Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

The reduction from $27,286,000 to $26,952,000, and going south in the parliamentary secretary's answer, brings me to the fact that the Ombudsman is not a government department but is an independent statutory officer set up by an act. This has been described by a previous Ombudsman—a very fine Australian, Dennis Pearce—as being both a blessing and a curse. Whilst it frees him from undue pressures of government, it also means that there is no ready access to departmental or ministerial support. I know there is a practice whereby people are seconded from government departments to the Ombudsman's service for the purposes of a particular investigation, but that too can have its downside. So I wanted to ask whether or not there was any consideration of what ombudsmen have said over time about either creating a parliamentary committee to have oversight of the Ombudsman's office, which would give it a direct connection to the parliament, or making the Ombudsman an officer of the parliament so that there is greater recognition of the way in which he can be answerable to the parliament and, indeed, can seek direct access to departments when he needs it—so the issue is twofold.

I hear that the main reason for the drop in funding for the office is that they have been relieved of responsibility in the Territory, but we still have not come to the nub of the question about the rising numbers of illegal boat people coming to Australia and the fact that a policy of having $900,000 over two years was set aside to look into the questions that arose from that—yet the number is so large that it seems an impossible task. So has the government abandoned that policy?

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