Julia Irwin (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight, I am pleased to take the opportunity to report to the House about recent activities of the Standing Committee on Petitions as it followed up matters relating to petitions. The standing orders of the House enable our committee to receive and process petitions in readiness for presentation to the House. We can also consider matters relating to petitions and to the petitions system as a whole. Since its establishment in 2008, the committee has been following up petitions in a variety of ways, not seeking to resolve issues itself but to air them.

The first and usual response, once a petition is presented in the House, is for the committee to refer petitions to the minister in the relevant portfolio area for comment. Occasionally, the response is a success story in which the minister agrees to take the action that is sought. Much more often, though, its purpose is to explain a situation or matter that has been raised or complained about in the petition. Responses from ministers are published on the committee’s webpage once the committee has had an opportunity to consider them. So the issues and the explanations by government are available not only to the committee and petitioners but to anyone who is interested in them.

Several times each year the committee invites representatives of different Commonwealth Public Service departments to come to Parliament House to discuss matters raised in petitions that have been presented in the House and then referred by the committee to a minister for response. These hearings with public servants are useful ways for the committee to monitor what the government is doing in respect of issues raised by citizens in their petitions. The committee appreciates the way that ministers and their departmental staff have responded to the committee’s requests for further information about the matters that concerned citizens have raised.

As I have often said, the committee’s power to seek a ministerial response, and the general cooperation of ministers in replying in a timely way, is one of the great successes of the new arrangements for petitions. Together with the responses, transcripts of hearings with public servants are published on the committee’s webpage, making that interaction available to the public too.

This brings me to recent hearings or roundtable meetings the committee held with petitioners in Sydney, Brisbane and Melbourne. The committee has taken the opportunity recently to follow up some of the matters raised by petitioners and to talk to them about their concerns and their views on ministers’ responses. As a committee we see great variety in the subject matter of petitions. Unlike other parliamentary committees that usually look at one or two issues at a time, at any one time we are aware of a range of matters that Australians feel they must bring forward for debate and also for action. The matters occasionally are very particular but more often they are regional and sometimes they are national. At our recent hearings interstate we spoke to petitioners about many different concerns. Depending on the location and makeup of our electorates some issues were familiar to us. Some were new, and I acknowledge the value that is gained when petitioners have the energy and good faith to raise concerns that are new or are not understood widely because the people who experience them may not have been in a position to advocate for themselves. The committee held a roundtable meeting in Sydney in April. It was an interesting day and the transcript is on the committee’s webpage.

There are two witnesses and issues I wish to mention tonight. The first of these is Sister Susan Connelly, who organised a petition that seeks to have the Democratic Republic of Timor-Leste awarded an honorary Companion of the Order of Australia. The petition states such an award would be an official form of recognition and gratitude for the role of thousands of East Timorese civilians who assisted Australian soldiers in World War II with courage and compassion and who were killed as a result of that assistance once the Australian soldiers had withdrawn. I will not go into the issues of why this is such an unusual request, but I will put on record that Sister Susan Connelly is a powerful advocate for the Australian veterans, whose numbers are dwindling now, and for the East Timorese people. She was eloquent in discussing the gratitude and affection of the Australian soldiers for the East Timorese people who protected them and their wish to have this gift acknowledged in a very public way. Sister Connelly said:

I know of no other country in the world that has lost 40,000 civilians as a direct result of protecting Australian soldiers. … It is unique, and because it is unique I believe Australia needs to give a unique response.

In coming weeks I will outline some of the other issues that we delved into at these hearings. In the meantime I would like to mention again the committee’s appreciation to those petitioners who came to speak to us. Some of them travelled for many hours or at quite some inconvenience. It was very clear to us that whatever the subject we were discussing—whether local, national or international, current or historic, popular or particular—the process itself was important. As the House’s representatives we were following up on matters that members of the public felt sufficiently concerned about to bring directly to the attention of the House, and it was our pleasure to do so.