Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Aged Care) Share this | Hansard source

Can I just say that I take what has happened today extremely seriously, despite the fact of the comedy and theatre that we just had presented to us by the five-minute contribution from the Manager of Government Business in the Senate. We are here for a really, really serious issue today. We made changes yesterday because this government continuously refused to be transparent and provide information that this chamber had asked the Senate to deliver and asked the government to provide.

The minister comes in here and talks about conventions being torn up. I think the most important convention in this place is the accountability and transparency of the government. This was a government that came to power in 2022, promising a new way, promising accountability and transparency, and they have been about as transparent as a brick. They have no respect for the institution of the Senate. They have no respect that the result that came from yesterday was that you didn't answer the question that was put before you to deliver a document so that not only the Senate could scrutinise what was going on but the Australian public, who have the right to see this document, could scrutinise. It was the will of the Senate that that document be delivered. To come in here and be so dismissive and so theatrical is actually a reflection of the contempt which this government holds of the institution of the Senate.

We also saw today, in the other place, the lengths that this government is prepared to go to in order to wreak retribution on anybody who dares to disagree with it. For the executive of the Labor government to think that it is okay to threaten members of this parliament in the ways that they have attempted to do—not just over this latest incident but in previous incidents as well—shows a vindictive government that is prepared to do anything to get its own way. The simple answer for the government—it's a really simple answer: all they need to do is release the document. Release the document that the minister herself promised to release in the middle of 2023. We're not asking the government to release a document that came into their possession last week, last month or even, for that matter, last year; we are asking the government to release a document that came into their position 2½ years ago, and, at the time, the minister said that she would release that document.

Don't get me wrong. In terms of the questions that were attempted to be asked by the government today, they could all have been asked if they had been important enough to the government for them to actually put them on the list for question time. They all could have been asked. Every week in this place, under convention of the agreement between the parties, the government gets at least two questions on Monday, three on Tuesday, three on Wednesday and three on Thursday. And guess what? This week, they got two questions on Monday, three on Tuesday, three on Wednesday and three on Thursday, so there was no restriction whatsoever from the normal, accepted number of questions that the opposition got. What we sought to do by our motion yesterday was to try and attempt to hold the government to account to allow us greater scrutiny, because the very act of why this motion was moved was your lack of preparedness for any scrutiny at all. We talk about this one particular document which was the reason for the actions of yesterday. This is just a chain of behaviour that we have seen from this government in their refusal, time after time, to release documents that the majority of this chamber, with the will of this chamber, has asked them to release. They came in here with some of the most incredibly spurious reasons as to why they shouldn't answer those questions.

So what I would say to the government is: if you really are serious about the transparency and accountability that you said that you were going to bring to this new parliament, then release the document that was the subject of this particular motion but consider into the future that it is your responsibility as the government to make sure that you do not withhold information from the Australian public that they have every right to see. Under our system of responsible government, the executive is accountable to the parliament.