Labor is cooking the books

Senate on 15/05/2024
BILLS
Administrative Review Tribunal Bill 2024, Administrative Review Tribunal (Consequential and Transitional Provisions No. 1) Bill 2024, Administrative Review Tribunal (Consequential and Transitional Provisions No. 2) Bill 2024
Second Reading

Senator RENNICK (Queensland) (18:45): I’m pleased to rise tonight to speak on the Administrative Review Tribunal Bill and the associated legislation because I smell a rat. You’ve only got to look at the history of the Albanese government when it comes to transparency to know that, somewhere, somehow, they are cooking the books. In my prior career, I was an accountant. One of the things we were taught in my professional years is that you’ve got to look at substance over form. That is statement of accounting concept No. 4. When you’re looking at a balance sheet and financial statements, you’ve got to look at what’s really going on. Many people might know it as reading between the lines.

What we’ve got here is a government that is going to spend a billion dollars on basically doing the old ‘bait and switch’. We’ve currently got 340 people working on the AAT, and they want to pull out the 160 or so people that weren’t appointed by the Labor government. I say that because, if you know anything about the Labor Party, they are all about command and control. They will not allow any independent thinking on any government body whatsoever. We have evidence of that. In the recent parliamentary break, thanks to an FOI by Senator Paterson, we discovered that the Prime Minister’s office released a document explaining to bureaucrats and people who take questions in estimates how not to answer the question. This is a government that hates transparency and hates accountability, and there is a conga line of examples.

One of the first things Prime Minister Albanese said he would do when he got into government was release the minutes of national cabinet. Of course he wouldn’t do that. He called out Prime Minister Morrison for not releasing the minutes from national cabinet, and I called out Prime Minister Morrison—that hideous Frankenstein creature that locked us down for two years through those horrible years of the COVID pandemic—for not releasing the minutes of national cabinet. They need to be held to account. That’s not all though. We wanted information on the vaccine contracts every Tuesday—’transmission Tuesday’. We want an inquiry into renewables and the impact of renewables on our farmland and our fisheries. We cannot get any transparency. We wanted an inquiry into childhood transitioning and whether or not that deserved scrutiny. That too was shut down. When we wanted more information on Brittany Higgins and the millions of dollars paid out to her, that was shut down. That decision deserved scrutiny because, in a recent court case, the judge said that Fiona Brown, Linda Reynolds’s chief of staff, acted sensibly. Serious questions need to be asked of this government; yet again, they are not interested in transparency.

Then we’ve got to look at how they love to stack the boards with their mates. One of the first things that the current Treasurer did when he got into office was put Iain Ross on the RBA board. Iain Ross was the former head of the Fair Work Commission, which was supposed to stand up for employees but of course they threw employees under the bus during the COVID pandemic. But there was more to that. Iain Ross was one of the architects with Bill Kelty and Paul Keating of the superannuation system—another form of mandate and another form of wage theft. There was no transparency about superannuation. There was no inquiry or referendum as to whether or not people wanted 12 per cent of their income taken from them and given to Labor’s mates in their ivory palaces in Sydney and Melbourne. No, there was no transparency, no scrutiny. ‘We’ll just start it off at two per cent and slowly creep it up to 12 per cent,’ because that is the way the Labor Party operate, and that is why we have to look at substance over form. Why are they spending a billion dollars on changing the name of a tribunal that does very important work assessing whether or not the bureaucrats in the government make proper administrative procedures? What is it that they are trying to hide? We know that the Labor Party love to hide information. They love not to hold the bureaucrats to account. We see that all the time in estimates—whenever we ask questions, they don’t want to answer them. So I think we need greater scrutiny.

Tonight, my colleague Senator Scarr pointed out how the committee had very little time to actually review this bill. After a number of days and the inquiry, suddenly this bill—and the committee hasn’t even had time to hand down its report—is being rushed into parliament so that it cannot be adequately scrutinised. Yet again, it’s this constant theme of being sneaky. Prime Minister Albanese and the Attorney-General, Mr Dreyfus, really cannot explain what the rush is.

And when this new creation is brought to life, of course it’ll actually cost you more to get the bureaucrats held to account. So it’s going to be even harder for the average Joe in the public out there to access their right to natural justice. Yet again, this is what the Labor Party do.

I ask myself: why do you have to sack 50 per cent of the AAT because they weren’t appointed by Labor? You could have just played the long game here and eventually put your appointees in there. It’s not like we don’t do that. Tony Abbott appointed a Labor staffer as the head of the Audit Office, the Auditor-General. When he came out and told lies about the purchase of land for the Western Sydney airport, we held him to account here in the Senate. I held him to account. He claimed that $3 million for 30 acres of flat land in Western Sydney was somehow criminal. What he didn’t say to the people was that Paul Keating, in 1995 when he was Prime Minister, paid $130 million for land for the Western Sydney airport, and that was only reported in the balance sheet as $30 million. But all that was put aside because the Auditor-General abused his position to make a whole swathe of lies, which he was never held accountable for.

Let me tell you, Labor, if you think that you’re just going to rush this through parliament without adequate scrutiny, you can think again. I’d like to think that the Greens, in order to honour transparency, in the name of transparency, will vote against this bill, will vote against rushing it through parliament, so that we can have a better look. Yet again, a billion dollars is getting wasted on nothing more than a shuffle, a bait and switch. Labor will put their mates on the board. We’ve seen it with the soon-to-be Governor-General. She’s an ex-Keating staffer.

I well remember another Keating staffer, Bill Bowtell. I was listening to ABC national coming back from doing laps in the morning one morning before COVID and a bloke called Bill Bowtell was telling everyone that we had to lock the country down. I thought, ‘Who’s this doctor?’ Of course, I googled his name. It turns out he’s a former Paul Keating staffer likewise with Qantas—a member of that board.

Labor have a history of appointing their mates to positions of power and authority. What we need to know here is why they are wasting a billion dollars of taxpayer funds plus the inconvenience of all the outstanding cases—I think there are tens of thousands of outstanding cases—that may have to be held again or started from scratch again for the poor person out there, the battler, who has probably been shafted by some tyrannical bureaucrat, where the power has gone to their head. Heaven knows we deal with these people every day. Every day I am contacted by people who have had unfair decisions handed down to them by the bureaucracy, whether it’s the tax office or whether it’s the NDIS, or people who have suffered from the vaccine injury scheme—all the time. I’ve been given tape recordings in which bureaucrats didn’t realise they hadn’t hung up the phone properly and were mocking people had who rung them for help.

I’m not saying that all the bureaucrats are bad, but we need to have a level of review. Obviously, there are only 227 politicians at the federal level. We can’t be across every administrative decision made every week by the tens of thousands of bureaucrats in this country, but we need to know that we have an impartial and independent appeals tribunal that is going to give the battler out there their natural justice—the battler who pays taxes to the government in return for services and for being treated like a human being.

That’s probably been the hardest aspect of this role, and my role as a senator is daily talking to constituents who are absolutely gobsmacked at the way they get treated by their government and the arrogance of the bureaucrats. It’s one of the reasons why my questioning in estimates does so well on the social media—because so many people can relate to being shafted by the government and the big engine of bureaucracy every day. And, no, Senator Watt, it’s not a laughing matter. It is very serious. This contemptuous, patronising attitude by bureaucrats has to be held to account by people who are going to put the interests of the people first. That’s what democracy is: for the people, by the people. It’s not for the bureaucrats; it’s not by the big end of town for the big end of town.

We see that all the time with the Labor government. In last night’s budget, we got $20 billion for critical industries, for green hydrogen, for their mates the billionaires—Andrew Forrest—and for big end of town bureaucrats, who are looking after big end of town blowhards. Let me tell you: the Australian people are sick and tired of it. They’re sick of the lack of transparency. They’re sick of the patronising attitude and the callous indifference. The people get shafted by the government and then the government kicks them to the curb. We saw that with those injured by the vaccine. They were mocked as being antivaxxers—how disgusting. And they’re still mocked—how disgusting.

Let me tell you: people are waking up. They know that the government should serve the people and that they are not doing that. So the question is: why is the Albanese government wasting a billion dollars to do nothing more than bait and switch to basically rebrand a whole new department, sack everyone and then recruit everyone again, disrupting the appeals process? Heavens knows how much backlog this is going to cause. It’s going to end up costing people more; they are now going to have to pay more. Why? I’ll tell you why. Labor are up to something. They’re looking after their mates at the big end of town like they always do.