Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to move a motion in relation to the response by the Chair of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, Senator McLucas, to the Senate’s resolution of 20 August 2009 concerning the ASIO headquarters building that has just been tabled.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

I will be brief, and I thank the Senate. Senator McLucas, as Chair of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works, has responded to the Senate’s request concerning the recommendation from the former Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation’s headquarters now being constructed near Lake Burley Griffin be exempted from the scrutiny of the Public Works Committee. I and the Senate had asked why the letter from the former Attorney-General to the then chair of that committee was not available. The letter has now been furnished for the Senate to see.

I want to say a couple of things about that. When you look at the letter, you see how remiss it was of those involved to think that there should have been such a difficulty in furnishing the letter. We had to go to a Senate motion to get this letter tabled. There is nothing of national secrecy which threatens the public interest in this letter at all. In fact, the letter says what we had already presumed and what has already been in the press, which is that the request from then Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, to the committee to meet in secret and not to reveal the plans or to investigate the plans in public was because the building will have ‘A significant protective security component to meet the special purpose needs of these two Commonwealth intelligence agencies’—that is, ASIO and the Office of National Assessment. Yes, that is so. But the great question about this building is its place within the Parliamentary Triangle, close to the shores of Lake Burley Griffin and in the planned city of Canberra—the pride and joy as our national capital.

Why, I ask, should this parliament exempt buildings which are defence related or which have spy agencies in them from an open parliamentary investigation on behalf of the people and, therefore, from a public debate? The process here has been entirely wrong. This matter should never have been moved from the Public Works Committee in public into the Public Works Committee in secret. That the former Attorney-General wanted it is one thing, but that the Public Works Committee accepted it is another thing. I am very critical of the ease with which this parliament says, ‘Oh, it’s to do with a spy agency, therefore, we mustn’t investigate it’—and therefore we do not have the common sense to be able to establish that which needs to be kept secret in the public interest and that which is of great public interest. The decision on this building should never have been ratified without a thorough public inquiry. This building is a matter of public contention and decisions on it should never been taken out of the public domain in this fashion.

We learn from this letter that the presumption that the public should not know about it is totally spurious. Of course, it was up to the committee to say: ‘When it comes to installations in this building which might further the spy agency’s interests, that’s not what we are here to discuss. We’re here to discuss whether the money is being well spent and, in particular, whether the architecture and the planning of this building are toward.’ I submit there are great questions hanging over that. It is a blight on this committee and, indeed, this parliament, that it allowed the construction of this building to get underway without proper parliamentary scrutiny.

We are not a secret society. Our committee system is set up to be able to establish what is in the public interest and what is not. To say that the whole matter of debate about this building should be swept under the carpet under the guise that there were some defence interests at stake, I think was muddleheaded at best and a failure of acting in the public interest to be direct about it. It should not have happened and I would think the Public Works Committee should go back and do its job of having public submissions on this building, even though it is now underway.

I might ask a very pertinent question here: how is that the spy agencies ASIO and the Office of National Assessment, who ply their trade in the public interest by staying out of public view, want a dress circle location for their building down on Lake Burley Griffin? I would have thought it would be in their interests to stay out of the front row, but no, that is not the case here. I think the Public Works Committee was dudded in this matter. I do not think it did its job. I think it failed the people not just of the Australian Capital Territory but the people of Australia. It was set up, among other things, to ensure that there is proper process and proper inquiry.

That some buildings ought to be exempted from the process of public inquiry in the ongoing work of establishing this great bush capital of Canberra, one of our show places of Australia, because they have a defence function, is insupportable. The process has been wrong. I am making this statement because I hope it is not to be repeated. There is no excuse, when Defence or spy agency buildings come into the dress circle or the parliamentary triangle, for such buildings not to undergo scrutiny. The public has been unfairly kept out of this matter by the committee and, I submit, by this parliament. It is a process that I would not want to see repeated.

Question agreed to.