Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, but it shows how stupid the whole thing was: was the phone call at 8.55, 8.56 or 8.57? Because the officials could not quite remember, they were berated by members of the Labor Party. Deliberation on the progress of this committee's inquiry will not take long because there has been no progress. What Senator Brandis said in the estimates committee hearing, and he then corrected in one small area immediately he was able, has all been there on the public record for weeks and for months; yet, this references committee has sat for two days already going over and over and over and over the same things. This abuse of the process, again, continues today.

Somewhere along the line this Senate has to get the Senate committee system back to the times when it was respected and when it operated properly, when it operated with cooperation between all senators because we were doing good things. I am sorry that Senator Lazarus seems to be tied up in this because you will recall that that Queensland committee—the reference about the Newman government to be investigated by a select committee which Senator Lazarus chaired—was a committee set up notwithstanding that the government had by far the biggest number of senators in this chamber. The government had one senator on that committee, the Labor Party had two, the Greens had one and Senator Lazarus was the other one. So of a five-member committee, the government had one member. That brought the Senate into disrepute. It was an absolute farce, that committee; nothing came out of it and nothing was achieved. No new information came out and it was just a waste of the senators' time and the taxpayers' money.

There have been a couple of other instances and this is just another one—purely political. Once the Senate adopts what seems to be an increasing situation by the Labor Party that we will run these committees purely for partisan political purposes or to give one of their allies the additional resources that comes with the chairmanship of a committee—

As I say, the chair is a person who, to my knowledge, has taken absolutely no interest in this matter at all—has not attended an estimates committee and has not, as a participating member, attended any of the other committees. As I understand it—someone has mentioned this to me—I am assuming the suggestion is that this crossbench senator will become the new chair.

The motion we are dealing with states:

The time for the presentation of the report on the handling of a letter sent by Mr Mon Haron Monis to the Attorney-General be extended to 12 August 2015.

This committee should have been able to report five minutes after it started, but the reporting date is now being extended to 12 August. I have no indication of what that is about. There has been no argument by the mover of the motion as to the reason for this. The committee was supposed to report today. I would have hoped that the committee would have had its report circulated to committee members, as is usual. Certainly, those of us who suspect what the chair's report might be have taken the precaution of getting a dissenting report ready for tabling today, in accordance with the procedures of the Senate.

Again, changing these things without notice to other members of the committee—with 10 seconds notice—is not the way that this chamber should operate. It is not the way the Senate committee system has operated in years gone by. It distresses me, as someone who has been in this place a long time, who has seen the good work that Senate committees have done, very often in a bipartisan way, very often correcting legislation and actions of governments, be they Liberal governments or Labor governments. Committees have investigated various areas and looked into them, as they should, and have made recommendations which both Liberal and Labor governments have accepted as being a sensible addition to the debate on these issues. Yet, in recent times, we have had the sort of dodgy dealing that is evidenced by this motion today.

Does it matter that I and other members of the committee have other things planned for 11 o'clock today? Did it matter that, when this committee first sat, the majority of the committee members picked a day that they knew I would be in Cairns for the launch of the northern Australia policy and that Senator Reynolds, the other regular member of this committee, would be in Amberley with a defence committee, that being a longstanding commitment? They knew that, so they set down the meeting for that day, when government senators would not be available. Fortunately, we were able, at short notice, to get another senator—one senator only—to fill in. But that sort of activity just brings the whole system into disrepute and means that the cooperation needed to run the Senate is rapidly dissipating.

I suspect that one of the decisions of this committee—I have no notice of this—is that they will probably want to have a hearing tomorrow. That is because they know that tomorrow is the meeting of the Federal Council of the Liberal Party and they know that all Liberal senators will be in Melbourne for the Federal Council.