Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Knowing our history and handing it on from generation to generation is vital for our Australian democracy. In that endeavour, it's hard to say anything is more vital than preserving the critical historical material in our National Archives so that it's accessible for Australians today and tomorrow and into the years beyond.

This afternoon I want to praise an opinion piece written by former Prime Minister John Howard in Nine newspapers in mid-January. He welcomed the fact that there'd been a recent injection of nearly $68 million of funding, to allow the Archives to do, really, the emergency work and avoid a catastrophe, with some of our key historical documents at risk of not being able to be preserved in a digital form into the future. He pointed out in that opinion piece:

The National Archives of Australia truly fits the definition of a national treasure. The material contained in the archives is integral to an accurate understanding of our history as a nation.

And that is so true. If we want to teach history, then it's very important that we have the facts of our history, so that Australians can understand where we've come from and where we're going, that they can access this material and that it is never lost.

This afternoon I want to argue for more funding for the National Archives, because the amount that has been provided, whilst welcome, will, as I said, get the Archives through the immediate emergency, but, as the Tune review has found, far more money will be required into the future. This is no ordinary spending program. It's a bipartisan issue. The Archives don't express a political opinion. As former Prime Minister Howard pointed out, they merely preserve the primary sources of what actually happened in our history, and preserving them is vital for us as a nation.

So I am arguing for more funding for the Archives, but I'm arguing for a bit more than that this afternoon, because additional funding can be seen as a cost but it should be seen as an investment in our nation. So, as well as having the additional funding, I'm very keen that, in the future, whether it's in this parliament or the next, we end the days of the National Archives coming to government at a time of crisis, every one or two years, seeking money so that we don't face the situation where vital records are not preserved. There is an advisory council, which I know does a very good job and gives advice. The Archives themselves appear before a Senate estimates committee, as you'd expect. What I'd like to see, in terms of getting certainty and clarity around their funding for the future, is for a joint parliamentary committee to be able to have the Archives in regularly, to understand what the needs are, put a bit of sunlight on the task at hand, create a bit more understanding of how important it is, and be able to recommend that to government, on a long-term basis of the sort of funding that's required.

As you'd know, Mr Speaker, I'm not an advocate of creating new committees unnecessarily. If there were an existing committee that could do this—perhaps the joint public accounts committee—where the parliament itself took some ownership of this bipartisan issue for the benefit of Australians today and tomorrow, then I think that would be a very, very good thing. I put that out there as an idea, in the last word in the adjournment debate on this Thursday.

House adjourned at 16:59

The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Mr Zimmerman ) took the chair at 10:00.