David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I note the further contribution from the government there. This is an order that was first made in March of this year, requiring documents to be produced in April. The government then said, 'Oh, well, we're having an investigation into the Jervis Bay ditching,' and gave a private briefing to me and, I think, a private briefing to Senator Roberts as well. In fact, it may have been a very efficient joint briefing at the time. Part of what we were told—I'll keep the bulk of it private, but this is relevant for today's purposes—was that they expected the investigation to be concluded by October. As a result of that, Senator Roberts moved this motion to produce the documents by 1 November. And what have we heard since then? The usual Minister Marles response: crickets—nothing.

When we get told that the investigation will be finished by October and on that basis there's an agreement to push off production till 1 November—a very reasonable agreement—you would expect there to be some engagement with the minister when they just fail to produce documents. But there's such contempt amongst the Defence establishment for parliamentary scrutiny that they don't even bother to communicate with the senator who moved the motion to give some kind of explanation for why their previous commitment to get the report done by October no longer holds. There is just complete contempt from the Defence establishment.

Now the only explanation we're given is that seven months ago the minister said that there would be an investigation—there's an internal investigation. Well, we already knew there was an internal investigation. We were told it would be complete by the end of October, and the motion was adapted for that very purpose. So where is the investigation into the Jervis Bay ditching, which could very easily have seen lives lost? My understanding is that it was just a mixture of good luck and incredibly quick responses from the crew that prevented lives being lost.

Thank goodness it was in the protected waters of Jervis Bay, close to the shore, because if it had been anywhere out at sea or in rough water the results may well have been fatally different. Indeed, months later we had a tragic loss of life from another Taipan helicopter. I join with Senator Roberts in expressing my genuine and sincere condolences to the families of all the lost crew, who are still seeking answers.

To be clear, this order we are talking about now is only for the Jervis Bay incident. It does not in any relate to that second tragedy that happened with the Taipan helicopters. It's interesting that this motion about the noncompliance has come up today because this is also the day I got a response from Defence to a freedom-of-information request seeking the flight test reports that Defence had in relation to Taipan's forward-looking infrared, its airworthiness and related matters. I also saw Defence's reports and documents, including the CASR compliance, the HMSC, the CFIT and related matters. A lot of that relates to the equipment that is used in the Taipan, particularly the heads-up display, which was notoriously unreliable, giving false readings and potentially sending pilots into catastrophic error, all done through a highly credentialed airworthiness certification process inside Defence.

One of the golden rules of civil aviation in response to an accident or concerns about an accident is to have no secrecy at all, to have radical openness, to just share all the documentation and all the findings and to do it in the most transparent way possible. That's because other people operate these platforms and it's been found in civil aviation investigations that that commitment to radical transparency is actually the way we keep the travelling public safe. So why is it any different for service personnel? We know that radical transparency on airworthiness works for civil aviation. There are no credible national security reasons to not produce this material, the reports about critical instrumentation in the Taipan helicopter. It has been withdrawn from service. It will never come back into service in Australia. So, if our enemies find out that there were serious critical faults in how the Taipan helicopter operated, no national security harm can come from that because we thankfully will not be putting service personnel into them ever again. They've been withdrawn from service, so there's no credible national security reason not to produce this material. There are compelling transparency reasons to produce it. The reason I got from Defence to not produce these documents is that, if they produce the documents about the independent credible internal assessments that were done by credentialed airworthiness and air safety experts inside Defence, apparently that would have a negative effect on the 'proper and efficient operations of Defence'. Tell me how. Tell me how having transparency about identified deficiencies in a helicopter that has now been withdrawn from service would have any kind of negative impact on the proper and efficient operations of Defence?

We are also told by Defence that this confidential aspect of aviation safety is 'vital in order to quickly and accurately ascertain issues' and to 'delineate between human and mechanical error to ensure that an incident is not replicated'. It seems to me that that it's only in Defence that secrecy and hiding of documents provides any kind of safety response, because in all other aviation investigations radical transparency is what provides safety. What's special about Defence that the airworthiness assessments of critical parts of the Taipan helicopter system should be kept confidential and hidden from the public, the Defence Force and families of serving members in the Defence Force?

Why is it only in Defence that these things are hidden? What are they hiding? And who's hiding them? We're not going to let this FOI rest here. We're going seek a review. But, of course, the government has starved the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner of funds, so it could take five years for us to grind our way through the FOI review—