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

Yes, thank you, Madam Acting Deputy President Boyce, and I thank you for pulling Senator Cash up. As a consequence of those events, there was an article in the Canberra Times by Robin Brown, who is a Canberra consultant in effective governance and market regulation, and John Braithwaite, who is an Australian Research Council Fellow and founder of RegNet at the Australian National University. They wrote:

As the media cycle moves on from the demise of former ombudsman Allan Asher, the Parliament must now repair the institution its members have damaged. Many MPs say Asher had to be pressured until he jumped to preserve the integrity of his office. We take the opposite view.

It is senior politicians and public servants who have now damaged the office by leaving the public asking the question: "Will the next ombudsman be their patsy?" Will persons of integrity want the job? Will whistleblowers lose confidence in baring their souls to the next ombudsman?

Asher's error was to push too hard on defending the rights of those in immigration detention centres. His email of questions to a Greens senator was the pretext for his demise. It was not the reason.

Further on they said:

The problem here was that neither the Government nor the Opposition liked Asher's interpretation of the public interest on immigration detention.

What they are pointing to is that Mr Asher's valiant, intelligent and humane role, given to him by government, was to investigate immigration detention. Thousands of people are held in detention who, the Greens maintain, ought to be much more quickly released into the community, because that is where they, in the main, end up, and some are held to the point of mental breakdown and indeed, far too often, of seeking to commit suicide. But Mr Asher and his office were not given the wherewithal to undertake the extraordinary new load that was put onto his and his staff's shoulders, and he sought to get that information out into the public arena.

In the wake of Mr Asher's very valiant resignation to protect the position that he upheld, the Greens have not simply come to get into a debate with the opposition, or the government for that matter, but instead have drawn up an alternative which will help fix the problem, to ensure that no future Ombudsman is put in the impossible position that the good Mr Allan Asher was placed in. We are proposing to give a parliamentary committee oversight of the Ombudsman's office and, therefore, give the Ombudsman a parliamentary advocate for review of his funding and work levels. He will not have to go to another member of parliament to get the information out. Our proposal will assist in ensuring the executive remains at arm's length from the Ombudsman but will, simultaneously, give that Ombudsman an assurance that they are able, if they do not get adequate resources, to make that known and to appeal for them.

Under the Australian Greens' proposal, the parliamentary Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit will have its duties expanded to be able to examine the receipts and expenditure of the Ombudsman; to examine the Ombudsman's reports that are tabled in parliament; to report to parliament on any matters within those receipts, expenditure or reports that the committee thinks should be drawn to the attention of parliament; and to report to both houses any alteration the committee thinks desirable. The Public Accounts and Audit Committee already performs a similar role for the Auditor-General.

So we are not only defensive of the honour of and the sterling work done by Mr Asher in the office of Ombudsman; we have also moved to respond to an obvious oversight in not providing the Ombudsman—that is, the office of Ombudsman; it did not matter which one was there—with a natural and easy facility to have information brought to the attention of parliament about the running of the Ombudsman's office and its needs. We will be looking to support from both the government and the opposition in having this positive change made.

To go back to the Ombudsman himself: I am hoping to catch up with him in the near future to go over the matters that caused him extraordinary pain. They must have; no human being could go through that without extraordinary pain. I may be wrong about this but I do not think I have ever sat and had a talk with him, so I am looking forward to doing that. I think he has served this country well. He is an experienced officer who has worked in the UK and elsewhere in the world, as well as in Australia and for this nation, and I think he needs to know that that service is being recognised and that there is a hope that he will be able to continue that service without the events of recent times cutting across his ability to do that.

Finally, the question I have asked myself through this episode is: what if he had not gone to Senator Sarah Hanson-Young? What if he had gone to an opposition backbencher, or frontbencher for that matter, or, indeed, to a government backbencher, and they had sought out the questions? He would still be in office. So, when we hear the sort of diatribe we just heard from Senator Cash about the Greens, you see a different way of treating the political connections that arise from time to time. I think the Ombudsman's downfall, if I can call it that, was very highly politically charged, and I think it was a sad day when he left office. However, he has been prepared to do that, and it was a mark of this man that he was prepared to do that, to prevent an ongoing furore over the office, to defend that office which he had served so well. I for one thank him for the service he has given this country.