Rex Patrick (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, I am having a go at a public servant—because this public servant is incompetent. It's incompetent. And public servants ought to know that if they do something as stupid as what she has done, I'm going to call it out. And I'm going to do that over and over again. I respect public servants, but not when they are politicised like this. Justice White made a determination that national cabinet was not a committee of the federal cabinet. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to work out that it is not appropriate for a public servant to say: 'Disregard what the judge says.' That is not okay. The problem we've got now—and this goes to the reason why this question ought to have been answered—is that the number is somewhere above 50. Fifty applications have been made to PM&C for access to national cabinet documents since the decision was handed down by Justice White. And that's likely to be 50 decisions wrongly made by PM&C that go off to the Information Commissioner and clog up the entire system. And that may well suit those on the other side of the chamber, who love secrecy. They don't want to have anything disclosed to the public. The news is that everything that a government does is paid for by the public and is supposed to be for the benefit of the public, and the public are entitled to see it, except in very narrow circumstances. This is just an abuse.

So, yes, Senator, I am going to name a public official, particularly one who has behaved in such an abhorrent way.

A government senator interjecting—

If you want to file me up you're welcome to. This is just wrong. You ought to be standing up and agreeing with me that we respect what our judicial officers say.

The government says, 'Oh, well, the AAT is not binding upon the executive.' Let's look at who was involved in this. The matter went to the Information Commissioner. She bumped it up the chain, saying: 'This is an important matter. It needs to be sorted out by the AAT.' It got to the AAT. The AAT recognised its importance and assigned a judicial officer as the presiding member. It wasn't as though bush lawyer Rex Patrick argued the case. It was Geoffrey Watson SC, a most eminent barrister with a long history, a gentleman and someone who knows the law inside out, and on the other side was Mr Berger QC from PM&C. This wasn't a kangaroo court. Serious legal minds dealing with this issue were overturned by someone in PM&C, a public official who ought absolutely to respect the way the rule of law works in this country and who should absolutely be respecting exactly the authority of a justice in making a statutory interpretation.

So, yes, I am naming Ms Angie McKenzie. I'm naming her as incompetent and I'm naming her as politicised. She has been directed to make a decision contrary to law because it suits the Prime Minister, because the Prime Minister doesn't want anyone to know about anything that happens in national cabinet. He doesn't want anyone to know about all of the decisions that have been made about the National COVID-19 Coordination Commission or what the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee might have been saying about masks or protecting children or vaccinations. They are all things that we ought to be able to see. National cabinet is a meeting of the federal government and the states. It's an intergovernmental meeting. The FOI Act actually protects those sorts of meetings. It just doesn't give a blanket protection. It's not controversial. I'm not saying we should open the floodgates, and neither was Justice White. He made the point that there are protections for intergovernmental exchanges that are sensitive, that might give rise to a concern, but, in relation to the minutes that I originally requested, they were released to me.

There are a number of organisations, journalists, NGOs and people who are trying to get access to see what's happened inside the national cabinet, who are now getting frustrated by an official. Every one of those decisions—because she's ignored them because she's incompetent and she's politicised—will now have to go through a process that will take a year. It will take a year because your government hasn't properly resourced the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. When the Labor Party set up that office there were three commissioners: the Information Commissioner, the FOI Commissioner and the Privacy Commissioner. Tony Abbott tried to defund the whole organisation, and we were left with one, the Information Commissioner, trying to do the work of three. Finally, with some arm twisting, I've managed to help get us an FOI commissioner, but we're still without a privacy commissioner. The whole organisation is underfunded because the whole plan of the government is: 'FOI request? We make a cavalier claim, it goes to the Information Commissioner and, two years later, an answer pops out. If you still need to delay it beyond the election, you appeal to the AAT at taxpayers' expense.' It's a disgrace, and the fact that Ms Angie McKenzie is in on it is just disgusting, and that's why I am calling her out.

You understand as well, Senator Van, that parliamentary privilege is not my privilege. It's the privilege of my constituents that allow me to say in this chamber what people can't say outside of it. It's a really important democratic principle. You need to understand exactly how this thing works and why it is important. Have you just not listened to the Leader of the Government in the Senate and the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate? No, you didn't listen to them, did you? They were just talking about the importance of parliamentary privilege. You ought to understand it. You ought to respect what happens in this place. This is absolutely a disgrace. There's no other word for it. The government has directed an official to apply secrecy in contravention to the ruling of a judicial officer. I've never seen that before, and I think it breaks the rule of law.