Nick Sherry (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Special Minister of State, Senator Ludwig, I table a ministerial statement on the approval of exemption of AEC public information campaigns from Australian government advertising guidelines.

Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the statement.

I will not take up too much time, but I do want to indicate in relation to the interjection by Senator Brown before that the reason the Senator Williams motion was withdrawn was to facilitate the government’s legislative program. So let us not hear any reflections at all on Senator Williams’s decision to withdraw his notice.

It would appear that bipartisanship has taken a rather nasty tumble today. The shadow Special Minister of State, being me, was not extended the courtesy of being provided with a copy of the ministerial statement today. I will let honourable senators make a decision about the appropriateness of that, but the longstanding convention in this place is that ministers will give shadow ministers copies of ministerial statements before they are tabled. If this is where bipartisanship is now in relation to this minister, at least I know what the rules are and I can respond appropriately to that destruction of bipartisanship.

I want to say a couple of words in relation to this matter. In the run-up to the last election, the then opposition, now the government, made a significant song and dance about government advertising guidelines and government advertising. They were going to clean up the system. They would come into government and they would clean the system up. They said the Auditor-General would be examining the material to ensure that the material was appropriate. So the question is: why exclude the AEC from these rules? What is it that the AEC has said to the government which would move the government to change the rules? Will the minister table correspondence between the AEC and himself that has led to the AEC being removed from these guidelines—the guidelines that were going to clean up the system? If there is a legitimate reason, let us hear it. Table the correspondence; let the Senate make a value judgement about whether this removal is appropriate or not. So I have not had the courtesy of a copy of the ministerial statement. I have not seen the ministerial statement, but I assume that there is not a letter tabled. Perhaps the minister at the table, Minister Sherry, can indicate with a nod of his head or otherwise whether the ministerial statement has attached to it a letter from the AEC. If it has, let me know now. But I suspect it probably has not. Of course, I do not know whether it is there or not because I was not given the usual courtesies associated with these matters.

There is absolutely no justification, unless I am advised otherwise by the minister or by reading this statement, for pulling one particular agency out of these guidelines. No justification at all. They say they are going to clean the system up and then they take one agency out. I can understand, for example, that government business enterprises and agencies under the CAC Act would not be involved. But we have not been given to date a good reason why an agency the size of the AEC, an agency with a very substantial advertising budget, has been removed. If there is nothing in that ministerial statement which explains by way of letter or correspondence from the AEC as to why they should be excluded, then this is totally inappropriate. I cannot pursue it because I have not read it—because I was not given the courtesy of seeing it. Anyway, we will have a further discussion about that at estimates, no doubt.

I will finish by saying that the coalition does not support, in the absence of any reasonable information, the AEC being removed from the government guidelines. The guidelines have been shown for the last 12 months to be completely and utterly farcical anyway. If you start taking big-spending agencies like the AEC out, then the farce just becomes magnified.

Question agreed to.