Robert Ray (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is good to know that Senator Macdonald is going to shout them all tonight, too, so congratulations on that. I wanted to start off tonight by talking about the Queensland state election. I am not really going to talk about it other than to note that every time a state election comes up the local senators here get stuck into the issues—I commend Senator Ian Macdonald for not doing so tonight—and we have very various slanging matches in here about the state election and the virtues and faults of the various state parties are expressed. And you know what? Not one vote is ever shifted. It is just group therapy. It is just sending a signal back home that the boys and girls down here are representing their home state.

Santo Santoro (Queensland, Liberal Party, Minister for Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is only day one!

Robert Ray (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes. But why don’t we just desist from it? Why don’t we get on with the national issues and let them, the provincials, fight it out on their own turf? Because, really, it never shifts a vote. And if you need that form of group therapy I feel sorry for you.

One of the issues I want to address tonight, and I have raised this at estimates on one or two occasions, is the question of the government producing legal opinions. You always hear oppositions and Democrats and Greens demanding the government produce this and that legal opinion. I rarely have sympathy for that view, but with one exception: I do believe it should be mandatory for governments to table in this place, and in the other place, legal opinions as to the constitutionality of a particular piece of legislation. I do not believe they have any right to bottle up those legal opinions. They should be put on the table so they can be debated and examined in full.

We saw it recently with the proposed sale of the Snowy Hydro. There were legal opinions around that said the government proposal was unconstitutional. What did the government say? ‘We’ve got our own advice on that.’ We could never examine that advice, and we should be able to examine legal advice on the constitutionality of legislation. This is not a partisan matter; it would help national government if they promoted those sorts of debates. Instead they say: ‘It’s always been done this way. You didn’t produce legal opinions on constitutionality, so we won’t,’ ignoring such a thing as progress in politics. We do change things; we do not always do things as we have done in the past. There is always the possibility for advancement, and I believe whatever advice is sought as to the constitutionality of bills—sometimes it is from the Attorney-General’s Department, the Government Solicitor, the outside—it should always be tabled in this chamber. I commend the government to at least consider that into the future.

The next issue I want to raise is that on, I think, 9 May the Minister for Defence and his very able parliamentary secretary issued a press release about the High Readiness Reserve. I did not read it at the time but I read it today, and what a sense of deja vu I had. I remind everyone that when I was Minister for Defence I instituted the system of Ready Reserve. This was a very successful innovation. I thought it was working very well when I left office in 1996. The incoming Liberal government scrapped it without review. It is interesting to track back and find out why they did it, because they did not give it any real consideration. This is the sequence of events: over six years, I had five shadow ministers, only one of whom was interested in the Defence portfolio.

I started off with Senator Peter Durack, a very nice person, past his prime and not really interested in the subject but who, nevertheless, took a genteel interest. In rapid succession, I had Robert Hill, who never asked me a question on defence in the time I was defence minister, never fronted an estimates committee and only issued a statement on military bands—that is, he advocated the abolition of military bands. When we abolished three, he secretly sent messages out to those marginal seats saying they should oppose the abolition of military bands. That is the only thing I can remember him doing. Then we had Peter Reith, whose major activity was to see whether the VIPs could land in his electorate so he would not have to go all the way out to Tullamarine. Then we had Alexander Downer—I went through quite a few—who ripped up bipartisanship in a press release one day. Finally, we had someone who took an interest in defence issues, Senator Newman.

Most of these people were understaffed, so when a retired army major came forth to volunteer to assist they used him—and so they should have. But he had a passionate hatred of the Ready Reserve, so when it came to writing Liberal Party policy for the 1996 election he inserted the abolition of the Ready Reserve. This did not go through any processes or intellectual examination. It simply sat there, and when the incoming defence minister was bound by Liberal Party policy, he got rid of the Ready Reserve—just dispatched it.

The Ready Reserve were there to supplement regular Army people. They could be deployed within 30 days. Many of them would go on to careers in the Army, and there was a retention problem because they so enjoyed it. It was an excellent proposition—just dispatched. Now we have the High Readiness Reserve about to come in. I have tried to find one difference between the High Readiness Reserve and the Ready Reserve and I cannot. So I am very pleased the government has brought it in. I am not even seeking an apology for their dismissal of my idea and innovation all those years ago; I just think it is a pity we spent 10 years without it, because it could have filled many of the holes that exist in the current day in providing military personnel.

I notice that yesterday it was announced that the ideal size of the army would be 30,000. Good luck with that! I think it is a good policy but, as to being able to recruit and retain people in modern society, you have a real job ahead of you. You will find that many of those who participate in the High Readiness Reserve will go on to the regular Army because they will enjoy it so much. This will give you a retention and recruiting problem in the High Readiness Reserve, but do not worry about that. At least a lot of them are going to go on to a full military career, and it will ease the recruiting problem. I congratulate the government on bringing in the High Readiness Reserve but express some disappointment that 10 years ago the Ready Reserve was butchered without a proper discussion and a proper assessment.

The final matter I want to mention tonight I do with some trepidation. I still wonder what we are doing with superannuation as it applies to those who were elected in 2004. If you take your mind back to when the existing scheme was closed down, there were many reports in newspapers saying that MPs’ superannuation was too generous, but the answer to that was: it was better to remunerate members of parliament according to community standards and reduce the superannuation. Frankly, all that has happened is that the remuneration for those elected in 2004 must by constitutional and other imperatives remain the same as the rest of us, and they are left with a second-rate superannuation scheme. I say second-rate because I have talked to academics who have far better superannuation schemes. I have talked to public servants who have far better superannuation schemes than the inductees of 2004. Now that the panic and political opportunism created by Latham and responded to by the Prime Minister are behind us, we should do something about it. We cannot restore the old scheme for those elected in 2004, but why should they have one of the worst schemes in the Public Service rather than one of the better ones?

It is never very good to raise these issues. You get pilloried by the press. They bag you because you are just a shellback looking after others. I have maximised my superannuation. There is no advantage in any of this to me. What is more, I am impervious to the blandishments and the threats of the fourth estate; I just do not care, and that makes me very dangerous politically to them. But it is time we did something about it and showed a bit of ticker and tried to improve it. I do not like sitting in this chamber on far better conditions than some other colleagues. I do not think it is fair and I do not think it is good for politics into the future.