George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I strongly support the Australian National Preventive Health Agency (Abolition) Bill 2014, because it is a removal of duplication and expense that is an unnecessary drain on taxpayer funds and I question why we need to have an agency that tell us exactly what to do. Before the election the Liberal and National parties said that we were going to remove unnecessary red tape and regulation, and that is what we are doing. We are doing it here today because the Australian National Preventive Health Agency is a redundant agency. It is funded by the Commonwealth, funded by taxpayers, in addition to the Commonwealth Department of Health, despite the fact that most of its functions actually overlap the functions that are in the Department of Health.

In addition, a range of other Commonwealth research bodies have been funded to work in the same space: the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, the Productivity Commission and the Australian Law Reform Commission. None of these bodies, though, were ever specifically tasked by government to actually lobby government, but this agency that we are abolishing here today was. One of the legislatively defined functions of the agency is to lobby and advocate for public policy change. The agency is a taxpayer funded lobby group—government giving money to an agency to then lobby the government for particular changes. How crazy is that?

I read a lot from the Institute of Public Affairs. They put out a lot of good stuff. One of the reports they had, which was called The biggest vested interest of all: How government lobbies to restrict individual rights and freedom, said:

One-third of the submissions to the Preventative Health Taskforce—which established the Australian National Preventive Health Agency—were from bodies which received large amounts of taxpayer funding.

So, there you go: taxpayer dollars going to agencies that are going to another taxpayer funded agency to recommend that an agency be created that recommends back to government programs that have to be funded out of taxpayer dollars. It is absolutely crazy.

The method of this self-lobbying works something like this: (1) Taxpayers fund an agency to come up with a health-first paternalistic policy; (2) taxpayers fund research to justify the policy; (3) taxpayers pay for the agency to lobby the government to impose the policy; (4) the policy is then introduced; (5) the policy is then measured and evaluated; (6) if the policy was ineffective, a stronger policy is then proposed, because the earlier one failed; and (7) if the policy was effective, a stronger policy is proposed because the earlier one succeeded. And round and round we go on that taxpayer funded merry-go-round. We end up with a self-reinforcing taxpayer vortex of control.

While, with this bill, we are getting rid of some duplication, this bill includes transitional provisions for functions from the agency to transfer the Department of Health. I am glad that this agency is going, because it is, as far as I can see, a lead apparatus in the creeping nanny state. We have seen the nanny state creeping into our lives, particularly under the last government—riding on the back of these supposed preventative health measures. We have just heard from the member for Wills and after I had listened to about five minutes of his speech, I thought, 'God, I should be dead'—after all that doom and gloom. I am one of those people, as you can see, Mr Deputy Speaker, who suffers from something called obesity.

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