John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the reports.

Mr Acting Deputy President Marshall, can I say in speaking to this motion that you would be aware that, prior to the dinner adjournment, I did speak on the question that these reports be printed. In order to assist the Senate at that time, I accepted the offer made by Senator Colbeck, the parliamentary secretary, that this matter be dealt with by putting the question that the reports be printed, which was agreed, and that a motion in this form would be moved. I do not want to delay the Senate too long on these issues, but I do want to complete my remarks in relation to some security issues.

I was pointing out a little earlier that we now have a situation where over 7,000 photographic pass holders are able to use their passes to retract the retractable bollards that surround Parliament House. I was making the point before the break that this was never the original intention when the bollards were proposed. The original idea was that very few pass holders would be able to access the slip-roads at Parliament House by using their photographic passes to retract the bollards. Something happened between the original planning and the putting in place of the current regime.

I want to stress again, as I did before the break, that everybody in this building ought to be concerned about the security of the building and particularly of those who work in the building—and when I say ‘those who work in the building’, a very small proportion of those are senators and members of the House of Representatives. A lot of staff work here, and we have a duty of care towards them. So I think there are real concerns in relation to the number of security passes that can retract the bollards.

I would like this evening to request in these circumstances that the President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives engage both the Protective Security Coordination Centre and ASIO, if that is appropriate, for a further security assessment of this situation. I think it is a real worry that we have spent $11.7 million on security works around the building and over $2.2 million on the bollards themselves yet more than 7,000 photographic passes can be used to retract those bollards—and, of course, from time to time these passes go missing.

You have to see this issue in the context of other changes that are occurring around the building. The first and most obvious of those, of course, is the conversion of Parliament Drive to a one-way road around the building. It is going to go anticlockwise around the building. Thanks to evidence extracted at the estimates committee, we now know not only that it will be anticlockwise but also that special arrangements are being put in place for the Prime Minister so he does not have to take the two-kilometre journey around Parliament House that every other Australian has to take. The exit road at the ministerial wing is going to become an entrance road and the entrance road is going to become an exit road so the Prime Minister and the Prime Minister alone will not have to go the whole two kilometres around Parliament House. So much for Mr Howard as a man of the people! He is even starting to behave like a President of the United States of America.