Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

It does need to be put on the record, though, the disparity between the actions of the coalition when they were in government in preventing inquiries, including into the Northern Territory intervention, and what they are doing here. I called for a proper examination of the issues when the Liberals were in government. It is sad that it took them until they got into opposition to actually allow proper scrutiny, but now that we have the opportunity for proper scrutiny, it is something that should be welcomed.

It should be stated that this does not just concern the Northern Territory intervention and its effectiveness; it also concerns the impact of state and territory government policies—which also need to be thoroughly examined—the health, welfare, education and security of children in remote and regional Indigenous communities across the board and employment and enterprise opportunities.

I do not have any particular objection to a Senate committee going for 2½ years. Senator Sherry would know; he was, I think, part of the Senate Select Committee on Superannuation that went for about three or four parliaments. The Senate Select Committee on Animal Welfare back in the 1980s and early 1990s also went for about six or seven years. So a committee going for a prolonged period of time is not necessarily a bad idea if—and this is the key issue and I do hope the Senate committee is able to achieve it—the committee operates constructively with a genuine attempt being made to leave the politics out of it, to take the point scoring out of it, to stop the ideological arm wrestling, to stop the using of Indigenous people as political footballs and to actually look at the issues. That is part of the reason why I have foreshadowed my amendment.

The other thing we have seen with this proposal, as with every other select committee that the coalition have now suddenly seen a need to set up, is that they are taking the chair for themselves. It may well be that the best person for the role of committee chair is one of the coalition members, but I think we really need to be looking at the principle of the best person getting the job. In my view, and this is the reason behind my foreshadowed amendment, once the members of the committee are known, the committee should—and it could be an early test of its ability to work in a non-partisan way—determine for itself who should be the chair, and then the deputy chair would be from a different party from that of the chair. I can say this now as I clearly have no self-interest in this as this committee will obviously not feature any Democrat, but it will have a person from the crossbenches. I expect this would be a Green, but that is still to be determined.

Depending on who those people are, it is quite possible that the best chair for that committee could be a Green or a government person. The select committee should not be set up specifically—