Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak this evening on the Procedure Committee report on the restructure of the Senate committee system. As we know, at the last election the government was able to win a majority in the Senate in its own right effective from 1 July last year. The government, in the months leading up to their assumption of control, went to great lengths to talk down their plans for the Senate—surprisingly!—and to try and assure Australians that they had only honourable intentions. The Prime Minister, Mr John Howard, told the Australian people, to quote from him on a doorstop from 28 October 2004:

... I want to assure the Australian people that the government will use its majority in the new Senate very carefully, very wisely and not provocatively.

We intend to do the things we’ve promised the Australian people we would do, but we don’t intend to allow this unexpected but welcome majority in the Senate to go to our heads.

And he said:

We certainly won’t be abusing our newfound position. We will continue to listen to the people and we’ll continue to stay in touch with the public that has invested great trust and confidence in us.

We had Mr John Howard running around the country telling anyone who would listen that they had no plans at all to abuse their power in the Senate, that they would not let the temptation go to their heads.

But before long—not very long at all—the temptation became too much to resist. Since 1 July last year, contrary to Senator Ellison’s claim, we have actually seen a massive increase in the government’s share of allocated questions during question time. Senator Ellison, vainly, I put it, but magnificently, tried to argue that, of the 1,000 questions asked since 1 July 2005, 800 were from non-government senators. Of course, Senator Ellison was being a tad—perhaps we could use this word—devious, or not giving us the whole picture, since he was double-counting by including supplementary questions. We all know that the government do not attach supplementary questions to their dorothy dixers. The more interesting statistic is this: of the 350 allocated questions asked during this parliament before 1 July 2005, just 25 per cent were dorothy dixers from the government backbench. Since 1 July, of the 623 questions asked, 39 per cent were dorothy dixers from the government backbench. If that is not a reduction in the Senate’s ability to hold the government to account then I do not know what is.

Secondly, there has been a 400 per cent increase in the rejection of inquiries proposed for references committees. These have leapt from three to 15 and, in many cases, they have been rejected without any justification given. Thirdly, the length of committee inquiries has been slashed. From the beginning of 2004 up to 30 June last year inquiries had an average length of 39 days. Since the government assumed control of the Senate that number has crashed to 27.5, so we have had nearly a full two weeks shaved off the average length of an inquiry. Amazingly, though, this figure would have been even lower if the government had had its way. If you cast your mind back to the end of last year you had the government proposing a miserable one-day inquiry into the Anti-Terrorism Bill (No. 2). I will add that the government is now coming back to parliament to amend that legislation which it rammed through parliament, to amend it even before it becomes law.

Fourthly, debate on legislation has been continuously guillotined or gagged in this chamber. The Senate was guillotined last year when debating the workplace reforms—legislation which has been shown to be the most drastic and wide-ranging change to Australian workplaces and home life in decades. On the other hand, when it comes to Australia’s migration laws, the government is more than happy to hear from Indonesia. It will listen to the Indonesian government but not to the elected representatives of the Australian people. Just this morning the government pulled its controversial Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill 2006 with less than a minute’s notice. In fact, it pulled it while the bells were ringing. The inability of the government to control its own ranks is not a legitimate reason for showing the Senate such flagrant disregard.

I could go on with other abuses. I have certainly catalogued many of them. Other abuses include the unilateral decision of the government to refuse to allow public servants to speak about the Australian Wheat Board in estimates and spillover days being cut from estimates schedules—days which in the past would have been used to explore issues such as the Cornelia Rau matter, which the immigration minister should be ashamed of, and the Vivian Alvarez matter. There are many other matters that spillover days would have been used as an opportunity to explore and to hold this government to account on.

We now arrive at the latest chapter in the Howard government’s ongoing sabotage of the Senate: the restructure of the Senate committee system. But it is not a restructure; it is a sabotage of the Senate committee system. This system will ensure that we really do have a different outcome. We first heard about this restructure through a letter from Senator Minchin on behalf of the government on 20 June this year. The key elements of the restructure were the collapsing of the reference and legislation committees into a single committee for each portfolio area, the assigning of all committee chairs to government senators and the creation of two new portfolio areas as part of a wide streamlining of the portfolio areas. These were the matters that were proffered. The changes were, according to Senator Minchin at the time, designed to achieve greater efficiencies and effectiveness, and rebalance the existing disparate committee workloads. That was the thin veil that was flicked up.

The proposals were then debated in the Senate in a motion referring the matter to the Procedure Committee for inquiry. The key arguments made by the government at that time included: that the changes would lead to greater efficiency and accountability, apparently through increasing the number of estimates committees available—although never mind that the government has consistently acted to curtail the power of the estimates committees this year anyway; that the proposals were returning us to the previous systems of committees which ran up until about 12 years ago; and, lastly, that the rearrangement of committees would rebalance the workload between the existing ones. Those were the arguments that were proffered at the time. To put it bluntly, I do not believe that these were the government’s true motives. At best they were a convenient smokescreen, a post facto justification for a proposal that had quite a different intent and purpose.

Perhaps I could explore the true motives for the sake of the government. To begin with we only need to look at the final outcome to see what the government’s true priorities were. Of the government’s proposals the only parts to stay standing are the abolition of references committees and that all remaining committees are to be chaired by government senators. The proposal streamlining the portfolio areas has been scrapped in this latest version. We can see now that this was only ever included so that the government senators could stand up in this chamber in June and defend the overall package. Without it they had very little to hide behind. There was no intention to keep it. It was part of a convenient smokescreen. By suggesting two additional portfolio areas the government was able to say that there would be a 25 per cent increase in estimates hearings. Of course, anyone who has ever participated in or observed closely the estimates process will know this is complete baloney. It would have left individual senators stretched between five concurrent sets of hearings, forcing them to forgo questions if there was a clash between agencies or to put them on notice and suffer the government saying: ‘You have put too many questions on notice. You were not there at the committee,’ and all of the other issues the government would raise to complain about. At the same time it would mean that the people who are interested—observers, media and people who have a general interest in understanding some of the content—would also be stretched while they tried to keep an eye on that many sets of different hearings. I suspect the government was simply trying to achieve less, rather than more, scrutiny.

But regarding spillover days, Labor saw through that government furphy. Why didn’t they just leave the spillover days in place? The government could easily have left those in place to deal with the Senate estimates process. Bringing them back would lead to a potential 25 per cent increase in scrutiny, if that is what the government wanted or was serious about enjoying—but no. So I say to the government: ‘Show us that you’re genuinely interested. This is part of your overall ability to bring efficiency and effectiveness into the chamber. Give back all the Senate estimates spillover days. With the spillovers back you will genuinely get an increase in scrutiny. You will genuinely have a situation where cases like those of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Alvarez, to give examples, are brought to light.’ But of course we know that the government will not do this because we know that the commitment to scrutiny is not real; it is illusory.

The government does not want cases like those of Cornelia Rau and Vivian Alvarez to come to light. It does not want the committee system looking into matters of the day such as the Australian Wheat Board scandal. No, you did not want anyone to look into that mess. It wants a committee system that holds one-day inquiries on important, complex legislation. Why? So that the legislation does not get the scrutiny that it should. You want the government position to be rubber-stamped with no genuine oversight and no scrutiny at all.

I turn to another issue, and that is the government’s argument about disparate workloads of the committees. But when you look at the proposal there is no substance whatsoever in that claim. If the government really believed or cared about the workload of the committees, they would have pressed ahead with the restructure of the portfolio areas. But they have not. The committees have been collapsed from 16 legislation and references committees to eight amalgamated ones, but the portfolio areas have not been touched. The reality is that this disparity will always evolve as the government’s legislative priorities change. It would seem to be common sense to this side of the chamber but it apparently escapes the members of the government for them to argue that. Of course workloads will change depending on the legislative priorities of the particular government and the bills they bring forward. That stands to reason.

In addition, one should not be surprised if an increased number of references are being sought, given this government’s poor record on allowing itself to be held to account. There are many areas where references committees will serve a useful purpose in exploring this government’s mismanagement and bungles. The disparity that occurs is not unusual. Priorities do change over time. As for disparities between legislation and references committees, these merely reflect the different purposes of the committees and, as I said earlier, the fact that the government has used its majority to block references. The number of rejected references has skyrocketed from three to 15 in the time that the government has had control of the Senate. If there is a disparity between the workloads of the legislation and references committees then the government might want to rectify this by approving some of the references. Of course, any efficiency benefits that might have come from consolidating the two committees have already been realised, given that each pair of committees already has a shared secretariat. The only potential gain left perhaps might come from cheaper letterhead or stationery, but I doubt that it would be significant.

Let us go back for a brief moment to the situation prior to 1994. The only argument the government has raised in support of this proposal that might be able to be argued, although I think it is still far from justifiable, is that the proposed changes to the committee system take us back to the situation we had prior to 1994. Senator Ellison described this as part of the evolving processes of the committee system. All I can say is that going back in time looks more like devolution than evolution to me. In any case, if you have a look at what coalition senators had to say about those changes at the time, it becomes patently obvious that it was all about reducing accountability, not increasing it.

Looking at some of the Liberals’ arguments in 1994, firstly, we have Senator Hill, as Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, arguing that:

... there is no reason why more than half the Senate should be excluded from having the responsibility of chairing, and the opportunity to chair, these committees.

Yet the changes that his party is now proposing will achieve almost exactly that, with 37 of 76 senators now barred from chairing a committee. At the time, the Liberal Party’s argument was based on the fact that the Labor government itself did not have a majority and therefore should not have all the chairs—it is an interesting argument that was put. It is a shame that now those opposite have tried to spin that the other way. I refer to former Senator Teague from South Australia, who provided the following comments on the same debate:

What we are moving to now is the kind of maturity which Australia is ready for, whereby the control of the Senate committee system is by the Senate itself, but where the chairmanship of particular committees is in the hands of senators in a manner which is directly proportional to the composition of the Senate as elected by the Australian people. ... That is one of the major steps forward in sophistication and maturity ...

So why these steps backwards? Why this reduction in maturity and sophistication? We come from a crass government. Senator Ferguson told us last week that 12 years ago he was not outspoken because he really did not know enough about the committee system at the time. One thing he did say was that he was in favour of the whole idea of having references committees separate from other committees. I ask Senator Ferguson: why, if he thought it was a good idea when he was in opposition, is it no longer a good idea now, or has the government’s view now changed?

Turning to the real motives: every person sitting in this chamber knows that the reason the government is foisting this restructure of the committee system onto the Senate has nothing to do with disparate workloads and nothing to do with improving the accountability and oversight of the Senate. It has everything to do with entrenching the dominance of this government in every way possible in every part to ensure that there is no scrutiny, no ability for this Senate to hold this government to account and no genuine check on the government’s powers and legislation. That is what this government is trying to achieve. It will not achieve that. History demonstrates that where there is a will there is a way to hold this government to account. Be it in this chamber or outside this chamber, it will still happen. It is both an illusory change and a useless change and it is one that does not reflect well on government at all. It does not reflect well on government to try to curtail the ability of this Senate to hold this government to account through the committee system. What this proposal will do ultimately is force it out elsewhere, because these matters will come to light.

There will be a need for the government to be held to account for matters that come up. We do not know what those matters could be. They could pop out from any direction, from any portfolio area, from any quarter. But they do fall out of government every now and then. The committee system is ably served to be able to look at such matters and throw light on them. And sometimes, although you may not like it, if you reflect upon it as a government it is helpful to have matters of mismanagement, even incompetence, pointed out because it gives you an ability to change things.

What you are now enforcing upon yourselves is the ability not to change and not to remedy deficiencies or bungles but, rather, to ignore them, to sweep them under the carpet. That is what you are now enforcing upon yourselves. It is not good governance. You know it, but you cannot help yourselves because you think you have the numbers today. It was also demonstrated today that you do not always have the numbers. So it is also poor foresight.

These retrograde reforms are ultimately short-sighted and they are not in the long-term interests of this country or any government. Indeed, the governance of this country will be the poorer for it, as maladministration and mismanagement will take longer to be exposed and addressed. It is not too late for these changes to be stopped. Backbenchers have already demonstrated a willingness not to support the government’s mad ideas. There is the ability for this not to be passed. Probably, though, the die has already been cast. But, after abolishing reference committees, this government will deny itself the important measure—(Time expired)