Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I'm very disappointed at the proposal for us to not insist on our amendments. It does make you wonder what the point of the Senate is. What's the point of the debate we had last week? What's the point of the amendments that were agreed in this place last week? We spent an extended period of time last week, as people will recall, debating these amendments in this place, and debating the main bill that they accompanied. I think that it was very appropriate, given the significance of the bill, for us to have spent that time debating the bill and the amendments.

As I said in my speeches then, we agree that, wherever foreign interference or actions that aren't in our interests are occurring, these are serious problems that need to be addressed. Where we disagree is with the approach the Liberal Party has taken. After a lot of debate, we had two amendments that got through—two amendments amongst many. It was an absolutely minimal number of amendments to this very significant bill. It is very appropriate for the Senate as a house of review to decide that there were some changes—just a tiny bit of extra checks and balances—that should be put in place on this far-reaching bill.

This bill is incredibly far reaching. It has been rushed through. It didn't have an exposure draft. It was basically being used as political cover when the Prime Minister was feeling very vulnerable on a very different issue with the terrible Commonwealth response to COVID in aged-care settings. It had no exposure draft. It had no regulation impact statement. The key stakeholders—including universities and local governments—raised significant concerns about the lack of consultation. We heard last week, at length, how consultation did not occur until after the bill was introduced in the House. So we made some very minor amendments to this bill. As Greens, we thought that there were a lot more changes that needed to be put in place to improve the checks and balances on the power that this bill gives to the foreign minister.

The bill leaves key terms undefined. It gives the foreign minister enormous discretion in overriding a very wide range of amendments, even retrospectively. There are no guidelines set out in the legislation as to what the minister needs to consider when deciding whether to intervene in an arrangement. There's no commitment to procedural fairness, which involves not being biased, giving the person or entity affected a hearing before an action is taken, and providing reasons for undertaking that action. As we noted in the debate last week, procedural fairness does not necessarily involve providing reasons if there are national security concerns. The whole argument, we were told last week, was that we couldn't have procedural fairness because it might impact on our national security, and that is a furphy.

Essentially, it's clear that the approach that has been taken by this government is designed to cut off all avenues of legal appeal. In doing so, it gives massively too much power to the minister. It throws away the essential checks and balances that should be there in such far-reaching legislation. And all the government can say is basically: 'Just trust us. We won't be doing it in that overarching too-powerful way. Don't worry. There will be notes. There will be frameworks. There's a task force.' But it's not in the legislation, so it's not guaranteed. It's not locked in. It is giving too much power to the minister.

Fundamentally, we believe that addressing foreign interference necessarily should involve working collaboratively with stakeholders around the country, including the state and territory governments, including the universities, and including local councillors and other bodies. We believe that this bill should have been developed with a very different process and it should have provided much, much stronger oversight and transparency. In that debate, only two amendments were successful in getting through the Senate, and yet we're now being asked to not insist upon one of them, which the House rejected. That amendment, requiring judicial review, is only a marginal improvement on a bad piece of legislation, but it is an important improvement and the Senate absolutely should be insisting on that amendment.

I want to conclude by noting that this whole piece of legislation does nothing to address an underlying and fundamental cause of potential foreign interference and influence and corruption and actions occurring that aren't in our national interest, and that's money. It does nothing towards getting money out of politics, which is what we need to do if we're going to get serious about decisions being made on their merits and not on who is holding the purse strings. We need to bring in a federal ICAC if we want to find out who is corruptly and improperly influencing whom. We need to fund universities properly if we want them to question the wisdom of entering into memorandums of understanding with foreign governments and universities. Frankly, there is so much more that this government could be doing to address these very important issues. This legislation does not do this, and not insisting on this one amendment makes a bad piece of legislation even worse.