Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Urban Development) Share this | Hansard source

I oppose the exemption to the cut-off of the Howard government’s proposals contained in the Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006. The Minister for Justice and Customs has just indicated that the reasons for urgency of these matters have been circulated in the chamber. We have yet to see those reasons. We have not been advised of those reasons. This is a particularly controversial piece of legislation which highlights just how extreme, arrogant and out of touch this government has become. This is the latest in a long list of measures that actually go to attacking the fundamental principles of democracy and which seriously undermine the environment and heritage protection regime that has hitherto existed in this country.

I will remind the Senate of some basic facts. This bill had no exposure draft and no environmental or heritage groups were consulted before the bill was tabled. There are 409 pages of legislation which were introduced into the House on a Thursday. It was debated the following Wednesday. The debate occurred in the House without there being a Bills Digest and before submissions had been received for what is essentially a perfunctory Senate inquiry. There was very little capacity, even at that stage, for environmental or heritage groups to be consulted.

As part of the Labor team that took part in the Senate inquiry into the bill, I was given barely 10 minutes—at best 12 minutes—to question witnesses that appeared before the inquiry. This is the process by which this bill has been introduced and is to be dealt with by this parliament, which highlights just what a travesty the legislative regime in this country has become. Senator David Johnston was absolutely right when, on 18 October 2006, in discussing the explanatory memorandum for this piece of legislation, he told the Senate:

This explanatory memorandum is probably one of the most appalling I have ever seen in the short time I have been in the Senate. It discloses no motivation, no reasoning and no justification for some of the most draconian powers that this parliament can conceivably and possibly enact: rights of search and seizure without warrant and rights of personal frisking without warrant.

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... this legislation should go back to the drawing board.

So it is not just Labor senators and senators from the cross benches who express their profound reservations about the actions of the executive with regard to this legislation; it is members of the government’s own backbench. Here we have a situation where the parliamentary processes of this country are being prostituted to the domineering executive in a manner which is most disturbing. We have a situation in which the parliamentary and public consultation processes have been fundamentally subverted.

Any individual or organisation wishing to make a submission or give evidence on this bill was given about a week to do it. This is a 409-page bill involving some of the most extreme actions a government can take with regard to civil liberties in this country, and we had one week while the chamber was sitting to analyse this through the process of preparing submissions on this bill. If you had an interest in other matters before the parliament during that week, you were rightly somewhat divided in the time that you could spend.

Is it any wonder that there was not one witness before this quick and dirty Senate inquiry who said that they had had sufficient time to examine the implications of this legislation? Experts in the field could not answer questions or give opinions on whole sections of this bill simply because they did not have time to examine the implications of this legislation. So is it any wonder that the environmental and heritage constituencies that this government has employed and manipulated in the past to support its agenda are now in open revolt about being fundamentally ripped off, abused and used by this arrogant government which is essentially treating them all as a bunch of mugs? Is it any wonder that people who know something about the operations of the law have expressed such profound reservations about what this government is proposing to do? Yet in the motion that the government has put to this chamber today we are expected to give the tick on this process without further complaint. I take the view that this chamber ought to say no.

Organisations which are not known for their radicalism in the environmental movement—the National Trust, for example, a highly respectable, thoroughly conservative, middle-class organisation—have simply said, ‘You’ve gone way too far.’ The World Wide Fund for Nature has similarly been used and abused and now says, ‘We’ve been conned by this government.’

Essentially the problem that the government faces is that it is seeking to ram through this parliament highly regressive legislation that explicitly and implicitly promises to make fundamental changes to the way in which our heritage and environmental protections can be undermined for good. It breaks basic protocols on which the government in the past—and I say this on a bipartisan basis—has sought to operate when it came to the question of environmental and heritage management in Australia. This is fundamentally bad public policy which, when exposed, will easily be able to be demonstrated as being based on a government’s ideological precepts that the government feels it now has the opportunity to pursue without proper debate within the community. It is a proposition which has been advanced in haste by a government which has an urgent desire to ram through its program in the run-up to an election year.

We are watching and being asked to acquiesce to a government at its most arrogant. This government has essentially been advised by its own backbench that these actions are totally inappropriate, yet we are told to tick off on this bad public policy. It is quite clear that the government will truck no criticism and will accept no contrary opinion, no matter what side of the chamber it comes from. We have a situation now where our environment and our fragile national heritage will suffer directly as a result of the negligence and arrogance of this government in seeking to pursue its agenda to wind back the clock with regard to environmental and heritage reform that has been in place in various forms throughout the last generation. The government could hardly do less in its attitude to the existing legislation, but now it is seeking to provide the legislative framework in which it will not have to measure up to its responsibilities. This extraordinary proposition is summed up by the simple fact that in these 409 pages of legislation the term ‘climate change’ is simply not used because the government’s approach is very old-fashioned. It is fighting the old wars of the 1970s and it is seeking to reinvent the disputes of that time and to force its position through this parliament at this time.

And it is appropriate for this Senate to say no; it is appropriate for the Senate in these circumstances to say, as Senator Johnston said, ‘This legislation should go back to the drawing board.’ It is not appropriate to acquiesce to the actions of an arrogant executive seeking to impose its will upon this parliament without proper debate and without consultation. It is not appropriate that we should turn a blind eye to such fundamental and far-reaching legislation when such important issues are at stake. I urge senators to reject this motion.