Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

I second the motion. The House of Representatives is the pre-eminent debating forum in this country, and, on an issue that is as important as government accountability and transparency, I would have thought that this government would relish the opportunity to have the debate in this chamber.

I've had the privilege of serving in this place for nine years, mostly on that side of the House rather than this side of the House, and I had the opportunity for six of those nine years to watch the Leader of the House go from Defcon 5 to Defcon 1 over issues around transparency and accountability. In fact, no-one does Defcon 1 like the Leader of the House. The issue of government transparency and accountability was, according to those members opposite—the government—one of their principal tenets, one of their principal pillars. I sat there and listened to speech after speech about how important it is to ensure that we have accountability in this place.

So you can only imagine my great surprise, when the chamber has an opportunity to debate a bill that talks about significantly altering the Freedom of Information Act, about significantly watering down the powers of the people to hold their government to account, that this government wants to send it off to the Federation Chamber, where none of you folk in the gallery will get an opportunity to look at it or listen to it. The students up there all want this matter debated in the House of Representatives, because this is the pre-eminent forum in this country.

Where the government consistently banged on for years and years about the importance of honesty, integrity, transparency and accountability, what do we get? We get the Leader of the House moving a motion to squirrel it away to the Federation Chamber. I say, even though it's his birthday: shame on him. I say to the Leader of the House, based on the previous speech and mine, I think we're getting to you. I know, deep down, that the Leader of the House has some modicum of respect for executive accountability. The concept of executive accountability is one of our fundamental tenets—

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