Mark Dreyfus (Isaacs, Australian Labor Party, Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

Dr Henry ended his appointment as Secretary to the Treasury on 26 April 2011 and he commenced in his new role as special adviser upon being appointed by the Governor-General. His duties are to be determined in discussions with the Prime Minister. I need to make it as clear as I possibly can to the member for Mackellar that this is not a political appointment, that the government does not accept her characterisation of the appointment of Dr Henry under section 67 as a political appointment and, further, that the comments that the member for Mackellar has just made to this House—that Dr Henry, when he ended his distinguished career or apparently at some unspecified point towards the end of his distinguished career, became partisan—are a disgrace. That is a disgraceful comment to make. We have here, in Dr Henry, someone who has served our nation for 25 years, 10 of them spent as Secretary to the Treasury. He was of course appointed as Secretary to the Treasury by the Howard government. After taking a well-earned period of leave, he will return to part-time government service, the terms of which will be determined in consultation with the Prime Minister later in the year. I want to take further issue with the whole way in which the member for Mackellar has sought to characterise this appointment. A legion of appointments have been made by successive Australian governments, not only under section 67 but in a range of other ways, sometimes not even under statutory authority or specifically under a particular provision of the Constitution but under the executive power of the Commonwealth. It is open to a Commonwealth government to appoint anyone in any capacity to serve the government, and it would be a sorry day if it were otherwise.

The government is entitled to engage the services of anyone to serve this nation if it is for the better government of the Commonwealth. It is not necessary to point to precedent. It is not necessary to point to anything other than the constitutional authority conferred on the government. Nor do we need to look for particular statutory authority because there is a whole range of conventions and institutions that serve the Commonwealth that nobody queries, other than those opposite, who wish to query governmental arrangements that they themselves have used on numerous occasions in government. They wish to challenge them because they are now in opposition and they wish to simply nit-pick or raise problems where none exist.

It is entirely appropriate that Dr Ken Henry, a distinguished Australian appointed to his former post by the former government and having served Australia well over many years, should continue to provide service to the people of Australia. Insofar as there is anything left of the question by the member for Mackellar I will take it on notice and provide anything more that might be needed to answer her questions in a timely fashion.

I would take issue also with her proposition that the examples that I gave of other appointments during the term of the former government, being Mr Fergus Ryan, Dr Paul Twomey, Ms Gwenyth Andrews, Mr Michael Hutchison, were not legislatively required to be made under section 67 of the Constitution. It is a facility put there when the Constitution was drafted in order to make it very clear that the Commonwealth will have at its disposal appropriate services of people with expertise, who could be employed in the manner envisaged by section 67 of the Constitution, as appointments of the Governor-General.

I reject on behalf of the government in the strongest possible terms the connotations which the member for Mackellar has sought to put on the engagement of Dr Henry or indeed the characterisation of his appointment by the member for Mackellar as a partisan or political appointment, which it is certainly not.

See this speech in context