David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

We're debating this today because the Labor government has made secrecy its default setting, and I am really concerned that the contribution from the minister reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the function of this chamber. I would refer the minister to page 665 of Odgers' Australian Senate Practice, which states that the Senate should reject the proposition 'that anything with a connection to cabinet is confidential'.

It goes on to say:

… it has to be established that disclosure of the document would reveal cabinet deliberations. The claim cannot be made simply because a document has the word "cabinet" in or on it.

Quite clearly, providing the risk assessment would not reveal cabinet deliberations.

But, to go back to the subject of the assessment, we're just weeks out from the government setting our 2035 emissions target, and the government is still hiding the National climate risk assessment. This report isn't some bureaucratic box tick. This shows which communities will face unbearable heat, which coastlines we'll lose and which parts of our economy will buckle under climate pressure. Insiders have called its findings dire and diabolical, yet the government is keeping it locked away and keeping Australians in the dark about the risks to their homes, their livelihoods and their safety. How can people judge whether the 2035 target is strong enough if they can't even see the facts?

Worryingly, the withholding of the risk assessment is part of a wider secrecy agenda that we're seeing from the Albanese government. Let's remember that, when the numbers were crunched, the last parliament had the second-most-secretive government in the last 30 years. Only one in four FOI requests are now granted in full; that is the lowest on record. The average FOI review wait time is 15.5 months. Today we've learnt that they plan to make it even harder to lodge an FOI request, reducing transparency below the basement level.

But, not to be limited to FOI, the government has shown disregard for this chamber. Compliance with Senate orders for the production of documents has collapsed to less than a third. Again, to be more secretive than the Morrison government, a government where the Prime Minister had five secret ministries, is quite an achievement from the Albanese Labor government.

Australians know what's at stake. We've lived through the Black Summer, through the Lismore floods and through towns running out of water, and we cannot prepare for what's coming if the government keeps us blindfolded. It is clearly in the public interest for this information to be made public. Remember who you work for. You work for the Australian people. How do we have a government that has such contempt for Australians and the Senate when it comes to information that it is gathering in our name? I urge the government to turn course on this.

I'm inviting all Canberrans and any of my Senate colleagues that might be in Canberra to a town hall on transparency at Canberra College, in Phillip, from 5.30 pm on 16 September. We need to have an honest conversation about what it means when you have a government that refuses to be transparent, when you have a government that seems to forget who it's actually in here to work for and when you have a government that is stifling the ability of the Senate to actually be the house of review and to hold the government to account. It seems like the Senate is simply an inconvenience for a government that has a whopping majority in the House but does not have a majority in the Senate.

So I urge the Albanese Labor government to think about the legacy they want to leave. Do you want people looking back and saying, 'That was "Antitransparency Albo"'? Is that really what you want? Because that's what you're on course for. You're the second-most secretive government on record, and we keep having to have these debates as a Senate trying to simply force you to release documents that the Senate is ordering you to release. It doesn't cut it, and I urge my colleagues in the Senate to continue to put pressure on this government to comply with Senate orders.