Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

So this is the hypocrisy of some of the people who have spoken today: they were sitting there and grinning from ear to ear as they took away the democratic representation of any opposition member to chair any committee at that time. Senator Macdonald was sitting there then and was very happy to take away such representation from everybody else. What is more, when the opposition members of the Senate, from the crossbenches or the Labor opposition at the time, put forward proposals for Senate inquiries into a range of very significant matters, they were voted down as a matter of course. Only those inquiries which the coalition were prepared to have were actually allowed to be even investigated at that particular time. One of the great strengths of the committee system in having opposition members and crossbench members chairing Senate committees is that, in a balance-of-power parliament when no-one has all the power, you get investigations into things which the government of the day does not necessarily want to have inquiries into. Not only do you get inquiries into things the government of the day may not want investigated but on the inquiries of the references committees the government does not have the numbers to dominate the outcomes. As a result, you get very significant Senate inquiry outcomes that are taken seriously by the community. During the years when the Howard government had control of both houses, the Senate committee reports were regarded as having very little significance because they were seen as a rubber stamp of the Howard government and the chairs made sure in those reports that they were government reports and that was all there was to them. Here we have people like Senator Joyce standing up and talking about democratic representation while refusing to acknowledge that when the Howard government had power it used that power ruthlessly to destroy democratic representation in the Senate.

This motion is saying that we recognise, as Odgers points out, the right of reasonable pro rata representation across the parliament for Senate committees. The committee system was changed when Labor got back into government so that we had opposition representation, but we have had abuse of that from the coalition. There was an agreement that there would only ever be three select committees at any one time and that they would be for specific periods, yet having agreed to that the coalition abused it. That is just part of what the community must now be worried about. The community should be worried about what would happen if the coalition ever got control of both houses again, because their track record to date is that they want to control everything. What is more, they have no respect for science, no respect for economists, no respect for international lawyers and no respect for anyone who does not agree with them, as we have heard from the leader of the coalition.

The leader of the coalition has cast absolute contempt. He has treated the scientific, economic and legal communities in Australia with contempt. To be truthful, we are now hearing drivel from people who are refusing to acknowledge that the born-to-rule mentality of the coalition showed itself during the Howard government years with the abuse of the Senate. What is even more interesting is that one of the major reasons the Howard government lost government in 2007 was the community's unhappiness with the Howard government having destroyed the democratic representation in the Senate in the manner to which it had usually been given expression. The community wanted to make sure that there were checks and balances and that the Senate was restored as the balance to a majority in the House of Representatives. That balance of democratic representation, with the ability of the government to chair legislative committees and the opposition and the crossbenchers to chair the references committees, means that you get a balance of interest. Because we have a balance-of-power parliament represented here in the Senate, we get the issues that are on the minds of Australians up for investigation by Senate committees. Those Senate committees are taken seriously when they represent a fair cross-section of the Australian community. That is the basis of this motion.

What we are hearing from the coalition is their view that they have a right to all of the chairs and that they should not be shared according to a pro rata distribution or to democratic representation. The coalition simply thinks it should keep all of those chairs. It is anti-democratic. It is anti the rules of the Senate. It is anti the commitment to the Australian people of fair representation in the Senate and it is restoring what the Howard government tried to take away and did take away for a considerable period. Over those years, I moved several times for inquiries into various aspects of the impacts of climate change on agriculture and other aspects in the Australian community and the upshot of it all—