Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

As a bit of a history lesson about how this chamber operates and how this parliament operates, public interest immunity is defined on our own parliamentary website this way:

Under the doctrine of 'public interest immunity', historically described as 'Crown privilege', the Executive Government may seek to claim immunity from requests or orders, by a court or by Parliament, for the production of documents on the grounds that public disclosure of the documents in question would be prejudicial to the public interest.

Now, that all seems pretty sensible to me. But the big problem that we've got is that we seem to have, at that point, deviated significantly from the process. The claim made by the minister when he came in here briefly before was that it would prejudice relations between the Commonwealth and the states. Following on from Senator Scarr's contribution, I'll read to you what that actually entails: 'The information concerned belongs to the states as well as the Commonwealth and therefore should not be disclosed without seeking the approval of the states.' The obvious response to this is that the agreement of the states to disclose the information should be sought before the government refuses to provide the information and must be given the opportunity to give reasons why such an objection should be sustained.'

So what we've got here right now is a government who has gone, 'We have public interest immunity ability; we're going to apply it. We'll just forget about all the process that sits in between it.' As rightly pointed out by Senator Scarr, a conversation with the South Australian government yesterday and with the Queensland government yesterday, and with every government in Australia today on the grounds of this particular claim would actually have enabled this government to follow an appropriate process. You do not care about process—you do not care about it—and, quite clearly, even a convention as important as public interest immunity in this place is being completely disregarded. It's also interesting to note that you cannot claim public interest immunity—this is via a doctrine from the former Clerk of the Senate, Harry Evans, one of your guys, who said—