Rex Patrick (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to add a couple of different perspectives to this debate. Firstly, I'd like to talk about Senator Gallagher's discussion about providing this information to the Senate. I agree that's very important. But I think we need to appreciate something—that is, these documents were written by officials who are paid for by the taxpayer, they were approved by ministers who are paid for by the taxpayer, they were transmitted to the states by means which were paid for by the taxpayer and they are documents that are written for public purpose. They are documents that do not belong to the coalition government; they are documents that belong to the Australian people.

The default position in our representative democracy is that documents that you are custodians of—you are not the owners of them—must be made available unless there's some very good reason for them not to be. I agree with statements made in the chamber this afternoon basically asserting that, in actual fact, there can be no question that these documents are not sensitive from any national security perspective, from any international relations perspective; they're not legally privileged. There is no reason that these should not be handed over to the Senate so that we can make them public and we can assist in informing. The whole point of a representative democracy is that we allow people to participate in our democracy, either through this chamber, through the media, through discussions or through ringing their MPs—however they may wish to do that—but they can only do that if they're properly informed. In politics, information is currency.

I understand why the government want to keep this secret. It is not for any legitimate reason. You're just not open to scrutiny; you're just not open to criticism. One of the benefits of disclosure is that you might find some people might congratulate you for some things that you're doing. You might find that it helps sway the public in supporting whatever campaign you're running. But if you don't bring the people along with you then you're not going to get that support that you need. So, first and foremost, this information belongs to the public, and you are not allowed to keep it secret from them. That's not how things work in this country. If you want to play in the political system that does that, move to China; move to other places that don't have the sort of free democracy that we have. That's the first point.

The second point—and I note that Senator Roberts brought this up—is that the mechanism by which you claim that these documents ought not to be provided to the Senate is because of an aroma of what you call 'the national cabinet'. I'm going to criticise Senator Gallagher here for giving legitimacy to the national cabinet. I think we ought to be saying 'the thing that the Liberal government call the national cabinet'; it is not a national cabinet. As Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Humpty Dumpty said, 'Words mean what I say they mean.' And that's what I mean: we've got a Humpty Dumpty Prime Minister who seems to think he can define what the word 'cabinet' means. That is not the case.

This chamber knows that I have a matter before the AAT that Justice White is considering at the moment, but let me tell you why there is no such thing as a national cabinet. There is an attempt by the government to connect the national cabinet to cabinet. A cabinet is something that's been around since King George II. It has particular attributes and those attributes must be respected. Those attributes include the fact that a cabinet is a meeting of senior ministers responsible to a single legislature. A national cabinet is not a single legislature. Our national cabinet is made up of one federal minister, that being the Prime Minister, and premiers and chief ministers, who are responsible to different legislatures. There are nine legislatures involved in what is called the national cabinet. That's the first problem.

The second issue is that, if you read the Cabinet Handbook, it makes it very clear that the Prime Minister controls who is a member of cabinet. The Prime Minister cannot control who the South Australian Premier is. The Prime Minister cannot control who the Queensland Premier is. The Prime Minister cannot control who the ACT Chief Minister is. So that's another inconsistency with what a cabinet is.

Thirdly, the very basal reason for having cabinet-in-confidence is cabinet responsibility, the idea that everyone agrees when you come out. That is not the case. The Prime Minister said it himself. He said in a press conference that he accepts that 'not everyone will be on the bus but the bus has to leave the station'. Those were his words. That is not how a cabinet works. A cabinet works with the principle of collective responsibility.

Another thing a cabinet works with is the principle of cabinet solidarity—that is, once a cabinet makes a decision, everyone who walks out of that cabinet must publicly support the decisions of cabinet. That is not what happens with the national cabinet. It has no resemblance to what is known in law as a cabinet. The Senate has faced an obstruction in respect of requests for documents which come from the thing that is called the national cabinet. The difficulty with that is that first and foremost, if you read Odgers, there is no proper claim—just as the courts have decided that cabinet documents may be adduced in a court or, as necessary, in the Senate in order for us to do our oversight role.

The second aspect of this is that 'cabinet' is a word that is defined in the statutes. So it is not for the Prime Minister to come along and simply say cabinet means something different now. Let me read to you from the submissions of the Commonwealth to the AAT. They suggest that, in spite of all the things I've just listed that have been determined judicially, and it is the judiciary that interprets what the words of the statutes mean, what the Prime Minister argued was that the tribunal should attach greater weight to the expert evidence—that is, Mr Gaetjens—before relating it to the specific issues raised in this case such as the generalised judicial observations made in very different contexts. What the Prime Minister was saying is: 'Don't you worry about what the word "cabinet" means in the statute. That's not for the courts to decide; it's for the Prime Minister to decide. The Prime Minister can decide whatever he likes.' We can put a word in the statutes here and then at some later stage the Prime Minister can just change the meaning of the word? That is not how this thing works. Humpty Dumpty will have to fall off the wall. There's a good chance that when our Prime Minister, Humpty Dumpty Morrison, falls off that wall there won't be many people prepared to put him back together.

The government needs to understand that it has to be open and transparent. It has an obligation to the people of Australia to be open and transparent in the conduct of its business. That's how this is supposed to work. That is especially the case when called on by the Senate to answer a question. In this case Senator Colbeck did answer the question and made a commitment to come back to the chamber to give the information, but somehow we find that information is no longer going to be provided. That's a disgusting state of affairs.

What is so sensitive in this information? It ought to be made public. It's to do with a very important program to be rolled out to make sure we can get on with our economy and get on with the work we do without being strangled by this awful pandemic. Cough up the information. That's the right thing to do. It's information that belongs to the public.