Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

That's right, on multiple occasions at both of those elections—that they would be more transparent than the previous government.

Well, you only have to ask the Centre for Public Integrity, who say this is the most secretive government in history—that their approach to the release of information, that their approach to being transparent, to being cooperative with those seeking information, is worse than that of any government on record. Now, I don't think the Centre for Public Integrity is a group you could call friends of the Liberal Party or the conservative cause or right-of-centre political parties. I think they are genuinely interested in this issue of transparency. For them to label this government the most secretive does rather put paid to this promise the Prime Minister made that this government would be the most transparent ever—it would be a new era of openness from government. Well, in fact, it is quite the opposite, when you see claims like that.

Today, as Senator Lambie has alluded to, we were able to debate exactly what this government is up to. They talk about wasted time and wasted resources associated with this—'It's an abuse of process.' Well, I'm afraid it's not. Let's just examine the road that it takes to get to this point around this issue of orders for the production of documents—that is, the Senate asking for information, on behalf of the people of Australia, from the government. The assistant minister, in his contribution earlier, talked about question time. Yes, that's a great opportunity to ask questions. The pity is that we don't get answers—not fulsome answers but just political babble.

Questions on notice: in my own experience, you put in questions on notice at, for example, Senate estimates; you go to the committee and say, 'Minister, could you tell me X,' and the minister says, 'Oh, I can't tell you that; I'll have to take it on notice,' or the official might do the same. Yet we're told that at Senate estimates we're putting too many questions on notice. That's because they're taking them on notice! They're refusing to answer the questions. So we're left with nowhere to go. In some of them I might ask a series of questions—say, 10 questions on similar issues—and the answer I'll get back might just be from the department: 'The department does not hold that information.' That's the kind of answer we're getting back to questions on notice.

Freedom of information: earlier today Senator David Pocock presented a document and showed it to the chamber and indeed the people in the gallery. It had more black ink than you could even imagine could exist on an A4 page, and that was freedom of information; that was information being released to the public. It was all redacted. So here we are, left with all these things the assistant minister said that we as senators should go to first, where we get zero information at every stop, and we're left with orders for the production of documents.

Again, this Labor government, which has united everyone from Lidia Thorpe to Pauline Hanson and everyone in between in opposition to its approach to transparency, has been moving amendments to these motions that, as I said earlier today—and we'll have to add to the time—have taken 6½ hours. Six hours and 31 minutes were wasted on formal motions relating to orders for the production of documents over the past four days alone. We could have been doing government business. We could have been dealing with matters Middle East. We could have been dealing with foreign policy. We could have been dealing with national security. But no: instead, we saw a government so desperate to not provide the information that Australians deserve that they moved the same amendment, motion after motion after motion.

So I commend Senator Lambie for bringing this matter forward as a matter of public importance, because it is important to highlight the continued flouting of this government's responsibility to be open and transparent, of this government's promise to the Australian people that they would be a more open government. The facts, from the report of the Centre of Public Integrity through to their conduct this week, are that this is not an open and transparent government.