John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

If you do not agree, I will have to withdraw it: I withdraw it. There is nothing worse, is there, than receiving a history lesson from somebody who knows nothing about history. That, unfortunately, is the situation we have with Senator Eggleston, who imagines, who dreams about, what it must have been like in the Senate prior to the introduction of proportional representation in 1949 by a Labor government, the Chifley government. He dreams about what it might have been like as far as the activities of senators were concerned prior to the massive changes to the committee system, the introduction of a real Senate committee system, driven by the Labor Party in the very early 1970s. The person who is properly given credit for that is former Labor senator Lionel Murphy, who drove those reforms at that time.

There is nothing worse than a person who talks about the appropriate role of the Senate as a house of review but fails to understand that that is precisely the role that the Labor Party has always believed that this Senate should pursue: a house of review, a house of scrutiny. The speaker prior to me failed to mention the abuse of process driven by the Liberal Party in 1975, when the whole history of this chamber was turned on its head with the most massive abuse of Senate powers we have ever seen in the history of the Commonwealth of Australia.

It is very unfortunate to hear someone speak about a committee system when they do not really understand the background to its introduction. There was no understanding from Senator Eggleston that this original duality, the paired committee system, was something that was very warmly welcomed by the opposition of the day—again, in the early 1990s, the Liberal opposition of the day—as around the chamber these changes were negotiated. It is the Liberal Party—the coalition—that has changed its view so massively in relation to the way the Senate committees should work. It was the Liberal Party that gave great support to the paired committee system that Senator Eggleston now tells us the coalition is so opposed to and never supported in the first place. It is appalling to receive a history lesson from someone so ignorant.

This is a very unusual Procedure Committee report that we have before us today. The motivation for the report? Venality. The justification for the report? Non-existent. The content of the report? Realistic, I would say, in the circumstances—the unacceptable circumstances—that the Senate faces. I believe it would be a very good analogy to say that the Senate Procedure Committee report proposes a well-designed procedural house but one built upon the sand, because there is no need for this report and the changes that it contains. It is very important—and I want to draw the attention of the Senate to the fourth paragraph of the report. It says:

However, Opposition and Australian Democrat members of the committee indicated that their participation in this inquiry should not be taken as support for the restructuring of the committee system with which they strongly disagreed in principle. Having considered the mechanics of the restructure, the committee leaves it to the Senate to determine its merits.

I want to make it absolutely clear: there is no need for these changes at all. These are the changes we did not have to have except for the fact that a couple of greedy people in the government wanted to filch committee chairs—that is why I described this earlier as venality. It is all about money—a couple of coalition senators getting their hands in the taxpayers’ pockets, a couple of coalition senators wanting to be chairs of committees. This drove the original proposition grandly presented by Senator Minchin, the Leader of the Government in the Senate, and Senator Coonan, the Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate. Again, it is very well described in the Procedure Committee report, so I will present it, as I so often do, to the Senate without spin. Let me quote the third paragraph of the Procedure Committee report. It says:

The Leader and Deputy Leader of the Government in the Senate had proposed that legislation and references committees be amalgamated, into legislative and general purpose committees, and that ten such committees be established.

That is right. They proposed amalgamation, which you have heard about, and they proposed that the number of committees be increased from eight to 10. As I say, the motivating factor is greed—another couple of coalition senators trying to get a committee chair position.

It is not just a power grab. It is not just an abuse of power. It is true to say, of course, that it is driven by the fact that the government now has a majority in the Senate. That is what has driven Senator Minchin and Senator Coonan’s change, and hasn’t it been an own goal! It has really blown up in their faces. What they have had to do is try and scramble around and use the experts that the Labor Party provide on the Procedure Committee to dig them out of this hole, to see if we can try and establish a reasonable outcome from this terrible abuse and this power grab and money grab of the coalition. The Procedure Committee has done its best, but it is a procedural house built upon the sand. There is no need for these changes and we should not be debating these changes now.

Yes, there is a proposal to extend the number of committees from eight paired committees to 10. That was the original proposal. You can read about it in the committee report. When the pressure has been put on the government to explain, at any stage, what the extra two committees might do, there has never been an answer. No-one had ever thought of that. They had only thought about the dollars and cents going into the pockets of the chairs. No-one had ever thought about what these two committees might do. No, they only thought about the fact that there would be two extra chairpersons from the coalition parties. No proposals at any stage were developed. No-one had bothered to check at any stage with the Department of the Senate or the Department of Parliamentary Services whether in fact it was achievable to extend the number of committees from eight to 10, whether we could do it, whether the logistics actually allowed it to be done.

I want to commend to any interested senators or members of the public two reports which have been tabled in the Senate. One is a report from Mr John Vander Wyk, Clerk Assistant Committees. Mr Vander Wyk, I know, is about to retire. We wish him well in his retirement and commend him for his report dated 26 July 2006 about the proposal to alter the Senate committee system. I merely draw attention to this particular report because it talks about the difficulties in terms of the current arrangements—the accommodation problems, the staffing problems, the broadcast problems and the like. It is worth reading. It is only a couple of pages and I commend it to senators.

Then of course we also had a report from the Department of Parliamentary Services. That report was provided originally to the Procedure Committee, and now it has been tabled in the Senate, under the hand of Ms Hilary Penfold QC, the Secretary of the Department of Parliamentary Services. I have a little time available to me to talk about this report because the legislation program has been changed in the Senate, because Mr Howard has been humiliated by the withdrawal of the unauthorised arrivals bill. We have a little time on our hands. The government were very keen to have this debate because they have no idea what else they might wish to debate this evening.