Michael Forshaw (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked today.

I particularly want to address my remarks at this point to the answers given by Senator Ellison, the Minister for Human Services, to those questions about the government’s proposed access card. In doing so I note, as was evident in the questions, that last week the Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration tabled what I said was an excellent report on the proposed Human Services (Enhanced Service Delivery) Bill 2007. That is the bill that covers the access card.

This report was a near-unanimous report. All members of the committee, except one government senator, agreed with the findings of the committee and the content of the report and supported the recommendation of the report. There was only one recommendation and that was that this legislation should be deferred or withdrawn and only brought back to the parliament as part of a consolidated legislative package to pick up the further tranches of legislation the government have said they are preparing and contemplating. But the report also went on to identify a range of serious concerns that the committee felt the government should consider in preparing that consolidated legislation. These were concerns that were raised by witnesses during the three days of public hearing.

The arrogance of this government was there for all to see in the way that it handled this bill. The committee was given virtually no time—a couple of weeks—to consider this very important legislation and this very complex proposal. The minister today said that there had been an exposure draft released for public comment. It was released just before Christmas last year. Essentially, the public only had the period over the Christmas-New Year months to consider it. What arrogance to release such an important exposure draft at that particular time of the year.

I want to quote from the report. I congratulate Senator Mason on his recent appointment and also on his excellent chairmanship of our committee. The committee said:

With only the first tranche of the access card legislation before it, the Committee has also been put at a disadvantage in that it does not know the detail of key provisions and measures that are intended to be addressed in later legislation. That the provisions held over relate to critical matters such as reviews and appeals, privacy protections and oversight and governance measures does little to allay the Committee’s general unease with the adequacy of this bill.² In essence, the Committee is being asked to approve the implementation of the access card on blind faith without full knowledge of the details or implications of the program. This is inimical to good law-making.

The committee further goes on—and this refers to the fact that the department already had out there in the marketplace calls for tenders, when this legislation had not been considered by a committee of the parliament or by the Senate itself:

In addition, two tender processes, one for the systems integrator, the other for card issuance and management, were running during the Committee’s consideration of the matter. This could be seen as undermining the authority of the Committee by creating the impression that passage of this legislation is preordained, rendering Senate oversight superfluous.

The committee goes on:

The Committee cannot accept that priority has been given to tender processes at the expense of reasonable time for the Parliament to scrutinise properly a complex piece of legislation.

And there are another 92 pages or so of the majority report that detail the very serious concerns raised during the committee’s public hearing.

Yet in the second reading speech on this bill, when it was put before the parliament, the minister referred to people who opposed this legislation as ‘friends of fraud’. We had the AMA, the Australian Bankers Association, Carers Australia, the Royal College of General Practitioners, Legacy and even the Office of the Privacy Commissioner appear before our committee and point out genuine concerns with this rushed legislation. This government arrogantly called them ‘friends of fraud’. The minister has done the right thing and accepted the committee’s report at last. (Time expired)