Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to say how disappointed I am that these changes are being proposed and will be forced through by a government with a majority. I say that because of my previous parliamentary experience in Tasmania, where we worked very hard to establish a committee system that was effective. We worked with the Reform of Parliament Committee between 1992 and 1996, when there was a majority Liberal government in Tasmania, to look at the way the parliament operated. The motivation for it was that the Liberal majority wanted to increase the pay of politicians by 40 per cent in one go. However, they had to have some justification for this incredible increase in remuneration and so they came up with the idea of a Reform of Parliament Committee. I served on that committee for those four years and it was incredibly important because it led to recommendations that took the Tasmanian parliament from the last century, that is, the 19th century, into the 20th—certainly not into the 21st but into the 20th.

The reform committee recommended that we have estimates committees in Tasmania. Up until that time there were no estimates committees in the parliament. It recommended pre-legislation committees of the type the Senate knows as legislation committees. It recommended that the Parliamentary Library employ researchers. This was a wild idea, opposed by the Legislative Council in Tasmania, who felt sure that too much information would undermine the prejudiced positions they had held for many years. They could not see the point of researchers and did not need them. Anyway, we proceeded with researchers in the library. We proceeded with the notion that question time could be televised on some occasions, providing the bald spots of some members were not shown—we got down to that level of detail. The point is that there was great excitement about at last having estimates committees and pre-legislation committees that would involve the community in being able to improve legislation before it came before the House of Assembly in Tasmania and start getting an active, participatory democracy. We succeeded in getting those changes.

But then, tragically, when it became apparent that the Greens would maintain the balance of power in Tasmania, both the Liberal government and the Labor opposition got together to reduce the numbers in the Tasmanian parliament in both houses and in so doing they destroyed the whole thing. The estimates committees still operate in Tasmania; the pre-legislation committees went west. It is a case of every player wins a prize in Tasmania now. With 25 members in the House of Assembly—for a critical mass in a parliament—by the time you get a ministry and a speaker you do not have very many people left on the backbench to serve on committees. So the whole thing was lost. What we see in Tasmania is a return to majority governments, rubber-stamping and all that characterised the poor governance of the preceding period.

When I came here to the Senate, having worked previously with Senator Brown in his office in Hobart and then having observed the Senate, I saw that the Senate committee system was at least an opportunity where the non-government parties could seriously engage in review. This house, having originally been a states house, has transformed itself over the years and is no longer a states house but is being seriously seen as a house of review—a check on the government of the day.

I was very interested listening to Senator Minchin because I was waiting to hear the motivation. The fact that the government can do it is obvious, because it has the numbers. The question is: why would you do it? Why would you change the committee system? So far the only explanation for the number 10—pick a number between eight and 16—is, as Senator Minchin told us a moment ago, nothing other than, in order to anticipate the Labor opposition’s attack that eight would be half, the government said 10. We are seeing the way that governance is carried out in Australia; it is based on anticipating a number between eight and 16 that the Labor Party might pick. So it was 10. The other two committees? No idea. As Senator Faulkner said earlier in this house, there is no idea at all what they might do, except it is more of every player wins a prize because allocating the chairs of all the committees to government members increases the loyalty of government backbenchers to the leader of the day, who appoints the chairs of those committees and the perks that go with the position of chair. It is also guaranteeing, of course, that the reports of those committees are sympathetic to the government of the day. I can anticipate that government members might say: ‘No, look at the current reference of the committee looking into the immigration bill. They came up with the wrong answer and yet they had a government chair.’ Yes, and look at the preselection processes around that particular chair. Look at the preselection in Western Australia, with a member of the House of Representatives, Judi Moylan. Let us have a look at those preselection processes.