Restoring faith in the Australian parliament

‘Restoring Faith in the Australian Parliament’

Address to the Institute of Public Affairs

Melbourne

Wednesday 30 January 2013

The 43rd Australian Parliament will be dissolved by the Governor-General this year. What was dubbed the “new paradigm” will be consigned to history and perhaps become the stuff of legend. After all, it is a paradigm in which we have seen one of the most scandal ridden and dishonest governments cast principle aside and embrace a ‘whatever it takes’ approach to clinging on to power.

Opinion polls suggest the vast majority of Australians consider our Parliament to be dysfunctional. Few people have any desire for another hung Parliament – my sense is that whichever party wins the next election it will be in their own right.

Today I wish to consider the impact the Government has had on the perception of the Parliament, through its Parliamentary Members, particularly the Prime Minister, and the wider labour movement. A Coalition Government would restore faith in the Parliament should we be fortunate to win government this year. People are entitled to ask how?

Upon election, as Leader of the House, I will seek to –

improve the tone of the discourse in the Parliament through the example of Tony Abbott as Prime Minister and the senior members of his team;
restore confidence and make the executive more accountable by giving Members more opportunity to ask questions with the introduction of an additional backbench Question Time each day;
ensure that all Parliamentarians are on top of the issues important to their local communities by enabling Members to accept interventions during their Second Reading Speeches;
stop the Executive using Question Time to sledge the Opposition by strengthening the Standing Orders so that it will be disorderly to repeat allegations once, in the opinion of the Speaker, a Member has corrected them;
support an independent Speaker;
allowing time after a full Question Time for a thirty minute take note session to consider the answers provided by the Government;
allow any Member of any political party who has serious questions to answer, time to explain themselves through the Parliament to the Australian people, and;
provide accessible government through a Parliament that sits when it needs to rather than being truncated as has consistently occurred in this so-called “new paradigm”.

The Parliament is controlled and defined by the government, the example set by the Prime Minister and the actions of its members. These things shape the political parties we represent and the public policy we advocate. Right now, the Australian people believe their representative government is rotten. It is too easy to point the finger for this malaise at the institution of Parliament, that somehow Parliament lacks some key ingredient. It doesn’t. The problem is this government. When a government is rotten – so too is the perception of the Parliament.

I do maintain the belief that individual Members have a key role to play in Parliament, in representing the views of their electors and serving the people who make up their electorate. Because backbench Members have specific local issues that find it hard to compete with questions each day about cost of living, job security, economic management and border protection (amongst other things), a new Coalition Government will create a backbench question time adopting some key features of the New Zealand system. Additionally, we will allow Members to accept interventions during their Second Reading Speeches in the Chamber.

The introduction of a backbench question time would be one of the signature Parliamentary reforms of a new Coalition Government. In practice it would mean that Members will have the opportunity to deliver written questions to the Clerk of the House who would direct the question to the appropriate Minister. Ministers would then be given a number of hours between receiving the question and backbench Question Time in which they can obtain a definitive answer. Ministers will need to respond with substance because Australians want less insults and spin and more accountability.

To strengthen Parliamentary participation and ensure that all Members are on top of the issues about which they speak in the Parliament an incoming Coalition Government will allow relevant interventions during Second Reading Speeches in the House, similar to the measures that exist in the Federation Chamber. It would mean that a Member may ask a brief question and the Speaker will have the discretion to rule that the question is relevant and the Member speaking will choose whether it is accepted. It would be an innovative way to encourage a more lively and spontaneous debate in the chamber and make government more accountable.

It’s hardly a revelation that the Government uses Question Time to sledge the opposition. A Member slandered in Question Time must wait until its conclusion to correct the record through a personal explanation. Even after it has been corrected, nothing stops the Minister from making the same flawed allegation again and again. That needs to be fixed. It is unseemly and reflects poorly on the Parliament. Slanders repeated after they have been corrected should be regarded as disorderly conduct. It is a change that needs to be reflected in the Standing Orders. A higher standard of debate isn’t something that you talk about – it’s something you make happen, and we will.

In its first year after winning office the Howard Government sat 20 weeks. In 1995, the last non-election year of the Keating Government and 2008, the first under Kevin Rudd, the Parliament sat almost 70 days (1995: 18 weeks, 70 days; 2008: 18 weeks, 69 days).

In 2013 the government has scheduled 17 sitting weeks of 63 sitting days. Parliament shouldn’t be about racing through legislation. Debate on important legislation like the Budget should not be shoved aside, it should take place in the Main Chamber. The Australian people expect Parliament to sit a full time schedule and consider all items diligently. A Coalition Government will not rush its Parliamentary agenda to get Members and Senators out of Canberra as soon as possible. We will schedule the Parliament to sit for as long as it is necessary to consider legislation effectively.

It is not just on tactical vote manoeuvring where the government has been cynical. The legislation considered by Parliament has been tainted with the same hollow brush. Julia Gillard and Anthony Albanese have been quick to crow about the number of pieces of legislation passed over the last two years. It is typical of the cynicism of the Labor Party, to focus on the process rather than the outcome.

There is no clearer illustration of this than with the recent introduction of the Australian Education Bill. It would be an overstatement to say that the Bill is an empty shell. The Bill and its accompanying Explanatory Memorandum state that there is no financial impact associated with the Bill and staggeringly, that the entire Bill is not legally enforceable. It is a press release masquerading as a Bill. It would be like asking guests out to a feast only to serve a crouton. Yet the Prime Minister will claim another Bill has passed the Parliament. It is not a Bill that will have an iota of impact on the values that underlie school education or the quality of teaching in our schools.

The Prime Minister and the culture of the labour movement are the key reasons why the people have lost faith in the Parliament.

As Prime Minister, Julia Gillard is the key cause for the apathy the Australian people have about our political system. She isn’t solely responsible for all political ills but that is the problem with the labour movement – there are far too many ‘faceless men’ unwilling to shoulder responsibility.

The truth is – Julia Gillard is the boss. The buck stops with her. And whether or not she is surrounded by countless machine men, she alone is responsible for key personal pledges she has made and then brazenly broken.

Her breach of faith on the carbon tax will no doubt be the signature duplicitous act remembered by political historians and Australians alike. But it is not the only one. The other three most notable are her craven reversal of her clearly stated opposition to the Howard Government’s “Pacific Solution”, that the government would not keep its two hundred commitments to deliver a budget surplus and her promise not to challenge the former Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. Each of these breaches are singularly contemptible but that she divorced her principles so easily, is astonishing. Rather than take responsibility for her changes of heart she instead blames her flaws on Tony Abbott! She has proven herself to be unworthy to hold the office of Prime Minister.

Kevin Rudd gave us a clear insight into the flaws of the Prime Minster during the 2010 federal election. Perhaps most revealingly her opposition in Cabinet to increases in social welfare because as she was reported to have said ‘older Australians don’t vote Labor’.

In my mind, the result of the 2010 federal election was a clear message from the Australian people that they didn’t wish to re-elect Julia Gillard. Rather than listen to the message from the Australian people, two independents in traditionally conservative seats had a Faustian pact to form government with Labor and the Greens.

What struck me during the private negotiations over the seventeen days between the federal election and Robert Oakshott’s excruciating seventeen minute press conference that tipped the scales Labor’s way was the stark difference between the character of the Coalition leadership and the Labor leadership.

Julia Gillard was willing to remain Prime Minister at any cost. The term “negotiation” requires give and take. Negotiation is about framing how far you are willing to compromise and what core beliefs are immutable. Labor’s true self was exposed in the negotiation process – the Labor machine is about power and willing to strike any greasy deal to obtain it. As was recently noted by The Australian newspaper, the leadership of our country “should not be side tracked by political deal-making, muckraking or the quest for tactical advantage.” Tony Abbott wasn’t prepared to abandon his values, Julia Gillard was, that was the difference.

Julia Gillard is a political opportunist. Her disinterest in truth telling and political expediency is the overwhelming hallmark of her leadership. It was laid bare in her political assassination of first term Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd. Within weeks Labor called an election to brazenly capitalise on the elevation of Australia’s first female Prime Minister with Julia Gillard repeatedly asking Australian’s to keep ‘moving forward’. It took two years before Labor let the Australian people in on the real reason that Kevin Rudd was politically executed by a Sussex Street Death Squad - they didn’t like him, he stood up to the faceless men of the Labor Party, he wasn’t of the Labor movement, he wasn’t part of the machine. As Prime Minister he had his own agenda and his own work style – characteristics seen as unacceptable by those pulling the strings.

That same base opportunism was the core driver for Labor electing Peter Slipper as Speaker of the House of Representatives following Harry Jenkins resignation in November 2011. Make no mistake, the hurried dispatch of Jenkins was forced – he had been given his marching orders on the basis that Labor thought it would have a tactical advantage by gaining an extra vote in what is ostensibly a hung Parliament.

Again Labor’s ‘winner takes all’ approach was exposed when Labor failed to support any one of the nine Labor Member’s I nominated for Speaker, including Anna Burke who Labor would be forced to appoint less than a year later.

What has happened with the speakership over the last two years is a farce. It has strengthened my resolve that the Speaker should be independent, they should abstain from their respective Party Rooms and when the Speaker is taken from one Party, the Deputy should be taken from the other. A Coalition government will ensure that the office of Speaker is treated with respect, not as a shiny bauble to be used as a bartering tool.

Political deal making, tactical advantage and power grabs are now the key motivators of the modern labour movement. Just before Christmas the truth of this was laid bare when Labor Party elder, Senator John Faulkner gave a measured critique of Labor saying, “there is…a great deal wrong with a situation where a Russian doll of nested caucuses sees a tiny minority of MPs exercising a controlling interest over the majority.”

His insight into dysfunctional Labor control is one that we have seen play out over recent years, most notably with the shocking levels of corruption in parts of New South Wales Labor. The calls by Faulkner were reinforced by Kevin Rudd when he said “There's something sick which needs to be healed…It's that closed culture of faceless factional men which makes a whole series of things possible.” And Kevin would know, he still has the knife wounds to prove it. So too would Joel Fitzgibbon, Julia Gillard’s appointed Chief Government Whip in the House of Representatives who wrote, “The key informal issue is patronage; the ability of a few, often trade union blocs, to control individual MPs.” Most recently, Senator Trish Crossin of the Northern Territory felt the immediate job insecurity of every Labor Member and Senator when she happened to be an inconvenient hurdle in the Prime Minister’s path that needed to be swept aside.

What many have forgotten was that in Opposition Julia Gillard made similar statements. At that time she had been quietly promoting herself while the leader Kim Beazley floundered. Giving a keynote address in 2006 Gillard said “We must unshackle our Party from factions. It’s time to stop mincing words and acknowledge that factionalism in the Labor Party is out of control and destructive.” Her words then were damning. Damning because she was a frustrated leadership aspirant without the support she needed in the caucus room. How did Gillard respond to the recent calls from Faulkner, while sitting in the lofty chair at the front of caucus propped up by the ‘faceless men’? Silence.

The ‘faceless men’ are the factional heads of the Australian Labor Party and the union movement. A movement that is at the core of the Labor Party. It is Labor’s defining feature and the body from which the Parliamentary arm springs. Long gone is the day when its purpose was to represent Australian labour in the workplace. The union movement is no longer just a labour movement – it has become big business which is in the business of keeping Labor in government.

An analysis by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Library roughly estimates that Australia’s registered unions disclose to the Electoral Commission a combined asset base of about one billion dollars. To put that into perspective, that is equivalent to the market capitalisation of the retailer JB Hi Fi with its 165 stores nationwide.

While the union movement’s influence over the Labor Party and financial muscle is increasing, its real size in terms of membership of trade unions is diminishing. Union membership has been in decline for twenty years. Today, eighteen percent of the total workforce is a member of a union – representing less than one in five workers. Staggeringly only 13 percent of the private sector workforce opt to join a union. In the broader community the union movement now represent a minority, yet in the Labor Party it wields total control. As Julia Gillard said before the 2007 election “…in Parliament we do the job that the ACTU…would expect us to do.”

One could be forgiven for believing that the unions have always had this extraordinary level of control in the Parliamentary Labor Party. Historically this has not been the case. Union control has dramatically increased since the 1970’s. The Rudd Labor Government was elected with a Ministry of which 70 percent had a union employment history. Under Kim Beazley, it was half that, at about 37 percent. When Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam were elected Prime Minister, over half the working population was a member of a trade union. Yet under Hawke only one in five of his frontbench hailed from a union background while under Whitlam it was less again, at about 18 per cent. On the face of it there is nothing wrong with the union movement controlling Labor. The problem is that the control, as pointed to by Faulkner, has led to impropriety and at worst endemic corruption.

Although it is astonishing how frequently there are allegations of impropriety within the labour movement it is both the insatiable sense of entitlement to members’ money and the web of the relations within the labour movement and Labor Party that is breathtaking.

During the public outcry over Gillard’s involvement in the Australian Workers Union Workplace Reform Association slush fund scandal there was deathly silence from Labor. Is there any wonder? The Australian Worker’s Union is the most powerful union in Cabinet, Treasurer Wayne Swan, Ministers Joe Ludwig, Bill Shorten, Craig Emerson, Stephen Smith and Nicola Roxon are all reportedly members. The AWU represents the largest factional grouping in Caucus.

When the Coalition has sought further information during Question Time about the Australian Workers Union Workplace Reform slush fund, the Prime Minister has been quick to obfuscate, stone wall or simply refuse to answer. I have long articulated the need for the creation of a ‘take note’ session to follow Question Time. The session would consist of a thirty minute period following Question Time which would allow a number of Members to speak on the significant matter of the day. While we should not implement mechanisms that tacitly allow Ministerial obfuscation, I do support a mechanism that would create an opportunity for greater debate on specific issues covered during Question Time. This would complement the current Matter of Public Importance which is a debate on wider issues of public policy.

The matter engulfing Craig Thomson and Former National President of the Australian Labor Party Michael Williamson and the Health Services Union have been well documented in the press. It took until April 2012, years after the issues were first exposed, for the Prime Minister to recognise that the Member for Dobell’s presence in the Labor Caucus was untenable. Contrast that, with her treatment of Senator Trish Crossin. When she wanted to make a so called “Captain’s Pick” and dispense with Crossin for Nova Peris, she was able to do the bloody deed in a matter of 48 hours.

Many of these problems would have been less politically explosive had the government allowed for greater accountability in the Parliament. Craig Thomson should not have been dragged into the Chamber at the eleventh hour to explain himself. The government and the independents continually voted against motions allowing him that chance. A Coalition Government will not simply shut down such motions. There will be less need for them as any Member of any political party who has legitimate questions to answer will be given the opportunity to explain themselves through the Parliament to the Australian people.

The stifling of accountability simply reinforces that there is a more deep seated problem with the culture of the labour movement. In too many ways (with some notable exceptions) it has adapted the characteristics of a mafia family. Rather than seeing the need for change, dissenters are forced out and the walls closed behind them. It would be easy to blame individuals, like the Prime Minister. Or blame individual union entities like the Health Services Union. But it’s greater than that. The failure of the labour movement is systemic and it’s cultural. The labour movement is due for wider cultural change.

So I end where I began – it is not the responsibility of Parliament itself that carries the blame for its standing in the eyes of the people – it is the Prime Minster and the government that must shoulder the blame. It is the Prime Minister that sets the tone. The Prime Minister leads by example. If the Parliament smells rotten the Prime Minister bears responsibility for it – no-one else. It is within her power to change it.

The Coalition’s approach to reform of the Parliament – the Prime Minister leading by example, a backbench Question Time, interventions during Second Reading Speeches, the making of misrepresentations disorderly conduct, a take note session, an independent Speaker, personal explanations and extending the time that Parliament sits – represent an opportunity to strengthen accountability and our democracy.

A change of government will also deliver a Prime Minister who respects the institution of Parliament and who, like John Howard, will lead by example, setting the tone of a more respectful, less personal political discourse of which we can all be proud.