Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Keneally and I have some disagreements on policy matters in the purview of the Department of Home Affairs, but I will place on the record that I agreed with every single word that she said in her recent contribution.

If this wasn't so serious it would be an absolute joke. The money that this department wastes beggars belief. This massive department—probably one of the biggest administrative consolidations of power in Australia's history—basically could not organise a beer in a brewery.

The Australian National Audit Office has regularly, consistently and significantly criticised this department for its incapacity to manage basic administrative functions. Whether you are talking about outrageous delays in visa processing, whether you are talking about its propensity to torture refuges on Manus Island and Nauru or its regular and consistent failures to adhere to government purchasing guidelines—all of which, I might add, have been the subject of significant criticism from independent statutory authorities ranging from the Australian National Audit Office through to the Human Rights Commission—this department has consistently failed to deliver value for money for the Australian people.

I wish I could say that I was surprised at the farce that this Senate has been presented with this evening, but I am anything but surprised. This is absolutely par for the course from the Department of Home Affairs.

This is a department that has a tame minister, who is predisposed to accede to all of this government's organisational desire to control and surveil every single aspect of the lives of Australian people. And the fact that they have this tame minister, and a tame Prime Minister—who used to be the minister responsible for various parts of what is now the Department of Home Affairs—is leading Australia down a very dangerous path. We have a secretary of the department who believes Australians are like innocent hobbits who need to be protected from the dark forces at work in the world, and who is not prepared to contemplate that actually some Australians, me included, value our freedoms more highly than we value the mirage of absolute safety that this minister, and this secretary, are attempting to sell us, the Australian people. They are marching us down the dark and dangerous road to a police state and a surveillance state, and they are doing so in the most inefficient and draconian way imaginable.

This farce that the Senate has been presented with stands as a symbol of the farce that this department has become. And the best stroke of an administrative pen that could be wielded in Australia today is to smash up this department—to de-consolidate the Department of Home Affairs, to spread the power out. Because power that is concentrated and power that is unaccountable—and both of those criticisms apply to the Department of Home Affairs—is the most dangerous kind of power that there is. The consolidation of power bringing, for example, ASIO into the home affairs department, was a sad day for this country. It was a sad day for democracy. And every time this department takes the next step down the road to a police state, every time this department continues to erode fundamental rights, freedoms, and liberties in this country—rights, freedoms and liberties that we used to send Australians overseas to fight wars to defend—and every time this department takes another step down that road, it is the Australian people who are losing something precious. They are losing their freedoms. They are losing their privacy. They are losing their capacity to go about their day-to-day lives without the all-seeing eyes of the government spying on them. And I use that term advisedly: the government is spying on Australians with the draconian laws that this department continually recommends up to its minister, who continually takes them to cabinet, who continually brings them into this place.

It's not good enough. It needs to be called out, and I'll tell you why it needs to be called out, Acting Deputy President Faruqi: because if you want to fight something, you have to call it out. If you want to call something out, you've got to name it. So I'm going to continue to be a member of the very small and selective group of senators in this place who have used the f-word: fascism. I've used it repeatedly, and I will say it again today. Don't believe that the slow frogmarch to fascism cannot happen in Australia—anyone who believes that is not a student of human history. Fascist regimes rise because people do not fight for their rights. And I am here to fight for the rights of ordinary Australians, and to insist that we have an informed debate in this country about this erosion of rights and freedoms, and about how we balance the perfectly reasonable desire to be safe in this country with that erosion of rights and freedoms.

Australia remains the only liberal democracy in the world that does not have some form of charter or bill of rights to protect and enshrine our rights. And yet the Australian Greens are the only party in this parliament that has a policy that Australia should have a charter or a bill of rights. And the reason we need a charter or a bill of rights in this country is so that citizens have got the tools that they need to stand up against this march down the road to a police state. We will campaign through this parliament and, I predict, beyond—because we won't get a charter of rights in this parliament, because neither of the major parties support those protections.

We'll campaign in this parliament, we'll campaign in the next parliament and we'll keep campaigning until, finally, Australia loses that tag of the only liberal democracy in the world that doesn't have a charter or bill of rights, either legislatively enshrined or constitutionally embedded. It should be in the Constitution, in Australia, a charter of rights. I acknowledge constitutional change is very difficult in this country and basically relies on broad political agreement in this place and in the public debate to succeed. But there is no reason we should not have a legislated charter of rights, and that is what I commit the Australian Greens to continue fighting for.

We are presented with this farce today, a farce that has cost millions of taxpayer dollars. I think about this every time I hear a government minister stand up now and say, 'Oh, no, we cannot increase the Newstart payment because we are making choices and we are setting budget priorities.' This government that just smashed up the progressive tax system in Australia, to give away $158 billion in tax cuts, can't find within its collective heart the relatively miniscule amount of money it would take to deliver a $75 a week increase in Newstart. Those are your priorities, and you stand condemned for those priorities. Yes, budgets are all about priorities, but when you're throwing away millions of dollars in a completely useless review, you stand condemned for your warped priorities.

Question agreed to.