to.

See this speech in context