George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I am very disappointed to hear that the Greens will not be supporting the amendments which I have moved on behalf of the opposition and which the arts community want very badly out of this process. I have heard in the years I have been in the Senate many ignorant speeches. But I have never in my life heard a speech which revealed such a depth of invincible ignorance of a subject as the speech that has just come from Senator Christine Milne, whose knowledge and understanding of cultural policy is non-existent.

Let me outline the opposition's attitude to the Australia Council Bill 2013. We welcome the review of the functions of the Australia Council. The Australia Council, in its current form, was created by the Whitlam government, although the form in which it was established by the Whitlam government built upon an entity established by the Gorton Liberal government—a fact often overlooked by those who choose to rewrite history so as to favour the preferences of the left. So this is a legacy of the Gorton government, expanded by the Whitlam government and maintained with bipartisan support by both sides of politics in all the years since.

I was at an arts function in Sydney recently. I hope Mr Hockey is listening to this. I was flattered to be reminded by one of the most senior arts practitioners in Australia that the government that was most generous to the arts in terms of arts funding was the Howard government in its final year and that the minister who had been most generous to the arts in terms of funding was me. The canard that the Labor Party looks after the arts and the Liberal Party does not is just that. It is a lie. It is a falsehood. As with so many other things, when it comes to cultural policy the Labor Party owns the rhetoric and the Liberal Party delivers the outcomes.

Let me make a comment on the timing of this bill. The review of the Australia Council was a long and detailed one. When the draft bill was published and issued for public consultation, a negligible amount of time was made available for feedback from the various sectors of the arts community—something like a fortnight. So there was, in fact, after the draft bill was published virtually no opportunity for feedback from the sector, something the sector well knew and deeply resented. Nevertheless, the government charged on, and now, in the dying days of this parliament, three days from the end and with about an hour and a half of debate allowed, we are expected to deal with the most significant set of renovations to the architecture of Australian cultural policy that the parliament has dealt with since the act which this bill would replace, the Australia Council Act, was debated all those years ago in 1975. After 38 years, the most important series of changes to Australian cultural policy is vouchsafed an hour and a half of debate in the parliament. That tells you how seriously the Labor Party takes cultural policy and that tells you how serious is the Greens' commitment to both proper parliamentary process and cultural policy itself. There is no need to deal with this bill now. If it is hurried through, guillotined through, as the government and the Greens propose to do, it will not command the bipartisan respect that it ought to. We know why the government wants to rush this bill through in the absence of any necessity—because this is a government that is determined to lay minefields for any future non-Labor government, and we do not treat that with respect.

Let me turn to the opposition's amendments and let me deal with the three topics which they principally address. When the bill was introduced into the House of Representatives, the most revealing and indeed shocking aspect of it was that, from clause 9 of the bill, there was removed the provision in the Australia Council Act 1975 that one of the core functions of the Australia Council would be—this was in subclause (f)—'to uphold and promote the right of persons to freedom in the practice of the arts'. It tells you everything you need to know about the contempt this Labor government and the Australian Greens have for freedom of expression that, when they rewrote the Australia Council Act, they removed as one of the core functions of the Australia Council the obligation to protect freedom of expression. It was relocated elsewhere in the act, to an inferior criterion, an inferior set of considerations. But it was removed as one of the core functions of the act. Why would you do that? If you believe in freedom of artistic expression, why would you, as a matter of deliberation and careful thought, decide to remove freedom of artistic expression as one of the core values of Australia's principal arts funding body?

There was a Senate inquiry into this bill, and the Senate inquiry recommended that freedom of artistic expression be reinstated into the bill. That is why, in clause 9, we have some non-sequential alphanumeric provisions so that clause 9(1)(bc) would now include 'to uphold and promote freedom of expression in the arts'. That is fine. But why did you take them out in the first place, Minister, and why did you, Senator Milne, connive with the government in doing that?

What the opposition has decided to do, having—