Keith Wolahan (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you to the speakers that have come before me. Australians expect us as the opposition to hold the government to account, and often that means that in motions like this we come up here and we fire back, but I won't be doing that today. There are times when we have to acknowledge when things were wrong on our side and there are lessons to be learnt. There are a few reasons for that. One is that it's not honest to do otherwise. Opposition is a time to reflect on how you can do better if your party is given the honour of being in government again. People won't listen to you when you actually have valid criticisms if you don't look within.

We all come to this place with our experiences. I was a barrister for 12 years before this. In the early days of the scheme, someone I know well came to me and said: 'My daughter is distraught. She's got this letter, and I don't know what to do.' I looked at it and I offered to help her pro bono, which means you don't charge. The more I looked into this, the more I realised something was going wrong quite early in this scheme. Then I heard of others that were in a similar position. What struck me quite early on with that one example was the unfairness of it and how it was not competent. As someone who's a Liberal and believes in the sanctity of the individual, due process and the presumption of innocence, it offended all of those. It was illiberal, it reversed the onus and it hurt people.

And it hurt people on a large scale. We now know—I didn't know at the time—that close to 500,000 people were affected. I saw one number of 470,000. The scale of that did warrant a royal commission. It was warranted, and that process is something that we should review carefully. It is a 900-page report with many recommendations. We have an onus here, whether we're in the executive or in the parliament, like we are, not to blindly follow every recommendation. Despite the distinguished qualifications of commissioners, they're still people too, and it's an administrative inquiry, so we must do a proper reflection upon all of the recommendations.

We must also, going forward, recognise that we still have a duty to have a strong and sustainable safety net. I'm proud of Australia's safety net, and the member who spoke before me is right: any of us may find ourselves in the position where we rely on it. Even if you don't rely on it, I like to know that it's there for my fellow Australians when they need it. That system should be one that is compassionate. It should still incentivise work for those who can work and for whom work is available. It must be affordable and sustainable. We have that duty to those who pay taxes, and we also have that duty because of the impact that excessive spending will have on inflation, which affects everyone.

But, when you look at this particular scheme, in trying to achieve some of those objectives it overreached and it wasn't properly scrutinised. At all levels of government, we should be conscious of the feedback loops when we hear that something has gone wrong. If someone drafts legal advice that says something might be illegal, that should be properly considered and passed up and down the chain of decision-making. We must never tell decision-makers just what we think they want to hear; we should tell them the truth all the time, and that should be timely. It seems, from my reading of the evidence that came before the royal commission, that there was a breakdown in that flow of information, where honest, frank and timely advice wasn't being properly moved up the decision-making chain and probably wasn't being properly considered as well.

This scheme was illiberal, it was unfair and it was incompetent. We must all learn the lessons from it, and we must do so in a way that's above politics. There is excessive joy about this scheme by some, and we see it in the House every day. I would ask for us all to reflect on that. I understand why that would occur, but there are lessons to learn about how to have a competent, fair system of welfare in this country, because Australians deserve no less.

See this speech in context