Zed Seselja (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

I would like to speak briefly. Coalition senators have tabled a dissenting report. We have a number of concerns with this committee generally. We believe that the Select Committee on Health is duplicating much of the work that is done by both the Senate Community Affairs Legislation Committee and the Senate Community Affairs References Committee. That is important as we look at the strain on committees at the moment. We know that there is some doubt about whether some of the crossbenchers will be able to get resources for things like the committee into wind farms, yet this committee is more or less duplicating the work of two existing committees and we believe is being conducted in a way that the outcomes are completely predetermined and there is a lack of foreseeable actionable outcomes. There is scope and scale, as I said, that duplicates much of the work. There is an agenda that appears unduly partisan, and there does not seem to be any recognition of much of the complexity of this area.

I would also like to briefly highlight—and this is highlighted in the report—that the committee emphasised that they wished to focus on hearings in regional areas. Of the 13 regional hearings proposed by the chair, five have since been cancelled, four that were scheduled to be full days are only half days due to lack of witnesses and one has been postponed. Despite the committee's purported focus on regional areas, there is yet to be a full-day hearing in a town outside of the capital cities.

There seems to be an ignoring of inconvenient evidence, which I saw, for instance, in Tasmania. When I attended there was evidence presented that showed that the former Tasmanian Labor-Greens government had been getting all sorts of additional money for health which it had not been spending—in fact, it was spending less per capita on health even though it got that additional money in recognition of Tasmania's special circumstances. Evidence like that seems to have been ignored.

To finish briefly, we have concerns about how this process is managed. We think it is duplicating the existing work of committees, therefore putting unreasonable strain on the resources of that committee office. I commend the dissenting report to the Senate.