2016-09-01
MR BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — I will be reasonably brief. The only matter that we ought to be debating in this chamber here today — the first order of business, the no.1 priority — is the joint sitting to swear in our new member, who is currently unable to take up his seat in the Parliament. Now, I am worried about the direction that this government is heading in.
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — First of all, there came to this Parliament a set of allegations that Labor MPs had misused their parliamentary entitlements to have staff members work on a Labor Party election campaign. While I have read extensive commentary on those matters, I have formed no view on the facts of the matter. I am not here arguing today that there is necessarily a case to answer there. However, it was Labor's reaction to the allegations that were most worrying.
Labor has mounted an argument — everything from 'We followed the rules' to 'The rules are very confusing' and 'There are no rules. Anyone can do whatever they want anyway'. That already starts to put a bit of a stake in the ground in terms of the procedures and the democratic nature of this Parliament in the sense that one of our first responsibilities here is the proper stewardship of public resources, and our own electoral allowances and entitlements are obviously the first and most obvious test of that. It is not like other parliaments in the world have not had similar allegations made against members. In fact the House of Commons has an entire permanent standing infrastructure set-up to deal with the question of entitlements. The allegation itself starts to suggest that there is a group of people who do not actually understand their first responsibility as members.
Then when we suggested that the Ombudsman investigate the matter — and a motion of this chamber regarding that successfully passed — leading to an independent and at-arm's-length investigation of the facts of the matter, the government went to extraordinary steps to block that. A second plank, if you like — a second check and balance in the system — was strongly opposed by the government, and now we see that that investigation is to proceed. Along the way the Parliament was seeking to inform itself on a number of matters and moved a series of motions requiring documents to be tabled. Just to give one example — and it indicates the importance and the currency of this matter — the previous government gave grants to various coal companies to try and find new ways to burn coal. This new government arrived and said, 'There's nothing we can do about this. We can't withdraw the grants'. This chamber asked for proof in the form of the tabling of those grant agreements and contracts, and the government released a large proportion of the documents, mostly consisting of contract boilerplate, but excised the specific provision that said under what circumstances the grant could be withdrawn.
While the government says 'We've tabled thousands of pages' and 'We've done more than anybody else', what they have done is to seek to withhold from this chamber the most important issue that was in the document — the reason for the request in the first place. If the government think coal development in the Latrobe Valley and Gippsland is such a non-issue that they basically do not need to account for their action in that area or if they believe that a provision such as this in a grant contract is so secret and so holy that it can never be provided for the public — let alone this Parliament — to read, I think they have got another think coming. I think the issue of coal development in the Latrobe Valley is an important issue. A large amount of Gippsland and South Gippsland is covered by prospective coal exploration licences held by some of the same companies who are seeking new uses for coal, including in fact one of the companies that is actually getting this grant provided by the former Liberal government and which the Labor Party now seeks to defend. I think this is a pretty big issue and I think people in Gippsland and South Gippsland think this is a pretty big issue, but the government say that they are the arbiter as to whether the public can see this information or not.
Some government members have sought to misrepresent my position on this matter. They have said that I claim every document should be released every time, and that is not what I have said. It is not what I have said in this place over 10 years and it is not what I have said in private conversations with some relevant ministers. What I say is that if there is a public interest to be balanced here — that is, the public interest of knowing where we are at with expenditure of public money versus the public interest of the government being able to adopt commercial relationships with a whole range of private entities that seek dollars from the public purse — then there may be a balancing act to be done, but it is not for the executive to decide, it is for this chamber to decide.
If the government would like to have a further conversation with me about that particular document, we may be able to reach a compromise on that matter. More information may be able to be provided by the government. In fact in a very similar pursuit under the Baillieu government, where I used both documents motions in the chamber and FOI, I was actually successful in getting the very same information, not because we were able to force it through the chamber — the Baillieu government controlled this chamber at this time — but because in one way or another I was going to end up getting it. In the end the government released it voluntarily. I am only seeking the same behaviour from this government in relation to a very similar subject area. The government can hardly say that this is not an arguable question. Even members who have made FOI requests have gone to court and had the court conduct that balancing act — that is, the public interest of knowing how money is spent versus commercial interests and the ability of the government to enter into legal relations.
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — On the point of order, Acting President, I opened the batting by suggesting that the most important matter that we ought to be dealing with here was the question of the joint sitting. I did receive a barrage of interjections on a range of topics, and in some ways I am responding to those interjections as well, but I will put myself in your hands, Acting President.
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — As I was saying, the only matter that we ought to be debating here in the chamber today is the matter of the joint sitting, and we should not be moving on to any other item until we have secured that joint sitting. We ought to be debating the matter of the joint sitting, and until we have had that joint sitting and replaced our missing member, we ought not to be proceeding to anything that the government thinks is its particular agenda. As I said, it is a worrying trend that we have seen: first of all, allegations about misuse of parliamentary entitlements and that the government would attempt to block an independent watchdog, the Ombudsman, from investigating those matters. The government continues to defy the chamber — —
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — The government has continued to defy the chamber's clear request for the tabling of a number of documents that are essential to some of the matters that we will be dealing with in this Parliament. If this Parliament cannot inform itself on the matters that it is actually debating, then we are simply the world's most expensive debating club rather than a body that can hold the government to account.
What I find so amazing is that this worrying pattern of disdain for the checks and balances associated with our parliamentary system is, in the government's mind, now justifying what the government is doing, which is refusing the joint sitting. Their concerning behaviour, their defiance of the needs of this chamber is, in their mind, justification for now defying the constitution.
[Speech was interrupted.]
Mr BARBER — Not to encourage interjections, but Mr Dalidakis says, 'It's the vibe'. There is no vibe; it is the black letter of the constitution. When a member is missing and requires to be replaced by a casual vacancy, the two chambers must meet. The requirement for the two chambers to meet jointly is itself a check and balance in the system. It means that the upper house could not simply stack itself with acceptable substitutes for members who met with misadventure, but yet again the government does not see it that way. They do not see themselves in this instance making sure that we are doing the right thing here in the upper house. They are simply connecting it to another matter.
Emotions are running high in the Parliament this week, but not in relation to any matter that has yet been debated before this house. No-one has brought forward a motion or a bill — although there were some questions in question time — that relates to the thing that is really putting the Bunsen burner under the Labor Party this week. Sometimes I think 90 per cent of all Victorian politics is the internal politics of the Labor Party and the rest of us are just doing the residual 10 per cent, but this week it is 99 per cent, and that is the real problem.
Of course one would expect the opposition to oppose, because they would in fact benefit immediately from the complete demise of this government. The Greens would not. The Greens are seeking our policy aims. We are doing it from the position of balance of power. The government may not like to hear this, but we are in fact the honest brokers of this chamber. You have been in the Liberals' hands alone for most of your history, in fact, in this place. There has very rarely been a time when the upper house was not controlled by the conservative forces, even when Labor was in government in the lower house. We need to serve that balance-of-power role, which is to try and keep the warring parties apart to prevent them from completely trashing the constitution and the unwritten aspects of the institution simply because one or other wants to get hold of the prize of government, preferably in the next 10 minutes.
I have kept the lines of communication with the government open on this. I wrote to the Premier earlier this week asking for a meeting to discuss the question of the appointment of the member through the joint sitting. If the Premier wants to talk about other issues or if he considers other issues to be linked, that is fine We will talk about whatever he wants to talk about in the same meeting. In the meantime, however, the government ought to understand that we are taking this question of the joint sitting incredibly seriously. The government is copping it for a whole range of other things at the moment, which in some ways has masked from public view how serious the matters being dealt with here are. Personality-based politics I believe are being played out in the Labor Party and in the media, but here we are dealing with quite an important and serious issue. If the government uses this reasoning now as a tit-for-tat matter, who knows where it might end down the line? When the roles are reversed, and when there is perhaps a conservative government and a Labor member has to be replaced in the upper house and that future government decides it does not like the look of that new Labor member who has been brought in, just think — it might not be so far down the track until your bad precedent becomes the slippery slope on which other governments then choose to play. You really have to think a bit further forward than just surviving it one day at a time, which appears to be what the government is doing at the moment. That is why the Greens are considering these matters quite seriously.
I am not aware of whether a division is even going to be called at the end of this motion. I understand that at the moment we are just discussing the priorities of the Council for the rest of the day, and I have spoken the Greens' view on that issue.
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