Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

I and my Centre Alliance colleagues strongly support this bill, the Royal Commissions Amendment (Private Sessions) Bill 2019. The conduct of the intensely important Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has overwhelmingly demonstrated the great value in being able to hold private sessions. Where there are deeply sensitive matters at hand, private sessions are critical not only in allowing for full participation of individuals and their families in a royal commission process but also in allowing for personal trauma to be given the privacy and confidentiality that it indeed deserves.

This bill also presents the opportunity for the parliament to remedy a series of antiquated provisions that remain from the original drafting of the 1902 Royal Commissions Act. Most of them are administrative in nature, aiming at improving the general efficacy of the act and bringing it into modern practice, and draw heavily from the recommendations and good work of the Australian Law Reform Commission—specifically, their 2009 report, Making inquiries: a new statutory framework.

Centre Alliance will be circulating a series of amendments in the other place rather than in this House, but I will briefly summarise some of the issues that we will be seeking to address in that chamber. One of them is to require royal commission reports to be tabled in parliament within 15 sitting days of receiving the final report of an inquiry or, if a part of that report is not being tabled, a statement of reasons why the whole report is not being tabled. Another is to require that inquiries that may have a significant effect on Indigenous peoples consult with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander individuals, groups and organisations to inform the development of procedures for an inquiry. Another is to require the government to publish non-binding guidance akin to an inquiry's handbook related to the administrative conduct of the royal commission as to human resources, communications, finance, information technology and records management, including archiving. Another would require the government to publish an update on the implementation of recommendations of an inquiry that it accepts one year after the tabling of the final report of a royal commission, and each year until the fifth anniversary thereafter, to reflect any ongoing implementation activity and to require the publication of an expenditure statement for each royal commission within at least 18 months after the inquiry has concluded.

Centre Alliance believes that it's important to require compliance with the Archives Act 1983 when dealing with royal commission records and to require an explanation from the minister if those records have not been transferred to the National Archives of Australia after five years from the end of each record. It's important that we allow that the minister may, upon application by a person summoned to appear before a commission, authorise payment for all of any part of their legal costs, with the minister being required to have regard to a range of practical factors in making their determination. Finally, there is an amendment to allow for royal commissions to be able, on their own initiative, to refer a question of law to the Federal Court for decision and not to give a decision to which the question is relevant while the reference is pending, or proceed in a manner or make a decision that is inconsistent with the opinion of the Federal Court.

I thank the parliament in advance for their consideration of these amendments of Centre Alliance. We will be sharing them more broadly across both chambers. I look forward to working constructively with all parties in the process. I very much commend this bill to the House.

See this speech in context