Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Senator George Campbell put the Labor position very clearly. I do not want to cover all the ground he covered—I want to make some additional remarks—but his argument is the key one. The sale of Medibank Private is, first of all, not urgent in the sense that the government have said they are not going to sell it until 2008, if they are still in power. There are a couple of hurdles to get over first. Secondly, the government are seeking to define the debate about the sale of Medibank as a narrow financial debate about the terms of the sale, about the issues of ownership and structure of the company, whereas there are far wider implications to do with the sale, to do with the cost of health insurance to the Australian public, to do with the rights of the current members and to do with the effect on the efficiency and management of the whole private health sector.

If you turn to the Selection of Bills Committee report, you see that it was referred in part by the Democrats and Labor. The reasons for reference go to things like the effect on competition, the impact on health insurance, the implications for equity and access to health care. The people who have been invited to attend are the Doctors Reform Society, the AMA, Catholic Health Australia and the Australian Private Hospitals Association. Their issues are not merely issues of financial interest; their issues go to the future of the health insurance market and to the future of the health system in Australia. The government wants to narrow and control the debate; it wants to determine who appears and what they say and totally control it because it knows it cannot win the argument in the public arena. That is an abuse of the Senate process, and we ought to support Senator George Campbell’s amendment, which says that the broader issues ought to be examined by the Standing Committee on Community Affairs. It highlights the absolute farce that the committee system in the Senate is being turned into by this government.

We now have the ridiculous situation where government ministers have to pay lip-service to the Senate committee system. They have found that they cannot win the public debate about riding roughshod over the committee system so they have got smart and they have become cynical. Now we have a minister who says: ‘I think I might introduce a bill next week. I’ll get it referred to the Senate committee system so that when I actually get a bill we can ram it through within a couple of days.’ We have the absolutely ludicrous position where the Senate is referring bills it has not seen to committees on the motion of the government that at some time in the future it will introduce a bill relating to something generally described by the minister, and then it will have an inquiry. The government also sets the timetable for the inquiry so that the committee has to report before the next sitting of the Senate. However important the issue, however wide the terms of debate ought to be, however much it requires public examination, the Senate is asked to report the day or the Friday before the Senate comes back, so the government can ram the legislation through in the first week we are back. There is no consideration of how long a proper inquiry would take and there is no integrity to the system. The committees get a day or two days to take public evidence and then it is rammed through the committee.

To be fair to government senators, while they are not showing much bottle on the floor of the Senate, report after report has government senators saying: ‘We didn’t get time to look at this. We would have preferred more time. In the limited time available, we think it is probably okay because the man has told us so.’ I have served on committees where the government chairman has agreed wholeheartedly with us that there is not enough time to do the bill justice, to allow the public to have input, but when they seek authority from the minister to have a longer reporting time frame they are told no.

So we have this ridiculous farce of a process where we keep the sausage factory going. We are passing bills we have hardly seen. There are hundreds of government amendments moved at the last minute that are not cited but are passed through the Senate. So maintaining our review function and our capacity to examine legislation has been totally eroded. The government changed the rules so that they govern all the committee processes. They have control in the Senate, so they pay lip-service to the committee system, which is being undermined at every turn. This is just another example. I urge government senators to stand up for the role of the Senate and say: ‘This is not good enough. The executive should not be able to ride roughshod over the Senate.’ (Time expired)

Question put:

That the amendment (Senator George Campbell’s) be agreed to.