Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to take note of the response of Senator Reynolds. I do endorse the comments made by Senator Birmingham. I think he has been a circuit breaker in what's been an extremely unusual and vexed inquiry. I've done a couple of inquiries since I've been here. As I languished on the backbench, I learnt all about Senate standing order procedures and inquiries, but I've never run into this level of intransigence. I honestly have no political perspective in the pursuit of this inquiry. To me, it looks straight up and down: scrutinise expenditure, plans and progress in an extremely important area of defence policy.

I had the opportunity of opening up a hearing quite recently, and I said to the secretary of Defence:

I will start for a few moments. I'm not looking at this from any particular perspective, other than that the Senate gave this committee a reference. You would be familiar with the terms of that reference. Amongst the terms of reference is the ongoing examination of contracts and scrutiny of expenditure. The department's performance, when we have requested information, has been nothing short of abysmal. You have redacted publicly available information and sent it to us. It's almost like you have a giant forefinger up to the operation of this committee. It has now been to the Senate to get orders. I accept that you have a case on your commercial confidentiality position and all the rest of it, but, in the ordinary course of this committee's activity, I, as the chair, personally feel—and I'm sure there are other members of the committee who feel the same way—that Defence has been absolutely obtuse, arrogant, dismissive and contemptuous of the work of a Senate committee duly given a reference by the Senate.

It was a pretty strong opening line to a departmental secretary, but I don't resile from it, because the people who are resourcing the Senate committee, the good people of the secretariat, were becoming absolutely flabbergasted at the information that was given to us. The way it was presented to us was almost something that had never been seen before—and I have done a little bit of work with Defence.

I chaired the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, and we went through some exceedingly contentious private issues and dealt with an enormous amount of stuff that may have needed to be visible in camera. It appears, though, that all of those sorts of protocols and procedures have been forgotten by Defence. In the Veterans' Affairs area we had a whole stack of in camera documents made available to senators. When I say 'senators', I don't mean just to voting senators, as they've tried to prescribe here. Over a period of time you'd sign in, you'd be able to access the information—you couldn't copy it or take it away but you could view it—form your opinion and come back and make your contribution. I well remember Senator Fawcett being exceedingly diligent in that area. Personally, I have only to read one tale of distress; I don't need to read a hundred. But there were other senators—Senator Lambie, Senator Fawcett—who went in camera and went through the whole lot. This is the really interesting thing: the end result was that we produced a report which had 26 recommendations, and the government accepted every one of them. The Department of Veterans' Affairs actually put money behind some of the initiatives that were suggested. So good work can come out of difficult areas. But not providing information to people is absolutely not conducive to a great outcome.

Senator Reynolds has left the chamber, and basically that's why I need to put on the record that she had written to me setting out a pathway forward, and that I had written back to her and she was responding to that. The problem with Senator Birmingham's and Senator Reynolds's responses basically is that this has twice been the subject of a Senate order for the production of documents. Senator Patrick is quite entitled to look for a Privileges outcome here. I foreshadowed that this type of activity could occur every sitting day until we got resolution. I foreshadowed it to the Department of Defence and clearly, obviously, as it was a public hearing, to the minister. What the minister sought to do was to say: 'Senators will be able to view the documents at a secure location in Canberra. This will be available to voting members of the committee only.' Clearly, that condition is a breach of the standing orders. All members of the Senate are participating members of all committees and therefore can go and participate in all inquiries. To say it's available to voting members only is wrong; it's against standing orders. That has been clearly pointed out. This request contravenes standing order 25(7)(c), which states:

Participating members may participate in hearings of evidence and deliberations of the committees, and have all the rights of members of committees, but may not vote on any questions before the committees.

So they can get all the information; they just can't vote on the outcome of it.

We're not quite as close as Senator Birmingham alleges, but I do say that he has intervened to good measure a couple of times. The nut of it all is this: I said to our committee secretary, 'Can you reach out to the Department of Defence and say: "We're not unique. This is a reference. You can see the terms of reference. These are requests. You know the standing orders. Can we get somewhere closer? Is there an area where we can start seeing a regular flow of information to allow the committee to do its work?"' You've got to allow the committee to do its work. If you need to argue commercial-in-confidence, you'll either win or lose that, and you're losing it. Senator Patrick has come to the committee and put on the table freedom-of-information outcomes which clearly say that Defence was wrong in hiding the stuff from the committee. There are no ifs and buts about it. Some of the freedom-of-information stuff that he's got actually state that they should be made available to the committee. So we've been passing the parcel in a very difficult area. I don't know whether this intransigence and reluctance to cooperate with the Senate committee is in the ministerial office or whether it's in Defence.

I fired a shot over Secretary Moriarty's bow and said: 'I reckon you're giving us a giant forefinger. Tell us why you're not, and improve your performance.' This doesn't stop in the references committee; all it does is transfer it to estimates, and then you'll have another whole heap of departmental officers working away on questions on notice and the like. Why can't we have what the Constitution says? There's a parliament and there's an executive, and this Senate gave us the job of scrutinising performance capability and money. Where's the big issue here? Every time they raise an issue, Senator Patrick trumps them with this: 'By the way, I got that under freedom of information, and it says it shouldn't have been classified in the first place.'

I won't take up any more of the Senate's time, but I think it's important that we allow our Senate committees to do what they do best: scrutinise expenditure. The Audit Office will come down eventually and say, 'God Almighty, what happened here?' but in the meantime we might be able to put someone on the pathway to good outcomes.

Question agreed to.