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

Senator Ludlam has the advantage of being able to comment on all six bills because he at least seems to know what the other four bills will say. The rest of us in this parliament will just have to wait until Senator Conroy, the minister responsible, and Ms Gillard eventually get around to informing the Australian people what sort of a deal they have done with Mr Katter, what sort of a deal they have done with various of the Independents and what sort of a deal they have done with the Greens political party. I want to refer to all six bills, because the way the Greens political party and the Labor Party will guillotine or curtail this important debate—one of the most important debates on freedom ever had in our country—is reminiscent of the totalitarian regimes of the mid-1900s. I will start with a quote said in a debate:

To trivialise it by saying that it can be cut off at the whim of a majority—maybe the uninterested majority, at that—and to prevent those who find this matter extraordinarily and hugely important and deserving of the greatest consideration is very bad parliamentary process. I think it is unconscionable: the unconscionable is occurring to what we proclaim as the conscionable. It is bad parliamentary process and a total abrogation of the whole idea that, when we get to complex and important ethical mileposts like this in the progress of our society, the matter should be given greater importance and should not be cut down by a guillotine …

Who said that? None other than the then leader of the Greens political party. That was just one of the flourishes that Senator Bob Brown and current members of the Greens political party would use on the rare occasions that the coalition in government did, after much debate, cut off the bill.

I remember, dealing with Senator Brown for 26 hours on the Regional Forest Agreements Bill 2002. We would not cut it down; we wanted everyone to have their say—the only person saying anything against it was Senator Brown. After 26 hours, we allowed the debate to go and that was on something as innocuous as saving the Tasmanian forests with the Regional Forest Agreements Bill 2002. Yet here we are with a bill dealing with freedom of speech in this country and it is going to be guillotined by Senator Brown's political party, the Greens, and the Labor Party.

We have heard Senator Ludlam concede that the process is an absolute shamble. We are not dealing with Tasmanian forests here. We are dealing with freedom of speech in this country, and the Greens and the Labor Party will curtail speech to a few hours. I should not be talking about those other four bills, but I know that I am not going to get another chance to talk about this because the Greens and the Labor Party will be savagely curtailing speech on those very important bills. Isn't it ironic that they will be curtailing freedom of speech on these bills that are all about freedom of speech in our country?

The coalition is deeply opposed to those parts of the overall package that have the effect of increasing regulation of the news media and diminishing or restricting freedom of speech. Senator Brown once confessed in a book that had he been around in Germany in the 1930s he would have been a member of the Hitler Youth. Perhaps it is appropriate, that the party that he founded in this parliament is taking the sort of actions that led to the establishment of the Hitler Youth in the 1930s.

This sort of thin edge of the wedge of government control of the media is the sort of thing that, if you look through history, is how totalitarian regimes started. Senator Ludlam, in his contribution, also acknowledged that our side would be attacking the Labor Party on the process. He said he agreed with us. He expected us to attack them. Yet, does it make any difference to the Greens? They still join with the Labor Party in everything the Labor Party wants them to do, even to the extent of curtailing and having government control over the media in this country. I know it was the Greens political party who originated the term 'the hate media', but you can see it coming into play now as the Greens join with Senator Conroy in introducing legislation that will effectively allow politicians and Labor Party puppets to control what goes into the press.

The imposing of these sorts of controls over the freedom of the press will bully and threaten those who would publish in the newspapers, on TV and on radio to toe the government line. Isn't that what this is all about? The Gillard government has, in recent times, been getting an absolute belting from every section of the media. I cannot remember when the Agenewspaper and the Sydney Morning Heraldwere so anti the Labor Party. But even they now understand that this incursion into their right to print and say what they like is too much even for the Fairfax press to understand and to allow it to go through.

This legislation is the first government control over what is being published in newspapers in Australia's peacetime history. There has been some need for censorship in times of war, But in a peaceful country, in a country that was until now as democratic as Australia, to have this control directly and indirectly over what papers and other media can say is something that I think most Australians find abhorrent. If the number of emails and phone calls to my office in the last three days is any guide, most Australians have the same view. The Labor Party will find out to their detriment. Unless they get rid of Ms Gillard and her current communications minister, and get someone who understands the impact on the freedoms that our country enjoys, then the Labor Party will be decimated at the next election. You do not need me to say that. Have a look at any opinion poll, but have a look at the polls in a few weeks after the full impact of this curtailment of the freedom of the press is concerned.

We also have this farce, which shows how the Labor Party has absolutely no interest in truthfulness or freedom or exposing some of the bad elements of these bills. There is a committee set up by this parliament called the Scrutiny of Bills Committee. It is set up in a bipartisan, non-partisan way to look through, without making any opinion comments, on different pieces of legislation.

The terms of reference of that committee are to identify pieces in acts of parliament which:

(i)      trespass unduly on personal rights and liberties;

(ii)      make rights, liberties or obligations unduly dependent upon insufficiently defined administrative powers;

(iii)      make rights, liberties or obligations unduly dependent upon non-reviewable decisions;

(iv)      inappropriately delegate legislative powers; or

(v)      insufficiently subject the exercise of legislative power to parliamentary scrutiny.

That committee met when the first iteration of these bills came to the parliament and identified some particularly nasty elements of these bills now before the parliament. We have not yet had a look at the other bills.

It is very important in the normal course of events that, following the deliberations of the Scrutiny of Bills Committee in identifying these particular provisions that made rights and liberties dependent upon non-reviewable decisions or made rights and liberties subject to ill-defined administrative powers, members of the Senate have the benefit of the identification of those before they debate this bill.

But, again, thanks to the Australian Labor Party and the Greens political party we were even prevented from tabling that bill in time to allow senators to understand it. I would be committing a breach of the Senate standing orders if I were to tell you what is in the Scrutiny of Bills Committee report because it has not yet been tabled and discussed by the Senate, as it would in the normal course of events. But I am going to risk my hand, just to alert my colleagues to the fact that there are particular provisions, even in these first two bills—you would almost call them the two more innocuous bills of the whole package—that do unduly trespass on rights. There are provisions in the bills with retrospective effect. There are provisions in the bills that deny any merits review process—that is, once the decisions are made by these administrative authorities you cannot review them. That is almost unheard of in English jurisprudence. But these bills take away that merits review in certain instances. Very broad discretionary powers are given. The bills as presented give no indication of how you enforce what is said to be public consultation and a direction to consider any submissions received on the public interest media authority. So their decisions will be almost unchallenged.

There are provisions that trespass on personal rights and freedoms, privacy and freedom of expression. These were all identified by the Scrutiny of Bills Committee. But the Labor Party and the Greens would not even allow those to be tabled here before debate was to be held on those particular provisions. So not only will Labor and the Greens join together to bring these constraints on the freedom of our press before parliament but, by guillotining the debate, by shortening the debate, they are preventing any other aspect of these bills that would really frighten the general public if they understood them completely from being identified. The alerts of these horrendous provisions of the bills are not even allowed to be tabled in this chamber.