Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think the main point here is that the government is finding that governing is very difficult. When you are the dog that has caught the car, it is a big problem for the country. When you win an election with very few policies and you have people in positions that are not capable of administering departments and responding to events in a timely fashion, it is a very obvious problem now that the country has. The consequence of these actions, or these failures to act in a timely manner, is that Australians have been unnecessarily exposed to violent criminals in our own society.

This was not a difficult thing to predict. In fact, six or so months ago the High Court had flagged that there were issues here in relation to these laws. The government should have been prepared to act quickly with a bill. We had the charade of a parliamentary sitting just two weeks ago where there was emergency legislation rushed in, which was amended the day after it was introduced, following the recommendations of the opposition. I welcome the fact that the government has been prepared to take advice from others, but you have to think that the best position here would be that the government could take advice from its own departments, direct them to be ready for events and then have the legislation ready to go in the instance where the court makes a decision that exposes people to danger. That's what this is really about: is the government competent and capable of protecting the Australian people in relation to these matters?

We are recommending improvements to this legislation because we want to make sure that it does the job and it protects the Australian people. The various distractions that have plagued the government may be an excuse to a certain extent, but, ultimately, as I said, these are not events that were difficult to predict. We have now seen 80 or 90 people who were temporarily released into the community a couple of weeks back who are now under some sort of supervision. It is extraordinary to think that in this day and age, with the resources available to the government, this could have happened. The government is hiring 10,000 new public servants here in Canberra. What are they all doing? The government wants to hire more politicians as well, we see. There's not a problem with resourcing here; there's a problem with leadership and competence in these roles.

These ministers don't have to generate bills here—they're not hugely complex bills. There are bills and then there are bills. We've seen in this parliament that there are vastly more complex concepts that have been attempted to be legislated across the economy and across our society. These bills, while they may be heavy in legalese, are not the hardest bills to have ready to roll if they are needed in a contingency.

The Australian people will always be wanting their governments to be successful, in that they are able to promote policies and ideas that are going to improve the nation, send it in the right direction and so on and so forth. In this case, people will be bewildered that this has been handled in such a sloppy way, not by one minister but by a handful of ministers here. That's why we have this institution of a parliament, because our role is to ensure that we hold the government to account and that we hold them to their commitments. That is an important part of our democracy, and in this case the coalition has played a constructive role in recommending improvements to these various pieces of legislation that should have been prepared some months ago.

If you go through these cases, which have been canvassed by my colleagues in detail, there are people here who have committed very serious crimes against Australian citizens. There is no excuse for any government to allow violent criminals to be exposed to Australian citizens, and there have been particularly harrowing stories about victims of some of these crimes who have particular concerns that the perpetrators have been released into the community without any supervision or any measures in place. This was a huge risk that the government created some weeks ago when they failed to respond to these events in a timely manner. I remember my good friend Senator Scarr canvassing some of these matters in his recent contributions relating to some constituents in Queensland.

Ultimately, we have put forward some recommendations here, some amendments, to the government. We hope the government will take these on board, as they did a couple of weeks ago. It's not ideal to see the opposition legislating. It's much better for everyone for the government to legislate. But we welcome the fact that the government has been prepared to look at these things with an open mind. But the political point remains that we want the government to do a better job because we want the Australian people to feel safe. We don't want people to feel they will be under threat from violent criminals who should be restrained and who should not be set onto our streets. That is a fundamental expectation that the Australian people have, that those people will not be exposed to the community and that they will be restrained in some form because they have committed and have been convicted of serious crime. The basic standard here is, if you've committed a crime, you should face serious consequences. If there is a legal quirk that occurs where serious criminals are released from custody or from other measures, they need to be dealt with as soon as possible, rather than it being dragged out for weeks and weeks without a proper resolution.