Josh Wilson (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for the Environment) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Everyone wants our democracy to work better, and we all have an interest in that outcome. It's a simple idea, but it's a complex task, involving culture as much as structure. And democratic culture includes some of the conventions that we observe in our parliamentary system. It requires good faith, participation and respect for well-designed processes and their outcomes. For us to expect or hope that structure will do most of the work is understandable, but really it's the culture and the spirit of a democracy that animates a healthy body politic in which the institutional bones can be skeletally fragile. In the last few months we've had that X-ray glimpse of American democracy under pressure, and we are kidding ourselves if we think similar pressures don't exist and can't build in Australia.

Strengthening democracy is complex because the features of democratic culture exist in fine balance. We must value plurality and decisiveness, the contestability of ideas and consensus, and mutability and constraint—a list of qualities that we can rattle off easily enough, but they're not easy to blend and balance. I note that the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs References Committee, chaired by Senator Carr, last night tabled the report of its inquiry into nationhood, national identity and democracy. The chair, about that report, has said:

The report calls for a strengthening of civics education, scientific advice to Parliament, parliamentary accountability and parliamentary committee scrutiny because, through the committee system, Australians are able to participate in the work of the Parliament.

That sounds like a very sensible prescription to me.

I note that the Joint Standing Committee on Treaties will soon conclude its inquiry into Australia's process for making trade agreements and that this quiet, downstage work has the potential to improve the mechanics of how trade agreements are shaped and settled. Of course, if we improve the process, we get better and fairer trade outcomes. That's critical at a time of regional instability, a time when the multilateral trade system has grown weaker and at a time when we are seeing so-called geoeconomic pressures being brought to bear through trade. Some of those developments are forcing us to recognise that the superficial cheerleading that has occasionally accompanied bilateral trade agreements inevitably drowned out what should have been more searching examinations of the realities and limitations of BTAs. On that point, it was great to have Gordon Flake and Jeff Wilson from the Perth USAsia Centre in parliament this week to share their expertise about geoeconomics in general.

Like every aspect of a healthy democracy, parliamentary committees rely on good structures and good culture themselves. Structurally, the government will, in most cases, have a majority of members on any given committee. Structurally, therefore, it's conceivable that no inquiry would ever result in a recommendation at odds with the government's view. Obviously, that would defeat the democratic purpose. That's why it's vital that parliamentary committees maintain a culture in which recourse to brute partisan majoritarianism is limited and the possibility of reaching a consensus based on the evidence is supported by all. The JSCOT's review of international agreements is a critical matter of parliamentary process and accountability, not a rubber stamp.

Like most members, I suspect, I've been involved in committee work that has sometimes been at the more rigorous and substantial end of the spectrum and sometimes closer to that less desirable rubber-stamp end of the spectrum. I've certainly seen instances where the government would itself have benefited from heeding a committee's deliberations more closely. There's no doubt the Turnbull government missed a trick at the end of 2016 in relation to the proposed extradition treaty with China. Closer attendance to the arguments Labor members made in our dissenting JSCOT report, and perhaps louder voices from some clearly uncomfortable government committee members, might at least have prevented the awkward necessity of making the right decision so clumsily and so late.

The current JSCOT trade-making inquiry built on the work detailed in the 2015 report Blind agreement: reforming Australian's treaty-making process, which identified ways in which our trade agreements could be more far-sighted, better informed and more transparent. A trading nation like Australia should have the highest-quality agreement-making process and, while the government makes a virtue of signing these deals, we should ask whether they're really as good as they could be.

As public submissions to the inquiry make clear, there's every reason to ensure that in future we have regard to independent economic analysis and longitudinal tracking of expected and actual trade agreement outcomes. That's an argument the Productivity Commission has consistently made. Groups like the National Farmers Federation and the Export Council also argue for improved midstream stakeholder involvement in the course of negotiations as occurs in the EU and US. The bottom line is our parliamentary committees are not ornamental niceties; they're an essential part of our democracy. We should guard their good culture and extend their structural value wherever we can, especially as we're privileged to work as part of them.