Robert Ray (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, on a good day. You would wait for a good day! But it is good to have the discussion, not just because we want the intellectual exercise; we all feel like we can participate in the processes. It is an empowering thing and I recommend that you continue it. We are going to keep a very close eye on how the estimates committees operate next November and February to see if this is the last territorial demand of the government or if they are going to try to fundamentally change it. I hope not.

I am sceptical about some of the activities of Senate committees over the years—I admit that—but the longer I am here the more I change my mind on estimates committees. As a minister I found that it was a good process, and in opposition I find that it is a good process. It is the one thing that demarcates this chamber from those in the rest of the world, basically. No chamber has a scrutiny mechanism as good as that of the estimates committees. I have seen the state ones—really terrific, they are! You rotate questions. So, Senator Ferguson, you might ask a question and you have to wait for seven more questions before you can follow it up. It is a joke. At least we can say that we have developed a system. No particular party can take credit for it—all parties can. It is a system that we will monitor to make sure that it remains valuable.

I have to return to the question: why the changes? We heard the little bleat, ‘We want to go back to the way it was under Paul Keating.’ Really? Why? Why did you put in all the effort in 1994 to change it? The only answer we can get is: ‘We’ve got the numbers now.’ So all the posturing, all the philosophising and all the arguments about scrutiny, proportionality, fairness and all that were just a screen at the time to grab chairmanships, apparently. You are actually debasing your previous history by putting up those sorts of arguments. We have not been given a good reason as to why the change is necessary. We have heard about duplication and the fact that some matters to do with legislation have been referred to references committees. I am afraid that the problem here is your fundamental misunderstanding. It was the committee stages debate that was supposed to go to legislative committees.

If there are broader issues to consider, like second reading issues, they could always go to reference committees, and that was always understood. You have simply misunderstood that. It would have been nice if the government, which was then in opposition, had actually obeyed the letter and the spirit of the changes in 1994 and made those committee hearings the actual committee stages. But no, within two weeks of implementing that system, they were calling witnesses from all around the country to maximise their political position. That is what happened. So the whole apparatus that was set up in 1994 was perverted within a couple of weeks, and the agreements that we had brokered were basically no longer extant.

We have not heard why the changes are occurring, other than when Senator Ellison—I thought, with a degree of honesty—today said, ‘We’ve now got a majority, so it’s fine to change.’ That is, they have a majority based on preferences from Pauline Hanson and Queensland’s One Nation. That is why the government have a majority in this particular chamber. I hope they are proud that that is the way they achieved their majority in this particular chamber. But, of course, not everyone on that side agrees on how they achieved a majority in this chamber. There is a brawl going on, where Senator Brandis claims that it was all his brilliance and where Senator Joyce, a sort of modern-day Lord Haw-Haw of the Senate, claims that it was all his activities that got them a majority. We cannot arbitrate on this side.