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

The Greens support this reference to the Procedure Committee of the extraordinary letter from Senator Minchin to some of us which said that the government was about to take the axe to the Senate committee system. I had thought that when the Prime Minister said, ‘I am going to be humble and I am going to be modest about my new majority in the Senate and so should we all,’ there was a touch of Uriah Heep about it. Dickens knew how to read people very well, and he would be writing a new novel if he were around at the moment. It is a Uriah Heep attitude. It says: ‘I’m ever so humble, I’m ever so much a servant of the people, I’m ever so much there to do the bidding of the Australian people, but watch out, because really I am much more of a power monger who has no respect of the sort that I would have you think I have for the parliamentary procedures, the democracy and the great institutions of this country if they are going to get in the way of me exercising that power.’

This has now become a presidential style, an executive style, government. The Prime Minister is applying the triple rubber-stamp process to this parliament. He has a rubber stamp in the House of Representatives, where he has a majority. I will come back to that in a moment. He has a rubber stamp in the Senate, where he has a newfound majority, and a backup on most things through the Family First senator. Now he is going to convert the great Senate committee system into a rubber stamp as well by appointing to the chair of each of the reduced number of committees—10 of them instead of 16—a government appointee. Sure, he will get a vote through this place, but that will come at the direction of the party room, which comes at the direction of the executive.

The wonder of all of this is that in a party that bears the name ‘Liberal’ there is such a herd instinct. There is so little individuality. There is such fear of standing out against the dictate of the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister’s office. We will see that expressed in the new Senate committee system. It is a reversion to the situation that existed before 1994, as various government people have pointed out. We look forward to the next episode, which will be to revert to the situation that existed before 1970 by abandoning the committee system altogether. In the Prime Minister’s mind that would be an easy way to get the same result. The Prime Minister knows he is going to get his way here because he has a majority in the Senate—that majority that he is going to be humble and modest about and that he has told other members of the party they should not get intoxicated about. I think the Prime Minister is a little drunk on political power at the moment, and it is showing. When you get that way you lose your sense of judgment.

I do not think that the Australian people will feel the same way about this. The Australian people are very defensive of the Senate and its long history of, its role in, being a hand on the shoulder of government, a backstop, a house of review and, in ancient times in particular, a states house—that is, a house where regional and state concerns could be addressed when the government of the day had lost sight of regional Australia. One of the wonders of all this is that the party that purports to support regional Australia, which is The Nationals, is likely to support this new system without a whimper and, in doing so, to cement even further the power of the Prime Minister in this situation.

The Greens will oppose this change. If the Prime Minister thinks that paying deputy chairs to quietly and neatly go and occupy the chairs is going to make a difference to our opposition, forget it. On the other hand, if you expect the Greens to abandon the committee system and turn our backs on it because it is temporarily being usurped in its purpose and its significant role in this democratic parliament, forget that as well. We will make the best of it that we can and look forward to the time when the government loses control of this place again. That, of course, is in the hands of and awaits the wisdom of the Australian people.

There is some sense—and I have heard this hubris coming through in the last couple of days, including from Senator Abetz—that, because the government has control of the Senate, in some way or other the Australian people want that. It is a false perception. Very few voters at the last election expected when they cast their vote for the coalition that it would mean that the Senate would become a rubber stamp of the prime ministerial office. My sense is that the Australian people do not like that at all. That is not how they see the Senate. They think it is a very welcome check on the excesses of government and the tendency for authoritarianism that sneaks into all governments, particularly when they have been there for a long time. So let us wait and see.

I can tell the Senate that the Greens, while appalled by the proposal to emasculate the committee system and to put in patsies—because that is what they will be; wait and see—