Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Attorney General) Share this | Hansard source

This is a do-nothing government. After eight long years in office, they are still scratching around looking for a reason to be there. This government did nothing to prepare for the bushfire onslaught that devastated our nation in the Black Summer of 2019-20, despite multiple warnings from the most senior fire chiefs in the country through 2019. All the PM could manage was a secret holiday in Hawaii, and a disgusting, self-serving excuse that still reverberates almost two years later throughout our nation: 'I don't hold a hose, mate.'

This government did nothing and they continue to do nothing to build the quarantine facilities this nation has needed for almost two years now and which, as omicron and the ever-present spectre of other new variants makes clear, we still need. This government did nothing to ensure that Australians received an urgent supply of vaccines to ensure our population was protected from COVID-19 before the debilitating lockdowns our country has endured.

What have they done to keep on top of the significant harms occurring through social media in order to keep Australians safe online, particularly children? Next to nothing.

There have been endless announcements by the Liberal machine marketing department—a few press releases, a few speeches, a few press conferences and a few breathless headlines on the front page of their tame newspaper, the Australian. Nothing much of real substance to better protect Australians, particularly our children, has actually happened.

We in Labor hold that social media platforms have a responsibility to stop their platforms being misused by anonymous users to incite violence, spread disinformation and abuse, and defame people with impunity. Because we believe that the safety of Australians is paramount, online safety is an area of strong bipartisanship where Labor works constructively with the government on measures that will genuinely improve online safety. But this is not a new problem. Yet Mr Morrison has waited until the eve of an election, eight long years after the Liberals came to government, to announce that this government is proposing a new inquiry—another announcement by this tired, do-nothing government of yet another inquiry. If this government actually ever presents actual legislation to actually do something, Labor will study it closely. But this announcement now, for another inquiry on the eve of an election, sounds like just another bit of grandstanding, because that's what this government most likes to do—grandstand.

We all know what this government do after they complete most of their inquiries—nothing. They ignore them. Understandably, if you do nothing, nothing happens. Nothing changes. That's the story of this government. Perhaps I might not be being entirely fair here. They do have a press conference. They do make some announcements. They do furrow their brows after inquiries report and say things like, 'How could we have known?' or even, 'We are shocked.' They often even say they accept all the recommendations of the inquiries they have set up and then they get on with doing nothing, because that's what this government is—a do-nothing government.

Let's look at what happened with the Sex Discrimination Commissioner's inquiry into workplace sexual harassment—her landmark Respect@Work report. The former Attorney-General, Christian Porter, left the landmark Respect@Work report to gather dust on his desk for over a year, and he refused to even meet with the Sex Discrimination Commissioner to discuss the report's recommendations. When the government was finally forced to act on the report, after months of controversy following the courageous revelations made by Ms Brittany Higgins, the government claimed:

The Australian Government has agreed to (in full, in-principle, or in-part) or noted all 55 recommendations in the Report.

You can hear the weasel words there.

The government didn't even have the courage to say it was rejecting the Sex Discrimination Commissioner's recommendation for legislative changes to establish a clear, positive duty on employers to prevent workplace sex discrimination, harassment and victimisation. But that's exactly what the government actually did when we came to the legislation in this parliament in August. In August the government, differently from what it said when it was announcing its response to the report, claimed it could ignore this key recommendation made by the Sex Discrimination Commissioner because, the government said, such a duty already existed, and, so claimed the government, the Sex Discrimination Commissioner's Respect@Work report was wrong.

What happened with the government's inquiry into their so-called Commonwealth Integrity Commission—that's the Morrison version of a national anticorruption commission. The Prime Minister has announced that, having called a public inquiry into the exposure draft of their catastrophically flawed bill and having received 333 submissions that they claim to have been carefully considering all year—you've got to feel sorry for the new Attorney-General, who took on the job in March; her claim right throughout this year has been that she has been carefully considering the 333 submissions on the government's version of an anticorruption commission. The Prime Minister's announcement, in the last week, was that they have decided to ignore every single one of the 333 submissions—every single one of them.

So their proposal is unchanged. Amazing! It must've been perfect! Except, of course, it's not. Their proposal is only perfect as a means to establish a cover-up commission, a protection racket to allow corruption in government to go unchecked, which is just how this government likes it, and the minister at the dispatch box right now knows all about it. What do we have here? Another inquiry.

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