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

I seek leave to move a motion in relation to the report.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

This annual report goes to one area that I want to cover today and that is the key responsibility for security in this building. The responsibility for security lies essentially with the Presiding Officers and the Department of Parliamentary Services. One of the few windows for parliamentarians to supervise this is the Senate Standing Committee on Appropriations and Staffing. You will know, Mr Acting Deputy President Hutchins, that no such committee exists on the other side of this building. The other chamber has never replicated the initiative of having a staffing and appropriations committee. My close friend and colleague Mr Roger Price, the Chief Opposition Whip, has on several occasions suggested to the House of Representatives that they set up a committee to deal with staffing and appropriation matters. That has not yet been successfully achieved and therefore it really does devolve to senators to have their input at this particular level. We prefer to have it at this level rather than at the estimates committee because you can have a fairly frank exchange of views.

We have made a lot of progress, I think, as a parliament in protecting this as an institution. The building itself is quite iconic and will be a natural target for potential terrorists at some stage into the future. We know that. There is no secret about that, and so a variety of measures have been taken to make sure that this building is far more secure than it once was. We will always have in mind that we want this to be a people’s building. We want people to have access to the building, to have access to their politicians and to be able to scrutinise the activity of their politicians. We do not want to do anything that totally inhibits that. On the other hand we do not want to be blase. I do find at times that some of my colleagues on both sides of the political spectrum are blase about security matters. I have to make the point that over 3,000 other people work in this building, so it is not a question of whether politicians will be vulnerable to potential future terrorist activity. The real point is that we have a duty and an obligation to protect the 3,000 people who work in this building. It cannot be just dismissed. It must be a duty of politicians.

We have seen a whole range of changes with personnel deployed and the wall built around Parliament House to stop a vehicle coming illegally into the building. But there are probably two remaining issues that we want to see addressed. Of course we know on 22 August the parliamentary road around this building is going to become one-way. That is quite a sensible development given all the other things that have been done around the building. But one of the things that have disturbed the opposition is that we were strong supporters of protecting the three slipways to the ministerial wing, to the House of Representatives and to the Senate side—very strong supporters because that was a very vulnerable area of the building. When the bollards were put in we supported the putting in of the bollards and we have defended the expense incurred by putting them in.

But one thing we never anticipated, by the way, was that 7,520 passes would enable access to the slip-roads. We always considered it was going to be a much, much smaller figure. That alone I think is a potential security breach into the future. A lost card et cetera with 7,000 passes floating around could well mean that the building becomes vulnerable. Work has been underway in the parliamentary services department and a submission is being made to the Presiding Officers to reduce that amount of access, and in some cases the pass will only give you access to one of the slipways rather than all three. But I think access should be limited to just two groups: the first group is Comcar and the second is the diplomatic corps. Essentially that is almost happening in a de facto way, with some exceptions, but it is a potentiality into the future that I am concerned about, so I would like to see it restricted to those two groups. You do not have to give the diplomatic corps passes. The security officer that is constantly outside the building can, by prearrangement, let the bollards down for the consular corps, and Comcars will have their own entry and exit through the bollards. That was the original intention, or what we understood was the original intention. It was never intended that there be 7,520 potential entrants.

The second concern I have is the pick-up and drop-off for staff. We have had this under consideration for over two or three years and it has always been pushed back. Everything else has been solved et cetera. We are told by the parliamentary services department that everyone can go to the public car park and be picked up and dropped off. That goes against human nature; that is not going to happen. We have tried to point out that people are not going to walk hundreds of metres through the basement areas, dodging forklifts and other impediments, to get to that car park if they are on the Senate or the Reps side. By the way, at the moment if you do go and get picked up on the parliamentary road, you go down the steps and you wait there in totally non-secure conditions, exposed to the weather elements et cetera. Even politicians have to do it if it is a hire car in a non-sitting period, because they cannot get through the bollards.

Treating staff in this particular way to me is not acceptable. We must find an alternative. Several of us have suggested the alternative and that is using the Senate car park as the pick-up and drop-off point. That is going to be examined again, as I understand it, by the Department of Parliamentary Services and I hope we get a report soon. There are some objections to that. What is to stop people parking there illegally? We just follow the practice of any other restricted parking area and have a tow away policy. So if people illegally park there, like anywhere else in Australia, you get towed away and you then have to pay the fee—$300, $400 or $500—to retrieve your car. That soon stops it. The second argument is that if you do not have the boom gates maybe it will become a little more vulnerable to terrorists. I tell you what—Senator Faulkner and I could run through those two props that are keeping traffic out at the moment, let alone a terrorist who could just drive straight through. We know that.

There is a third, more serious, thing that we will contemplate. There have been various studies done as to vulnerability when it comes to bomb testing. That, again, has to be revalidated before we can properly proceed with a proposal to use the Senate basement. But remember this: it is undercover, it is accessible from the building and we could put in a waiting room or put chairs in the room that abuts that particular car park. Even though we have given some consideration to clearing the 70 car park spots out there, it is our judgement—Senator Faulkner’s, mine and that of a few others—that you can still make it a drop-off and take-off point without having to get rid of any of that car parking.

I do urge the Presiding Officers, especially the Senate President, to give this proposal serious consideration. We are often judged by how we treat and deal with our staff. To have them going across that slipway road and down the stairs in all weathers and at all times of day and night is, to me, not acceptable. We are not being asked to give up our own car-parking opportunities in the Senate car park. We are just being asked to share them. It is not much of the sacrifice for senators and senior staff in this building to do that, if it proves to be viable from a security point of view. I always put that caveat on. If it can be shown to me and to the rest of the committee that this is not a safe option from a bomb point of view then we will change our view. But it does have another corollary, of course. If it is not safe now, from a bomb point of view, then unfortunately we are going to have to spend more money to protect the Senate basement area, and in fact all basements in this building if that happens to be the case.

This report is very brief on detail, quite properly, with regard to these matters. We are going to keep a watching brief on this particular area. We are going to continue to support the Presiding Officers, who are often derided for the security measures. It is very easy to make cheap shots about the wall around the building or the bollards or anything else. We are not going to join that. We are, in a bipartisan way, going to support the Presiding Officers to protect the staff who work in this building.