George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. I will not be very long. In a speech to which I have referred, which sets out the Rudd government’s purported public position in relation to disclosure, Senator Faulkner went on to say:

Some of these symptoms of failing structures can be, and are being, reversed…

A ‘pro-disclosure culture in government’ is one of the five ambitions, or declarations of intent, that Senator Faulkner made for the Rudd government. He went on to say, rhetorically:

…do we really want our democracy to be one in which accountability and good governance ultimately depend on the goodwill, on the whim, of the government of the day?

We have seen how thin those words are. We have also seen how thin the announcement by Mr Rudd was, four days before the federal election last year, when he was the Leader of the Opposition, that ministerial staffers involved in government decision making would lose their ability to avoid giving evidence to inquiries by parliamentary committees under a Labor government. The article in the Australian by the journalist Matthew Franklin went on to report that Mr Rudd also foreshadowed the release of a new code of ministerial conduct. He said:

If we have ministerial staff who themselves are directly engaged in effective decision-making within government, then of course they should be accountable before parliamentary committees.

Those are the very words of the Prime Minister on 20 November last year: of course, ministerial staff should be accountable before parliamentary committees. That was Mr Rudd’s position when he was in opposition. That was the new government’s position, as announced in the speech of the Governor-General in opening the parliament. That was the position of the minister responsible for these matters, Senator Faulkner, in his speech to the 2020 Summit last April. Yet what we are seeing today and what we have seen in the approach of the Rudd government to this entire issue of the leaking of one of the most important—