Anne Webster (Mallee, National Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development, Local Government and Territories) Share this | Hansard source

Here we are on sitting day 13 of the new parliament, and the Albanese government is already acting like a third- or fourth-term government, lacking in transparency and accountability—and very smug at it. The coalition opposition has been listening to Australians, and, as shadow minister for regional development, local government and territories and shadow minister for regional communications—and, formerly, as shadow assistant minister for regional health—I have consistently heard story after story from stakeholders that they cannot get in to see a Labor government minister. It's okay to see the minister's staff, but not the minister. I get replies to my letters to ministers from their chiefs of staff and other staff, not the elected minister. This is an arrogant and out-of-touch Albanese Labor government that think they can get away with anything. Yet, the Prime Minister said last month:

My government is unashamedly an open government.

In April, Mr Albanese said:

I'm not frightened of scrutiny and transparency.

If the Prime Minister isn't frightened, why all the non-disclosure agreements? Why launch the biggest attack on freedom of information in 15 years? Why slash the number of staff allocated to the opposition?

The Prime Minister said, on 25 November 2022:

We're shining sunlight on a shadow government that preferred to operate in darkness, a government that operated in a cult of secrecy and a culture of cover-up, which arrogantly dismissed scrutiny from the parliament and the public as a mere inconvenience.

Yet, we have seen cover-up claims unravelling in court in relation to the payout to Brittany Higgins concerning former senator Linda Reynolds and her former chief of staff Fiona Brown, just this week. At the Bush Summit in Ballarat on Friday, the Prime Minister told a sceptical farmer audience, many of whom were from my electorate of Mallee, 'I won't BS you'—I'm paraphrasing. If the Prime Minister is not misleading farmers in regional Australia, why is the government moving in an increasingly secretive fashion?

The Australian government should operate as good corporate citizens. It is required to model good behaviour for other businesses to follow, yet what do we see in my electorate of Mallee and across regional Australia? Non-disclosure agreements—one after the other—secrecy, division and families that no longer talk to each other. Indeed, the Leader of the Nationals shared today an ageing farmer's one dying hope that his farming sons will speak with one another again. Why have they stopped talking to one another? They stopped talking over positions on the Albanese government's reckless railroading of regional communities with energy projects. These energy industry cowboys, the majority of them foreign owned, have been trashing social licence, which is a fact I think all serious observers of the energy debate acknowledge, including former and current Australian energy infrastructure commissioners. Social licence is being trashed because these energy industry cowboys are signing farmers and landowners up to non-disclosure agreements using divide-and-conquer tactics. We have seen the same from the Albanese Labor government: using selective consultation on key policy debates; keeping people in the dark, not taking the Australian community with them; and obfuscation and spin over energy prices, pretending power bills are going down, while they're actually going up. The lived experience of all Australians is power prices going up and energy reliability going down while emissions are flatlining.

This Labor government is a government that is loose with the truth, using eye-watering amounts of taxpayer money to cover for their policy failures on energy, and pretending it is good for Australians. It is anything but, and the government's culture of secrecy is dragging Australians into the Dark Ages.

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