Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In my final speech for the year I want to cover a few issues that were raised during the course of this week in the parliament and in documents tabled in the parliament. I also want to make a few comments about the environment amendment legislation that was just passed. I was not able to speak on the third reading, due to the guillotine and the time available to speak being taken up. I will try and cover all of those things. I will probably fail to do so in 10 minutes, so before I forget I will pass on my thanks to the attendants in this chamber, to all of the parliamentary staff and to the committee secretariat staff. I am involved in a lot of different committees, so I will not go through naming them all, but they have all been very helpful over the course of this year in many ways, and they are a key reason why the committee system continues to operate well—despite, I might say, the government’s growing efforts to slowly suffocate the value and effectiveness of the committee process. I also wanted to note all the other people who work to make our lives much easier, both inside the parliament and as parliamentarians in the wider community.

I also want to take the opportunity to thank my own staff and those of other Democrat senators for their work. They are a fantastic group of people who do an enormous job, many of them grossly under-recompensed. They work above and beyond the call of duty. It is not always a fun environment in the Senate in these days of government control. Despite that, they have continued to put in an enormous effort—and, I might say also, achieved an enormous amount for the good of the Australian community. I think a lot of people have earned a break and I certainly wish them well over that break. As we all know, we are coming back for an election year next year. So we all want to have our batteries recharged for what will be a very frenetic and crucial year for the future of Australia. I tried, in vain as it turned out, during the 2004 election when I was in my role as Leader of the Democrats to raise the prospect that the coalition was in a position to get control of the Senate. There was a lot of interest in that outcome after it had happened. I wish there had been more interest in the potential of it happening beforehand. But that will obviously be a key question at next year’s federal election: the future of the Senate.

I note that in my own state of Queensland it seems likely that we will have Pauline Hanson in amongst the competitors again. I ran against her in 2001, when I managed to get re-elected to this place and she did not. I know she had another go in 2004, unsuccessfully. I do think we need more diversity in politics, so I do not in any way try to dissuade anybody from running for election to parliament. But I do have concern that, whilst we need more independent voices, we need more constructive voices as well. That is what I try to provide for the people of Queensland, and what the Queensland Democrats as a party will seek to offer people as part of next year’s election campaign.

That leads me to a couple of reports that were tabled this week. One, in particular, was by the Ombudsman and reinforced the continuing problems with the immigration system. The way in which we treat asylum seekers and the way in which people are treated in detention reinforce the need for reform to our laws. We have had some changes in administration in the last 12 months or so, and that is welcome, but we need to change the law. Over the course of this year I have tried to put forward a number of ways that could be done, and I signal that that will be a continued focus for me and the Democrats next year. We will try to get legislative reform and put justice back into the Migration Act. That means speaking out against some of the mistaken comments that have been made.

As I mentioned in a speech in this place last week, we can from time to time across the political spectrum fall into the trap of playing on the easy prejudices, the ignorance and the fears that people have about migrants, about people from other countries. It has been raised in some of the campaigns that people from a range of different political parties, including other minor parties, have put forward. We need to ensure that it is not present in the campaigning that we do on any issue. Migration has been a massive gain and a massive benefit to this country. That does not mean that there are not issues to debate about how we run our migration system, but we certainly should not attack migrants or anybody who comes here from overseas.

We should, however, give a lot more attention to the needs, interests and views of the First Australians. I take the opportunity to once again emphasise the importance of the report tabled today by the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs on the issue of stolen wages—that one small component of grotesque exploitation of Indigenous Australians over decades in many jurisdictions across the country which has played a direct result in the poverty and disadvantage that many Indigenous Australians face today. We all need to give greater priority to that issue.

I also want to refer to the Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006, which has just passed—and I seek to do so without breaching standing orders in reflecting on a vote of the Senate. Clearly the Democrats were unhappy with the inability of the Senate in the committee stage of the debate to remove some of the key flaws in the legislation. It is worth noting in the interests of balance that there were positive components in the legislation. Indeed, material provided to the Senate Standing Committee on Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts by Mr Andrew Macintosh, Deputy Director of the Australia Institute, pointed to some of the positive amendments contained in the legislation as well as some of the negative ones. Given that Mr Macintosh has been prepared to be critical of the act in the past, I think the fact that he pointed to positive changes in the legislation is worth noting. But clearly there were negatives as well, and it is unfortunate that the very day after the minister tabled the State of the environment report—which quite specifically acknowledges that the act, as it was passed by the Democrats in 1999, has been a positive for the Australian environment and that it had been improved with regard to accountability, public participation and openness of information with regard to environmental issues in Australia—we had legislation containing parts that reduce that accountability.

The frustration I have is that, because of the government’s imposition of a guillotine—which we have seen with growing frequency this year, along with, I might say, a growing number of gags—we did not even get to highlight some of the biggest problems with the legislation and to question the minister about them, particularly the removal of the merits review of decisions by the minister and the increasing hurdle to be put in place for people who are seeking to undertake court actions, enforcement actions to require people to comply with the act.

Those key removals of accountability mechanisms are a real negative. We did not get to examine some of the issues regarding heritage and the concerns that were expressed about what that might mean. It is a reduction of protection in heritage. That includes, I might say, Indigenous heritage issues. This year saw yet again the failure of the federal government to follow through on commitments given about three ministers ago now, with Senator Hill, to update the legislation regarding the protection of Indigenous heritage in Australia. We still need to do that. It is a loss to the entire Australian community but particularly to the Indigenous people. We should be adequately protecting such an extraordinary—what should be essential—part of our nation’s psyche and our nation’s sense of who we are. Those links to the nation’s oldest living culture go back tens of thousands of years. To think that we still do not have adequate legislative protection for that is baffling.

It should be emphasised, though, that, despite those negatives that have now been passed into law, we do not want to repeat the mistake of 1999. This last debate has shown that the Democrats were right in our judgement in 1999 in ensuring that a strengthened national environment act was put into place. The problem since then was that, because of the controversy at the time, a number of environment groups did not engage and use the strengths of the act. The fact that some negatives have passed in the last few minutes should not lead people to think that the act is now useless. It is still quite strong. What we need to do is apply more political pressure to ensure that the political will needed to ensure that the act is administered and enforced properly is brought to bear. That is what the Democrats will seek to do over the next 12 months. The act still has strength; it has to have the political will and the resourcing to back it up. (Time expired)