Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise tonight to talk about People First holding the establishment to account with its policies. There is what I would like to call a motorboat of policies that I'm about to discuss tonight, and I will compare those with the major parties who have a raft of policies—thanks Rob Sitch. A raft is something that just floats in the water; you have a little bamboo pole and you're going around in circles at a very slow rate. That's one of the great things about being an Independent, I can get out there and talk about the policies that matter to the Australian people without being shackled down with all the palaver that goes on inside the major parties.

The first policy I want to introduce that will hold the establishment to account is to improve whistleblower protections. If there's one thing that we really need to uphold in this place, it is the brave and courageous public servants and bureaucrats who can see that there's something wrong inside their departments and they want to speak up. I have spoken to a number of whistleblowers throughout my time in parliament. One in particular was with regard to the Leppington Triangle. He was stripsearched by the Federal Police in his own house; he had his computer files and everything raided. This was all over the bogus claim that the Leppington Triangle was purchased for more than it should have been. Of course, that was completely ridiculous because if anyone knows anything about land valuations, 30 acres of land was not worth $3 million. That means one acre is worth $100,000. One acre is 4,000 square metres. So basically, you're saying a 500-square-metre block in Sydney would have been worth 12½ thousand dollars. I don't think so.

There have been other cases of whistleblowers coming to me, in particular from the TGA and also AHPRA. Throughout the COVID period people were very afraid to speak up. I've had people come to me from Home Affairs. Indeed, I had one very brave whistleblower who came to me from Home Affairs with all the posts where Home Affairs basically advised Facebook that they thought that they should be censored. It is absolutely disgraceful that the federal government—a coalition government!—was censoring its own people throughout COVID.

In the end, this whistleblower knew if he did this, he'd lose his job—and sure enough he did—but he said he'd reached a point where he could no longer work within the department anymore. He felt the role of that particular department was to protect the people. They weren't interested in protecting the people; they were only interested in controlling the people. So, the first policy that People First will be advocating for in respect of holding the establishment to account will be to improve protections for whistleblowers so that they can speak up.

The second thing I'm still going to advocate for, even though it didn't get up this afternoon, is that we need an independent judicial commission. The Queensland Law Society says that we need an independent judicial commission. I understand that is the Labor Party's own policy, yet for some strange reason they have not brought that legislation up throughout the course of their time in government, so since May 2022. And that's very disappointing. The question needs to be put: who will judge the judges? Politicians are held to account at elections. Ministers and governments are held to account through estimates. Who holds the judges to account? That's not just in terms of the decisions they make, but, often, in terms of the administration itself. If the administration is inefficient, slow and unwieldy, it costs people a lot of money, and justice should be free for all in a fair and transparent society. So I will continue to advocate for an independent judicial commission. I think we need that as a matter of urgency. I would still encourage Labor to bring that forward before they call the next election—not that I want to help them win an election or anything, or give them any free, gratuitous, advice. But it would look good in the eyes of the public, and that's something that the Labor Party could do with right now.

The other thing we need to do is to introduce cross-media ownership laws. Unfortunately, I think it was the Turnbull government that got rid of the cross-media ownership laws. At the time, people probably didn't foresee what the results of that would be, but today the mainstream media is predominantly controlled by three large media organisations—the ABC, News Corp, and Fairfax and Nine—and we've seen many minor regional newspapers collapse. I know that, when I was a Senate candidate in 2016, I was told by other senators: 'Whenever you go to a small country town, make sure you pop in and see the local newspaper. They're always looking for stories.'