Fatima Payman (WA, Australia's Voice) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of Senator David Pocock's Lobbying (Improving Government Honesty and Trust) Bill 2025. Yesterday I moved that the government should table a very simple list: the organisations that currently hold sponsored passes to access Parliament House. It's a measure that would cost the government nothing but would give the public some insight into who has privileged access to the decision-makers in this building.

That motion was blocked by both the Labor Party and the Liberal-National coalition. It highlights and is a very small example of a bigger problem. In almost every area, this government has sought to reduce the ability of this parliament and the Senate—and, by extension, the Australian people out there—to scrutinise its activities. Rates of compliance with Senate orders for the production of documents are now among the lowest since record keeping began. We have to drag information out of departments that should, by right, belong to the people. The freedom of information system is already broken. Is that to anyone's surprise? Requests are delayed for months, bounced between agencies or stonewalled altogether.

Instead of fixing it, the government proposes so-called reforms that would make things even worse. They want to introduce new fees for Australians who make FOI requests. But Australians already pay fees. They're called taxes. They already pay the wages of the public servants who process these requests. So I don't understand what the government's trying to get at there. Charging them twice isn't efficiency; it's about discouraging people from making the request in the first place and discouraging them from asking those real questions.

We've also seen that even answers to basic questions on notice in Senate estimates have become increasingly unhelpful. Orders for the production of documents are usually returned entirely redacted and blacked out, page after page—so much for transparency—months late and often reduced to a link to a department's website or a vague paragraph about government philosophy. This isn't transparency; it's an obstruction that's dressed as process.

When it comes to accountability, Australians in 2022 were promised a national anticorruption commission that would restore the trust in government, but what we have is a body so restricted in its scope and so hamstrung by secrecy provisions that it cannot do the very thing it was created to do. A commission that can't compel transparency, that dismisses referrals without explanation, that shields the most powerful from scrutiny, is not a watchdog. It's window dressing. It gives the appearance of integrity while protecting those in power from real consequences.

This isn't what the Labor Party, historically, stood for. Labor has always claimed to be the party of integrity, the party of transparency and the party that champions the rights of ordinary people against entrenched interests—from John Curtin's wartime government that trusted Australians with the hard truth to Gough Whitlam's reforms that expanded access to information and broadened rights of participation. Labor has claimed the mantle of honesty and openness. Yet what have we seen transpire in the previous parliament and in the 48th Parliament?

The modern Labor Party platform commits to 'restoring trust in democratic institutions, ensuring integrity in government decision-making and championing the rights of people over the influence of vested interests'. Those are not my words; they are the Labor Party's words. Yet when the moment comes to honour them, to stick by them and to implement them, when the Senate asks about transparency and about who holds passes to this building or when the public asks to see documents behind government decisions, the shutters come down.

Let's remember why this matters. The people who sit in this chamber and who walk the halls of this building make decisions that affect every person on this continent: decisions about housing, health care, the environment and our nation's future—decisions that young people in particular will live with for decades to come. I speak with young Australians every week, whether in WA or here in Canberra—in communities across the country. They're engaged, they're informed and they're watching. But, too often, they tell me they feel locked out of politics. They don't believe that the government is listening to them. They see lobbyists who have passes to this building being given more access than the communities they represent. They see secrecy where there should be openness and see self-interest where there should be service.

That's the crisis we face. It is not just a crisis of policy and mismanagement but a crisis of trust. When the Albanese Labor government was elected in 2022 we thought that the era of mistrust had gone, that they would bring hope to Australian politics, to do things differently. Unless we fix it, unless we build that transparency back into the way government operates, we risk losing an entire generation's faith in our entire democratic system, and that's dangerous.

This bill gives us an important opportunity to turn back from that path. As Senator Pocock said, this is not a radical proposal. It's simple. It's sensible. It's a basic attempt to repair the fabric of that trust between people and government. I say to my former colleagues in the Labor Party: you built your party on a promise to stand with the people against secrecy and entrenched power; do not walk away from that legacy now. Do not abandon young Australians who are demanding integrity and honesty in politics. You shouldn't see transparency as a threat. It's a foundation of our democracy. If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear. For the sake of young Australians, who deserve a government they can believe in, and for the sake of rebuilding trust in this parliament as well as for the sake of Labor's own legacy of integrity, I commend this bill to the Senate.