Andrew Wilkie (Clark, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Deputy Speaker Freelander, through you to the minister—and I have enormous respect for the minister, and I'm very grateful that he has no objection to be speaking back to the government amendments that went through the House minutes ago—I'm shocked that the government amendments went through the House minutes ago in the way that they did. There was no time to consider them and no time to debate them. The crossbench didn't even realise it had happened until after the fact. This is no way to be progressing and implementing reforms as important as this. These reforms go to cleaning up this place, holding parliamentarians to account for their misbehaviour in the future, to wipe the slate clean after the terrible events of recent years. It was no way for such significant amendments to be dealt with at all. And they are very significant amendments.

For a start, that the deputy chair of the joint parliamentary committee overseeing the IPSC is quarantined as an opposition position is to completely ignore the crossbench—the, right now, 18 crossbenchers—and the millions of people that voted for those 18 crossbenchers. We now have a completely different political landscape than we had before the last federal election. At the last election, the government got I think it was 32.8 per cent of the primary vote. The polls since then are trending down even further. The fact is our country is changing. Now, a very significant proportion of the Australian electorate is voting for someone other than the Labor Party or the Liberal and National parties. That should be reflected in the way this parliament operates.

Yes, there has been some progress, and I'm delighted to say I've been appointed to the Speaker's panel, and I'm delighted to say I'm on the privileges committee. I think that shows a very grown-up approach to the crossbench in those regards. But, in this case, for such an important parliamentary committee to be in the stranglehold of only the Labor Party or the Liberal and National parties is a betrayal of the electorate. It's not what the electorate wants. It's not where the electorate is going. This parliament is just fighting tooth and nail to keep their monopoly on power instead of waking up to what is changing and how this country is evolving.

For the membership of the parliamentary joint committee overseeing the IPSC to be controlled by the privileges committee is bizarre. This is such a thumping conflict of interest. The joint committee overseeing the IPSC is selected by the privileges committee, and the IPSC can't make recommendations to the privileges committee, and the privileges committee doesn't even have to follow any recommendations that don't come anyway. What's going on here? We've lost our way at the last stage of this important process to clean up this place. We really, really have. If we're going to be overseeing the IPSC, surely it should not be done by people selected by the privileges committee. The privileges committee, in effect, is overseeing itself, and that's just nonsense. That's complete and utter nonsense.

I'm very disappointed in the way that these amendments have been brought to the House and rammed through the House. I'm very disappointed with what they go to. I just don't know why the government is behaving this way. There's no good political reason for or public interest served by coming, at this late stage, to this point where the IPSC is effectively overseen by the privileges committee—that's the effect of it—where it can't make recommendations to the privileges committee and where the privileges committee doesn't have to pay any attention to what the IPSC does. This is a great case study in where the government is acting completely irrationally and at odds with the public interest, and it will feed into the continuing decline of popularity for the Labor Party at the next election, when this was a great opportunity to show the community that it's listening to the community, it's responding and it's doing good work. Instead, it does this, and I am just dismayed.

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