Tony Sheldon (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to speak on the Second interim report: public interest immunity claims of the Select Committee on COVID-19 and the tabling of documents. Transparency and accountability are bedrock principles in government which I think you would find near-universal support for among the Australian public. In fact, if you ran a poll asking whether transparency and accountability are desirable traits for a government, I think close to 100 per cent of respondents would say yes. I say 'close to 100 per cent' because there are at least 112 members of the coalition government who, based on all the available evidence, would tick 'no'. This is a government so averse to scrutiny it has two senior cabinet ministers on indefinite paid leave, avoiding questions in this place, hoping that serious allegations against them will just blow over.

Earlier today, tens of thousands of people marched across the country, including just outside these doors, in the Women's March 4 Justice—and, of course, I was one of them. The Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister, rather than accept an invitation to meet this rally, opted to hide behind closed doors. This is emblematic of the Morrison government's approach to transparency and accountability. The Prime Minister bunkers down, hides from scrutiny and hopes we all will move on to the next scandal. It's never his responsibility and, of course, 'There's nothing to see here'—that's all you get from this Prime Minister. Occasionally he'll throw someone under the bus so that he can make a clean getaway, as he did with the now former Minister for Sport Senator McKenzie over sports rorts. But, more often than not, scandals engulfing this government are not only not the Prime Minister's fault; they are not anyone's fault. Take robodebt, the baby of the Prime Minister in his previous life as the Minister for Social Services—373,000 people were hounded for debts they did not owe and $1.7 billion was repaid. All the time, the government knew their actions were illegal. Parents have come forward telling of the suicides of their children, but neither the Prime Minister nor anyone else in the government were ever held properly accountable.

Let's take the Paladin affair, another matter. A $500 million government contract was handed to a security firm being run out of a shack on Kangaroo Island without public tender awarded—no accountability from the Minister for Home Affairs and no accountability from the Prime Minister. Or how about the Watergate affair, when the then minister for water resources, Barnaby Joyce, was accused of funnelling $79 million to the company of the minister for energy Angus Taylor in the Cayman Islands? Again, there's been no real accountability from the Prime Minister or the minister for energy. What does it take to lose your job in the Morrison government? It raises a serious question, doesn't it?

Meanwhile, the same government shirks accountability by vigorous stacking of the body which reviews many government decisions, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. A parade of ill-qualified Liberal mates now sit on the AAT. As Crikey reported in September 2019, the federal government had appointed 64 members and senior members to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal over the preceding six years who either worked for the coalition or had another form of close connection to that party. The stacking has continued in the 18 months since that article was finished, including former Liberal Senator Synon being appointed head of the social services division of the tribunal late last year. By no coincidence, this is the division which had the audacity to expose the illegality of the robodebt scheme. What do you do? You stick one of your mates in there and make sure that doesn't happen again. At the same time, the federal government has repeatedly cut funding to the ABC, and of course we learned today that the Attorney-General is now, in fact, suing the ABC. What we have is a full-throttle attack on the media and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, the few entities which have the power to hold this government to account.

This brings me to this rather incredible second interim report of the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19. During this unprecedented pandemic, the federal government was afforded sweeping powers by this parliament. Large sums of financial stimulus passed through the Senate in an expedited fashion to deal with the crisis. And it was necessary. Labor worked constructively to make sure that the expenditure of the unprecedented amount of public money was subject to scrutiny by the parliament. Thus the Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 was born. The Senate Select Committee on COVID-19 was tasked with inquiring in detail—and in public—into how these powers were used, how these sums were spent and why certain decisions had been made. It was established with bipartisan support, yet, as a result of repeated, substantial and wilful obstructionism, the committee has been forced to produce a report reminding the government of its obligations to transparency and accountability.

They are a government who show contempt for accountability in all its forms, especially when it comes to what they do when they spend money. It's not their money. It belongs to the public, to taxpayers. It's not the Liberal-National re-election slush fund. The select committee on COVID has been forced to demand that the government no longer hide behind vague claims of public interest immunity which allow it to selectively drip-feed information to the Senate.

We also see that not one but six cabinet ministers have been cited in this report as attacking the Senate's inquisitorial powers by misusing public interest immunity claims. The Attorney-General, Christian Porter, has sought to hide whether US law enforcement agencies can access data collected by the Morrison government's COVIDSafe app. The Minister representing the Minister for Health in the Senate, Minister Cash, has sought to hide COVID-19 data modelling from the Department of Health. The former Minister representing the Treasurer, Mathias Cormann, sought to hide a broad range of information, including regarding support to the aviation sector, JobSeeker modelling and the design of the JobKeeper program. I for one would be very interested to see the advice provided to the government about why Rex needed an untied grant of $54 million while it recorded an underlying profit while Virgin, on the other hand, was left almost to collapse in administration. Another job for the mates.

The Minister for Finance, Minister Birmingham, has sought to hide a presentation provided to cabinet by the Productivity Commission. The list goes on. The Minister for Aged Care and Senior Australians, Minister Colbeck, has sought to hide the contents of briefings provided relating to aged care during COVID-19 and to the interim report of the royal commission. And the Minister for Families and Social Services, Minister Ruston, has sought to hide advice provided regarding changes to asset testing for Centrelink payments. These are important matters which the Senate and the Australian public have a right to know about.

As set out in this report, there are clear reasons why the public immunity interest test has been misused by the respective ministers. I welcome and wholeheartedly support the thoughtful recommendations within the second interim report. It is time for the Morrison government to front up and finally restore some accountability and transparency into the framework.