Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

Under the Acts Interpretation Act, where funds are provided by the research and development area of government, and under the Meat and Live-stock Industry Act, any new funding agreement between the government and LiveCorp has to be tabled in parliament within 14 sitting days of the date on which the funding agreement becomes operational. Tucked away in the millions of documents that are tabled in this chamber every year I found this particular reference to the late tabling of the statutory funding agreement which commenced on 1 July 2010. It should have been reported to parliament within 14 days after that or after parliament resuming. It was not. Therefore, the Acts Interpretation Act requires that the minister must explain to the Senate why it was late.

From documents tabled I notice that, on 22 July 2010, the department advised Senator Ludwig, the minister for LiveCorp, that he should have tabled this statutory funding agreement within 14 days of its commencement on 1 July 2010. On 22 July 2011, more than a year later, the advice had not been given to this parliament, in accordance with the accountability arrangements. So Senator Ludwig, the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry and the minister who has absolutely bungled the live export trade in Australia, wrote to the President on behalf of the Senate, saying, 'Here's a letter explaining the delay,' and he attached the letter from the deputy secretary. No other explanation is given. There is no I beg your pardon, no apology and no explanation of why it has taken this government more than 13 months after the document should have been tabled to table it.

If you have a look at these two letters, Mr Acting Deputy President, you will see they are only very short. They are stuck away in amongst the myriad documents that are tabled in this chamber. Why would Minister Ludwig not have tabled this statutory funding agreement? This is the funding agreement through which the government gives LiveCorp money, which joins with money from the industry, to allow LiveCorp to do its work. If you have a look at the statutory funding agreement, which was eventually tabled 13 months late, you will see all through it a requirement for the minister to consult with LiveCorp and for LiveCorp to consult with the minister and for LiveCorp to take instructions from the minister.

If you look through LiveCorp's website, and I encourage people to do that, you will see that, back in December last year and in January this year, LiveCorp were raising issues about dealing with cattle in Indonesia. They had implemented a number of programs and, as required by this agreement, they had clearly been discussing this with the minister. Time will not allow me to develop this so that people can fully understand but I will simply put it this way: the minister should have been aware of what was happening in Indonesia because LiveCorp was, and I am sure LiveCorp were telling the minister. But he did not do anything about it. He did not table these documents, and one would suspect that perhaps there was a reason why he did not want these documents tabled. Maybe he did not want parliament or the Australian general public to know how inefficient he had been as well as how stupid in his overall administration of the live export trade.

These documents are not a sufficient excuse. They beg the question as to why the minister did not table them in the last 13 months, and it leaves in the mind of many people a suspicion that perhaps the minister had something to hide, that perhaps he knew about all of this before the Four Cornersprogram and that perhaps he might stand condemned for his inefficiency in not dealing with this matter properly.