Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I do not know whether Senator O’Brien is questioning or stating. The point I make is that on the same day the Labor Party has voted for uranium enrichment in the country it intends to vote against an inquiry into Australia’s future sustainable and secure energy supplies and the options. That is studied head-in-the-sand stuff. We are used to that from the government, but to hear that from the prospective alternative government is woeful politics. And it comes on the day we are notified that the government wants to bomb the Senate committee system—this bastion of inquiry on behalf of the public into the nation’s affairs so that we have informed democracy and review of government decisions—and remove everybody but government chairs and reduce the number of committees from 10 to six.

What an awful attack on the Senate committee system that is and what better reason could there be for voting for this inquiry while we can? Labor is saying that it will leave it for some future date. Let me tell you, the intention of the Prime Minister, Mr Howard, is to have the executive run the committee system. A future committee set up to look at this will have a government appointee effectively in charge, if Mr Howard has his way. The terms of reference will be determined by the government. And who comes and gives witness on behalf of the Australian people will also be determined by the government.

We have had a breach of trust by the Prime Minister, when he had said to Australian people: ‘This is an unexpected thing—we have control of the Senate. The government will be humble in its use of that control.’ Today he showed how rapidly he can forget commitments about humility to the Australian people with the announcement that, come August, the government will use its numbers to axe the Senate committee system as it has been working for so many years and to instead install a Clayton’s Senate committee system which the government runs from start to finish. The hubris and the arrogance of the government on this day is horrendous—it is thumbing its nose not just to democracy but to the Australian people’s support of the Senate and its great committee system, which is a model for democracy around the world. The Prime Minister is taking an axe to that and is going to use, hopefully, he would think, his numbers to get that through here in the next sitting week, which is in August. What a black day for democracy this is, with this axe wielding against the Senate because the Prime Minister got a windfall majority in here. No doubt the people of Australia will have something to say about that at the next election.

But now we have the opportunity to have a Senate inquiry, with terms of reference set by the Senate, into one of the most important issues facing the nation. Senator Milne is moving that the Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts References Committee inquires into Australia’s future sustainable and secure energy supplies with particular reference to the range of important reasons why we should be doing that.