Julian Leeser (Berowra, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Commonwealth Entities Legislation Amendment Bill 2026. I want to start by putting this bill in context, because Australians are living under the most secretive and least transparent federal government that we've seen in a generation. Time and again, this government's instinct is to control information, avoid scrutiny and shift key decisions out of the parliament's line of sight. Instead of lifting standards, Labor's pattern has been to make accountability harder. That includes more decisions made by ministerial discretion, fewer documents proactively disclosed and more 'trust us' governance where parliament is asked to sign off on frameworks while the real power sits with ministers behind closed doors.

That matters here, because this bill is not being proposed in a vacuum. It sits squarely within that same culture where the instinct is to reduce transparency, to centralise control and to weaken parliamentary oversight, especially when it comes to statutory offices that parliament created precisely to operate with independence. That's the core issue here. If you combine greater ministerial power with weaker visibility, you don't get modernisation; you get a structural tilt away from parliamentary accountability and towards executive control. That's why the coalition will not oppose its second reading in the House but will seek Senate committee scrutiny—because sunlight is exactly what this government keeps trying to avoid.

That brings us to the details of the Commonwealth Entities Legislation Amendment Bill. This bill is presented as a governance modernisation measure, aligning certain statutory office holders with contemporary accountability standards. It applies to four entities: the Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research, or ACIAR; Austrade; the Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office, or ASNO; and the Office of Parliamentary Counsel. It does this by changing some maximum terms to five years; by expanding termination grounds to include serious misconduct and, for most roles, unsatisfactory performance; by allowing ministers to set written performance standards that can be used when assessing unsatisfactory performance; by introducing express suspension powers; and by giving the minister a new power to issue general written directions to the Office of Parliamentary Counsel.

Individually, many of these elements are not unprecedented. The concern is the combined effect and what it does to the balance of power. Taken together, this bill creates a clearer executive pathway: the minister can set the standards, assess performance, suspend and ultimately terminate. In other words, the powers are transferred from being clearly set out by the parliament to being set by the relevant minister, all without strong parliamentary oversight. A critical point is that several of these levers were deliberately placed outside strong parliamentary oversight. For example, the performance standards are not legislative instruments, they're not disallowable and they're not required to be published or tabled, and suspension decisions for most entities are not required to be tabled. So, while parliament passes the framework, the executive gains greater practical control over how key accountability thresholds are set and applied.

This shifts the power away from this parliament and towards the ministers. That's a problem in principle because these are statutory offices created by this parliament, often, to operate with a degree of independence, particularly the Office of Parliamentary Counsel and ASNO. We're not opposing accountability, but the questions we need to ask are: What problem is this bill actually solving? Why only these four agencies—why them, and why now? Why are the new performance standards not subject to tabling, publication or disallowance? Are the suspension and termination safeguards strong enough to protect procedural fairness and independence? Does this architecture preserve the right balance between executive control and parliamentary oversight? That's why we're not opposing the bill's second reading but we are seeking committee scrutiny before finalising our position.

If this bill is about restoring public trust and modernising accountability, consistency is important. It is reasonable to ask why these reforms apply to only the four entities listed and not other major statutory office holders, such as the ACCC, ASIC, APRA, the Information Commissioner, or the Australian Human Rights Commission and their commissioners. Why should the Race Discrimination Commissioner, who has lost the confidence of so many of our ethnic communities, including the Australian Jewish community and the Australian Hindu community, be exempt from ministerial performance standards and potential termination? It is also reasonable to ask whether similar changes are planned more broadly or whether these entities have been selected for specific reasons.

The introduction of the ministerial performance standard is the most significant new feature of the bill. The bill gives ministers the power to set written performance standards for certain statutory office holders. Those standards can then be relied upon in determining unsatisfactory performance, which is a ground for termination. Traditionally, parliament creates statutory offices and defines the removal grounds in the act. Here, while parliament sets 'unsatisfactory performance' as a ground, the minister may effectively define what performance looks like without parliamentary scrutiny of those standards. That's novel and highly unusual. It raises three important questions. First, transparency. Should standards that may ground termination be publicly available? Second, oversight. Why aren't they subjected to disallowance or tabling? Third, independence, particularly where these roles involve regulatory or drafting functions. We support accountability, but accountability mechanisms must themselves be transparent and subject to scrutiny.

There are also two changes that matter because they increase ministerial control over senior statutory office holders with limited built-in transparency. First, the bill lets a minister write performance standards for some agency heads. Those standards can be used to say that someone has unsatisfactory performance, which becomes a reason to terminate them. In other words, ministers can write the rules and then use them to sack people. Again, the problem isn't that the standards exist; the problem is how they're done. The standards don't have to be tabled in the parliament. They can't be disallowed. They don't have to be published. So the minister can set the benchmark that might later be used to remove someone, without the parliament seeing it.

Second, ministers get a stronger power to sideline an executive through suspending them. Suspension isn't neutral. It's a serious step. It can strip someone of their powers, damage their reputation, disrupt an agency and, in effect, push them out before anything is finally proven. And the transparency requirements are different across the board. For ASNO suspensions, they must be gazetted and made public. However, for ACIAR, Austrade and OPC, there's no clear requirement to publish or table suspensions. So some suspensions must be public and others must not be. This is inconsistent and weak oversight, and it's worth spending a minute or two reflecting on how this plays out in specific circumstances.

Take ASNO, for example. ASNO is Australia's nuclear safeguards regulator. It's the body that checks and reports that Australia is meeting its international nuclear obligations. Because of that, it has to be seen to be independent. If it looks like a government can lean on the regulator, it risks damaging Australia's credibility with our international partners. The government seems to recognise this. Unlike the other agencies in the bill, it doesn't add 'unsatisfactory performance' as a new reason that the minister could sack the Director of Safeguards. In plain terms, for the nuclear watchdog they're not giving the minister quite the same performance based sacking lever as they are for other agencies. But the bill still gives the minister new intervention tools, including an express power to suspend the director and expand misconduct related mechanisms. As I said a moment ago, suspension matters. Even if it's temporary, it can strip the director of their powers, sideline the regulator's leadership at a critical time and create the perception internationally that the regulator can be controlled. The point is this: if independence is so important that you want to introduce a performance based termination ground, we need to check that the new suspension or intervention powers don't achieve the same outcome in practice, just by another route.

Let's now consider the case of the Office of Parliamentary Counsel, or the OPC. This bill gives the minister a new express power to issue written directions to the OPC about how it performs its functions. The bill says that directions must be general and not about a specific drafting matter, but it's still a structural change. The OPC is the body that drafts the Commonwealth's laws for parliament. Its credibility depends on technical neutrality and independence. Even general directions can influence priorities. They can influence resourcing and internal processes, which in turn can shape how legislation is developed. The concern is also about transparency. The directions are not legislative instruments, and the bill doesn't clearly require them to be tabled or published. The explanatory memorandum also doesn't clearly explain why this new power is needed now. So, again, it's a power that warrants committee scrutiny because it's in all of our interests to ensure the safeguards and visibility are right for an institution as central as the Office of Parliamentary Counsel.

Let me come back to the net effect of these changes, because the net effect is to establish a clear chain of control for the minister. The minister sets the standards, the minister then says performance is unsatisfactory according to those standards, the minister suspends and, ultimately, the minister terminates. That's a degree of executive government leverage over statutory office holders that is far larger than we would usually expect, at least in the absence of strong safeguards.

Since the Act of Settlement in the United Kingdom in 1701, we've accepted that safeguards against removal by the executive government were an essential component of any guarantee of independence. And so, when this sort of bill comes before the House, proposing to remove exactly that guarantee, it's appropriate to ask why. Why these four agencies specifically? Why only these agencies? Why now? And why don't the powers set standards and have stronger transparency obligations for suspending office holders?

In conclusion, the coalition position is clear. We support accountability. But, if ministers are going to get new powers to sideline and sack statutory office holders, parliament should check the guardrails. That's why we want a Senate committee referral to scrutinise the design. I thank the House.

Debate adjourned.