Senate
28 March 1979

31st Parliament · 1st Session



The PRESIDENT (Senator the Hon. Sir Condor Laucke) took the chair at 2.15 p.m., and read prayers.

page 1017

MINISTERIAL ARRANGEMENTS

Senator CARRICK:
Vice-President of the Executive Council · New South WalesLeader of the Government in the Senate · LP

– I inform the Senate that the Deputy Prime Minister (Mr Anthony) left Australia yesterday to undertake discussions in the United States, Canada, Japan and New Zealand. He is expected to return on 12 April. The Minister for Transport (Mr Nixon) is acting as Minister for Trade and Resources and Minister for Special Trade Representations until the Minister for Special Trade Representations (Mr Garland) returns from overseas. The Minister for Special Trade Representations will then act as Minister for Trade and Resources.

page 1017

PETITIONS

Compensation: Commonwealth Government Employees

Senator GEORGES:
QUEENSLAND

-I present the following petition from 408 citizens of Australia:

To the Honourable the President and Members of the Senate in Parliament assembled. The Petition of the undersigned electors respectfully showeth:

That compensation benefits payable to injured Australian Government employees and Defence Forces personnel under the Compensation (Commonwealth Government Employees) Act 1971 should be increased as a matter of urgency in view of the financial plight of recipients, particularly those suffering long term incapacity and because of the significant increase in the cost of living which has occurred since compensation payments were last adjusted; and

That statutory provision should be made for the automatic adjustment of compensation benefits.

And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.

Petition received and read.

Telephone Charges

Senator DAVIDSON:
SOUTH AUSTRALIA

-I present the following petition from 155 citizens of Australia:

To the Honourable the President and Members of the Senate in Parliament assembled. The petition of the undersigned citizens of Australia respectfully sheweth:

That many Australian citizens suffer considerable distress and financial hardship as a result of inaccurate charges and accounts for the use of telephone, telegraph and other related services.

That Telecom Australia does not provide adequate information in relation to the subscriber’s number called, duration, and distance of telephone calls and telegraphic services made or used by their subscribers.

Your petitioners do humbly pray that the Senate will initiate moves to ensure that:

. Telecom Australia eliminates all abuses of the account system to ensure the details of all customer accounts are accurate, and that

On request from the customer, Telecom Australia provide details of date, subscriber’s number called, duration and distance of all services for which the customer is charged.

And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.

Petition received and read.

Indexation of Pensions

Senator Douglas McClelland:
NEW SOUTH WALES · ALP

– I present the following petition from 80 citizens of Australia:

To the Honourable the President and Members of the Senate in Parliament assembled. The petition of the undersigned citizens of Australia respectfully showeth:

That restoration of provisions of the Social Security Act that applied prior to the 1 978-79 Budget is of vital concern to offset the rising cost of goods and services.

The reason advanced by the Government for yearly payments ‘that the lower level of inflation made twice-yearly payments inappropriate ‘ is not valid.

Great injury will be caused to 920,000 aged, invalid, widows and supporting parents, who rely solely on the pension or whose income, other than the pension, is $6 or less per week. Once-a-year payments strike a cruel blow to their expectation and make a mockery of a solemn election pledge.

Accordingly, your petitioners call upon their legislators to:

Restore twice-yearly pension adjustments in the Autumn session.

Raise pensions and unemployed benefits above the poverty level to 30 per cent of average weekly earnings.

And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.

Petition received and read.

Aboriginal Land Rights

Senator GEORGES:

-I present the following petition from 78 citizens of Australia:

To the Honourable the President and Honourable Senators in Parliament assembled. This petition of citizens of Australia respectfully sheweth that:

Australia’s Aboriginal and Islander peoples have not been compensated for the loss of their traditional land, social and cultural independence and self-respect.

Australia lags behind other nations with white majorities in providing a Treaty of Commitment to its indigenous peoples giving them a defined proportion of national income for a defined period freehold title to traditional land, waterways and seaboards control over related resources and over the introduction of alcohol and other alien cultural influences in their regions.

Your petitioners therefore humbly pray that your honourable House will take urgent steps to concur with the wishes of a majority of electors at every polling booth in Australia at the 1967 referendum by resumption from the States of the major traditional Aboriginal land areas and reserves and former reserves as at 31.3.1978, to become federal Crown land pending prompt determination of freehold title for Land Trusts and eventually for denned community co-operatives.

And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.

Petition received and read.

Indexation of Pensions

Senator SIBRAA:
NEW SOUTH WALES

– I present the following petition from 121 citizens of Australia:

To the Honourable the President and Members of the Senate in Parliament assembled. The petition of the undersigned citizens of Australia respectfully showeth:

That restoration of provisions of the Social Security Act that applied prior to the 1 978-79 Budget is of vital concern to offset the rising cost of goods and services.

The reason advanced by the Government for yearly payments ‘that the lower level of inflation made twice-yearly payments inappropriate ‘ is not valid.

Great injury will be caused to 920,000 aged, invalid, widows and supporting parents, who rely solely on the pension or whose income, other than the pension, is $6 or less per week. Once-a-year payments strike a cruel blow to their expectation and make a mockery of a solemn election pledge.

Accordingly, your petitioners call upon their legislators to:

Restore twice-yearly pension adjustments in the Autumn session.

Raise pensions and unemployed benefits above the poverty level to 30 per cent of average weekly earnings.

And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.

Petition received.

Compensation: Commonwealth Government Employees

Senator KEEFFE:
QUEENSLAND

– I present the following petition from 339 citizens of Australia:

To the Honourable the President and members of the Senate in Parliament assembled. The petition of the undersigned electors respectfully showeth:

That Compensation benefits payable to injured Australian Government employees and Defence Forces personnel under the Compensation (Commonwealth Government Employees) Act 1971 should be increased as a matter of urgency in view of the financial plight of recipients, particularly those suffering long term incapacity and because of the significant increase in the cost of living which has occurred since compensation payments were last adjusted; and

That statutory provision should be made for the automatic adjustment of compensation benefits.

And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.

Petition received.

Indexation of Pensions

Senator MASON:
NEW SOUTH WALES

– I present the following petition from 80 citizens of Australia.

To the Honourable the President and Members of the Senate in Parliament assembled the petition of the undersigned citizens of Australia respectfully showeth:

That restoration of provisions of the Social Security Act that applied prior to the 1 978-79 Budget is of vital concern to offset the rising cost of goods and services.

The reason advanced by the Government for yearly payments “that the lower level of inflation made twice-yearly payments inappropriate “ is not valid.

Great injury will be caused to 920,000 aged, invalid, widows and supporting parents, who rely solely on the pension or whose income, other than the pension, is $6 or less per week. Once-a-year payments strike a cruel blow to their expectation and make a mockery of a solemn election pledge.

Accordingly, your petitioners call upon their legislators to:

  1. Restore twice-yearly pension adjustments in the Autumn session.
  2. Raise pensions and unemployed benefits above the poverty level to 30 per cent of average weekly earnings.

And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.

Petition received.

Compensation: Commonwealth Government Employees

Senator COLSTON:
QUEENSLAND

-I present the following petition from 1,425 citizens of Australia:

To the Honourable the President and Members of the Senate in Parliament assembled. The humble petition of electors of the State/Territory of Queensland respectfully showeth:

That compensation benefits payable to injured Australian Government employees and Defence Forces personnel under the Compensation (Commonwealth Government Employees) Act 1971 should be increased as a matter of urgency in view of the financial plight of recipients, particularly those suffering long term incapacity and because of the significant increase in the cost of living which has occurred since compensation payments were last adjusted; and

That statutory provision should be made for the automatic adjustment of compensation benefits.

And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray.

Petition received.

The Clerk:

– Petitions have been lodged for presentation as follows:

Indexation of Pensions

To the Honourable the President and Members of the Senate in Parliament assembled. The petition of the undersigned citizens of Australia respectfully showeth:

That restoration of provisions of the Social Security Act that applied prior to the 1 978-79 Budget is of vital concern to offset the rising cost of goods and services.

The reason advanced by the Government for yearly payments ‘that the lower level of inflation made twice-yearly payments inappropriate ‘ is not valid.

Great injury will be caused to 920,000 aged, invalid, widows and supporting parents, who rely solely on the pension or whose income, other than the pension, is $6 or less per week. Once-a-year payments strike a cruel blow to their expectation and make a mockery of a solemn election pledge.

Accordingly, your petitioners call upon their legislators to:

  1. Restore twice-yearly pension adjustments in the Autumn session.
  2. Raise pensions and unemployed benefits above the poverty level to 30 per cent of average weekly earnings.

And your petitioners as in duty bound will ever pray. by Senators Carrick, Mulvihill, Lewis and Guilfoyle.

Petitions received.

page 1019

QUESTION

QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE

page 1019

QUESTION

YOUTH UNEMPLOYMENT

Senator BUTTON:
VICTORIA

-Is the Minister representing the Minister for Employment and Youth Affairs aware of recent statements by Mr Hunt, the Minister for Health, and by Mr Robinson, the Minister for Finance, suggesting that the increase in unemployment amongst males, particularly young males, is due to the increasing participation in the work force of married women? Were those two Ministers articulating the Government’s view on this question? If so, what steps does the Government intend to take to deal with the situation?

Senator DURACK:
Attorney-General · WESTERN AUSTRALIA · LP

– I am not aware of the statements by the two Ministers, Mr Hunt and Mr Robinson, to which Senator Button has referred. I simply emphasise that Mr Viner is the Minister for Employment and Youth Affairs and is the principal spokesman for the Government in relation to those matters. I will seek out the statements to which the honourable senator has referred and submit them to Mr Viner, who I believe is the appropriate person to respond to the question that has been asked.

page 1019

QUESTION

COMMITTEE OF INQUIRY INTO EDUCATION AND TRAINING

Senator PUPLICK:
NEW SOUTH WALES

-Has the Minister for Education seen the editorial in today’s Australian Financial Review which describes the report of the Williams Committee of Inquiry into Education and Training as being below standard and having room for improvement? Is he aware that the editorial alleges that the thrust of the Williams Committee’s report will guarantee the further decline of the education system in Australia, in particular of the universities, and t licit lt describes this rs port us being irrelevant te the real issues of education and training? Is he aware that this view has been expressed by a large number of people since the presentation last week of the report of the Williams inquiry? Does the Minister believe that it is a wellinformed view?

Senator CARRICK:
LP

-Senator Puplick has referred to an editorial in the Australian Financial

Review. I have not read the editorial in full. I have read the rather satirical heading and some of the opening paragraphs. I do not believe that anyone who has thoroughly read the three volumes of the Williams Committee’s report in detail could come to any such decision.

Senator Button:

– There are not any of those.

Senator CARRICK:

-We now know that Senator Button has not done so because by inference he has excluded himself, and he happens to be the Labor Party’s spokesman on education. I am grateful for that. I happen to have read the report two or three times. It is inconceivable that recommendations which seek to do the following things would lower education standards in Australia: The Williams Committee seeks to upgrade the basic skills in schools. Does anyone believe that that will lower education standards? It sets out to lay down new and improved ways of training and re-training the young and the young unemployed. I doubt that that would attract negative views. The report sets out to ensure that the failure rates in tertiary institutions are lowered, that the qualitative approach of universities and colleges is improved and that research in universities and colleges is improved. Need I go on? One by one each of the 116 recommendations aims at improving quality in education. I am amazed that anyone could conclude other than that the Williams Committee, with the extraordinarily capable people who were on it, has produced a first class report and one which, if implemented, will raise very perceptibly living standards in Australia. The report expresses the intuitive reaction of Australian people that these kinds of reforms should be made.

page 1019

QUESTION

NATURAL GAS

Senator McINTOSH:
WESTERN AUSTRALIA

-I ask the Minister representing the Minister for Trade and Resources a question. It is common knowledge that when the North West Shelf gas field comes on stream the developers intend to export 6.S million tonnes of liquefied natural gas annually. Is the Minister able to inform the Senate of the relationship between the financial benefit to Australia through the export of this LNG and the financial burden to Australia through the importation of quantity of oil that would have a similar energy potential? In other words, is it of benefit to Australia to export one form of energy and to import another, especially when in the main they could both fulfil similar roles? If the anwer is yes, will the Minister be good enough to set out on paper the price structure of both commodities so that the Press may readily explain to its readers the reason for our growing overseas indebtedness?

Senator DURACK:
LP

– Great benefits can accrue to Australia by encouraging the exploration and development of oil and gas reserves. One of the great achievements in recent years has been the exploration and identification of gas reserves on the North West Shelf of Western Australia. In order to justify that development economically, because of the huge capital expenditure involved, it is necessary to permit the export of a certain percentage of that gas. Senator Mcintosh has asked for a detailed cost benefit analysis of the proposals. At this stage an in-depth feasibility study is being undertaken of the matter. I do not know whether the full details that the honourable senator seeks can be supplied before that study has been completed. However, I will refer the question to the Minister for Trade and Resources to see whether the details that he seeks can be supplied.

page 1020

QUESTION

TERRORISM

Senator TOWNLEY:
TASMANIA

– I direct a question to the Minister representing the Minister for Transport. I refer to the report of Sir Robert Mark to the Minister for Administrative Services on the organisation of police resources in the Commonwealth area and on other related matters, which was presented to the Parliament, I think, on 6 April last year. The report states:

The system of random security checks at airports throughout Australia seems to me of questionable value . . . This is so vulnerable an area that in the interests of passengers and air crew it is essential that consideration should be given to the establishment of security checks on every outgoing flight at the ten security sensitive Australian airports as a routine measure of high priority .. . It will be too late to contemplate this obviously necessary precaution after the first hijacking or bombing of an aircraft.

I believe that there was also some reference to some terrorism in the area.

Senator Georges:

- Mr President, I raise a point of order. The honourable senator is giving far too much information. He has taken at least a minute to get to the question. I do not think that the honourable senator is about to ask the question even now. I suggest that he be called to order.

Senator TOWNLEY:

-Mr President, speaking to the point of order -

The PRESIDENT:

- Senator Townley, you may finish your question.

Senator TOWNLEY:

-May I speak to the point of order?

The PRESIDENT:

– The point of order is not sustained. The honourable senator may carry on with his question.

Senator TOWNLEY:

– This matter was also dealt with in an article in the Australian yesterday in which a top police security officer said that terrorism could easily happen in this country. Is the Minister aware that anyone contemplating the hijacking of an aircraft in Australia would not have to be of very high intelligence to avoid the present random security checks which are just a waste of money? When will the Government take action to implement the suggestion of security checks on all outgoing flights as recommended in Sir Robert Mark ‘s report?

Senator Georges:

- Mr President, I wish to raise another point of order which supports my previous point of order. It is fairly clear now that Senator Townley could have asked the latter part of his question without giving so much information.

The PRESIDENT:

– Order! The honourable senator may not revive a point of order on which I have already ruled, which is what Senator Georges is attempting to do now.

Senator Georges:

– I raise a new point of order concerning the question which Senator Townley has just completed. I ask you, Mr President, whether it was in order for him to give such a lengthly preamble when the latter part of the question would have been sufficient?

The PRESIDENT:

– Often it is necessary to give some explanation before a question is actually put. If that is done briefly, it enables the questioner to get his message across and facilitate a clear and concise answer. I do not sustain Senator Georges’ point of order at this stage. I ask the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs to reply to the question.

Senator CHANEY:
Minister for Aboriginal Affairs · WESTERN AUSTRALIA · LP

– I feel the Senate will have a distinct sense of anti-climax following the answer I am able to give to the honourable senator’s question. Notwithstanding the complaint about the amount of information provided, not enough information was given to enable me to answer the question. I assume that the point that Senator Townley was making was that with random security checks it should be possible for a terrorist, provided he did not care which flight he tackled, to get onto an aircraft at almost any time and destroy it. I suppose that is a valid observation about someone in that state of mind. I am not aware what action, if any, has been taken to institute security checks on all flights. As a frequent air traveller, I have rather mixed feelings about that prospect. I will refer the question to the Minister for Transport and seek a reply for the honourable senator.

page 1021

QUESTION

AIR ACCIDENT AT GORDON DOWNS

Senator CAVANAGH:
SOUTH AUSTRALIA

– I ask a question of the Minister representing the Minister for Transport. Did the air accident squad of the Department of Transport investigate the incident on 23 July 1977 at Gordon Downs station in Western Australia in which an aeroplane knocked a rider off his horse during a muster? If there was an investigation into the accident, what was the result of the investigation? If there was not an investigation into the accident, why was there not an investigation?

Senator CHANEY:
LP

– I do not have the details requested by the honourable senator. I will seek them from the Minister for Transport.

page 1021

QUESTION

APPLICATIONS FOR UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFITS

Senator WALTERS:
TASMANIA

-Can the Minister for Social Security give to the chamber the latest figures for applications for the unemployment benefit? Is it true that these figures support the continued downward trend in unemployment?

Senator GUILFOYLE:
Minister for Social Security · NEW SOUTH WALES · LP

– I am not sure whether I have with me the latest figures for the unemployment benefit. I think the last figures I recall receiving related to the period ending 9 March. At that time I believe there was a drop of some 14,000. If later figures are now available, I will see that Senator Walters is provided with them.

page 1021

QUESTION

WORK TEST FOR UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFIT

Senator MELZER:
VICTORIA

– I am not sure whether my question should be addressed to the Minister for Social Security or the Minister representing the Minister for Employment and Youth Affairs. Was it the Department of Employment and Youth Affairs or the Department of Social Security that issued a memorandum to officers stating that people moving to areas where there is little chance of work will have their unemployment benefit cut off, and will remain deprived of unemployment benefit while in the area? How will the Department of Social Security deal with people who, on the basis of recent propaganda, moved to fruit picking areas looking for work and are unable to find jobs there? Does the Commonwealth accept any responsibility for people who, on advice from the Commonwealth Employment Service, took themselves into fruit picking areas and found that it was impossible to earn even as much as the unemployment benefit while living in very primitive conditions? Will these people be immediately eligible to receive the unemployment benefit? Is it true that the Commonwealth Employment Service knew that it was impossible to earn a living fruit picking in those areas before it sent unemployed people there?

Senator GUILFOYLE:
LP

– The questions raised by Senator Melzer deal more directly with the Department of Employment and Youth Affairs and I will need to refer to the Minister for Employment and Youth Affairs the matters raised with respect to the Commonwealth Employment Service and the work testing arrangements. I will see that the matters raised are drawn to the Minister’s attention and will seek an early reply from him.

page 1021

QUESTION

MEAT EXPORTS

Senator MAUNSELL:
QUEENSLAND

-Last week I asked the Minister representing the Minister for Primary Industry a question in regard to a Press report that Malta had cancelled meat imports from Australia. Can the Minister inform the Senate whether the Government has received further information which would clarify the situation?

Senator WEBSTER:
Minister for Science and the Environment · VICTORIA · NCP/NP

-The office of the Minister for Trade and Resources, Mr Anthony, provided me with some information. I understand that what Senator Maunsell has said previously is substantially correct. Recently the Maltese Government approached the Australian Government with a view to securing a special price for beef because recent quotations were significantly higher than in 1977. 1 understand that the Australian Government replied that Australia was unable to offer meat to Malta below current market prices and that exports were handled by private Australian companies. It was pointed out also that world prices for beef had risen substantially over the past 2 years. Australian beef, of necessity, was being sold very cheaply in 1 977 in the face of world over-supply and at levels well below the cost of production of cattle in Australia. The Maltese Government has not advised the Australian Government of any decision to discontinue imports of beef from Australia. Therefore the High Commissioner has been requested to clarify the position.

Mr Anthony states that he understands that the Maltese Government recently purchased quantities of pork from Denmark. The greater part of those purchases was made as a consequence of most of Malta’s pig population being eliminated by an outbreak of African swine fever. Senator Maunsell might have noted that the Maltese Government issued a Press release which suggested that a move was afoot in the Australian Senate to inflict serious harm on Malta and her people by persuading the Australian Government to put pressure on the European Economic Community not to sell meat to the Maltese Government. Any suggestion that any move is afoot in the Senate adversely to affect the welfare of the Maltese people is certainly and clearly without any substance whatever.

page 1022

QUESTION

INTELSAT SATELLITE

Senator RYAN:
ACT

– My question is directed to the Minister representing the Minister for Post and Telecommunications and refers to a recent question I put to the Minister regarding the legislative basis or otherwise for the trial use of the INTELSAT satellite in Australia. I ask again: Is it the case that the use of INTELSAT in Australia, though authorised by the Goverment, has been illegal? Does the Minister agree that three Commonwealth laws- the Overseas Telecommunications Act, the Wireless Telegraphy Act and the Telecommunications Act- have all been contravened by the INTELSAT trials? How does the Government explain this illegality?

Senator CHANEY:
LP

-Since Senator Ryan asked her question of 20 March, I have received some further information from the Minister for Post and Telecommunications. However, it does not really explain to me whether there is any truth in the suggestion by Senator Ryan that there has been illegality in the matters to which she referred. I am advised by the Minister that the arrangements for the conduct of trials for domestic television transmissions by the Australian Broadcasting Commission and the Overseas Telecommunications Commission between October 1978 and March 1979 using INTELSAT were conducted by a planning committee of senior officers from the Postal and Telecommunications Department, the ABC, the OTC and the Australian Telecommunications Commission. The OTC provided capacity in the earth station at Moree for a signal up to the satellite and also to house the small trial receiving earth station. Also, OTC, in its normal signatory role on behalf of the Australian Government, made the necessary arrangements within INTELSAT for the provision of channel capacity on the satellite. Mr President, I have some further information but it does not go into the question of legality or illegality. As has been said often in this place, I think that questions requiring a legal opinion are out of order. I do not think that my opinion as to whether it is legal or otherwise would be permissible.

Senator RYAN:

– I ask a supplementary question. I am not asking for a legal opinion; I am asking where is the legislative basis for the use of the INTELSAT satellite? In which Act or in which provisions of Acts reside the legislative power to do what has been done?

Senator CHANEY:

-The question on 20 March does not appear to me to have been in those terms at all. Senator Ryan asked a quite different question. If she has a different question now I will refer that to the Minister and seek a further reply.

The PRESIDENT:

– I must point out to honourable senators that supplementary questions must be directly relevant to the original question.

page 1022

QUESTION

REDCLIFF PETROCHEMICAL PLANT

Senator YOUNG:
SOUTH AUSTRALIA

– I direct my question to the Leader of the Government in the Senate. Does not the uncertainty of Australia’s overseas crude oil supplies, as reported in today’s Press, add further weight to the argument that a further petrochemical plant in Australia should be built at Redcliff in South Australia as it will be supplied with locally produced feedstocks and not be dependent upon a large percentage of imported feedstocks, as would be the case with the other proposed plants? Also, as it has been shown already that the Redcliff plant would save Australia some $2, 000m over the first ten years of its operation in terms of balance of payments by not using overseas hydrocarbons for feedstock, will not the big foreshadowed increase in overseas crude oil prices add significantly to this already huge figure? As these are two most important factors, coupled with many other benefits of Redcliff-

Senator Georges:

– I rise to order. It seems it requires persistent effort on my part to bring Question Time to order. That question is certainly out of order. The honourable senator is giving far too much information and is seeking an opinion. In fact, if he continues in that fashion an answer will not be needed. He is giving the answer to the question.

The PRESIDENT:

– I can assure the honourable senator that I am watching as closely as I can to ensure fairness in the presentation of questions and in responses to them. One has to be somewhat tolerant in respect to certain aspects. In my estimation it would be stupid to inhibit question presentation by too rigid an approach. I ask Senator Young to put his question immediately.

Senator YOUNG:

-Thank you, Mr President. I suggest that one day someone should teach Senator Georges how to ask a question.

Senator Georges:

– I object to that and I ask for a withdrawal. My suggestion was made with the best of intent. What I have suggested will serve Senator Young as well as me. The result will be a good performance at Question Time. Question Time will be to the point and as many questions as possible will be asked.

The PRESIDENT:

– I call Senator Young.

Senator YOUNG:

– As these are the two most important factors of Redcliff, coupled with many other benefits, will the Government lend its full weight to the establishment of Redcliff, which is of national importance as well as being in the national interest of Australia?

Senator CARRICK:
LP

-Senator Young has demonstrated consistently in the past his very real concern to ensure continuous and adequate energy supplies to Australia and energy conservation. It is natural, therefore, that he should ask a question on this subject. It is true that the uncertainties regarding oil supplies arising out of the tragic Iranian-

Senator Georges:

– Well, what about-

Senator CARRICK:

-He who has attempted to interrupt Question Time all the time is now attempting to divert us. The fact is that the Iranian situation does cause considerable uncertainties and the Government has made that clear. It is desirable, naturally, that relevant development of petrochemical plants in Australia should be pursued. I do not have the expertise to determine precise locations. I would look with sympathy at the suggestion by the Dow Chemical Company that it should be located at Redcliff. Indeed, if it can be sustained that its location there and its proximity to natural gas supplies are economic, of course that must be a good idea. I will refer the essence of the question to the responsible Minister in the other place, draw his attention to it and seek his comments.

page 1023

QUESTION

YOUTH WORK 79

Senator GRIMES:
NEW SOUTH WALES

– My question is directed to the Minister for Social Security and refers to a program called Youth Work 79 which is conducted by an organisation called the Bradfield Youth Employment Committee which has been established to take advantage of the Government’s Special Youth Employment Training Program to provide employment for youth and, therefore, is a project with which we all could agree. Is the Minister aware that in the literature put out by this organisation it is claimed that youths who join the program will receive two full weeks training and at the same time receive unemployment benefit? Is this so? Does it mean in fact that this project has been given special advantages in that youths can receive unemployment benefit when they would not otherwise be eligible for it? If that is so, can other similar projects throughout Australia receive the same dispensation?

Senator GUILFOYLE:
LP

- Senator Grimes has drawn attention to Youth Work 79 and raised specific questions. I will need to check both the literature with regard to that program and what arrangements are made for people who participate in it with regard to unemployment benefit. I have no information about it with me but I will see that it is checked and that the honourable senator is advised without delay.

page 1023

QUESTION

UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFIT

Senator WATSON:
TASMANIA

– My question is directed to the Minister for Social Security. Will the Government give consideration to varying unemployment benefit to meet the circumstances of, firstly, retrenched employees, secondly, family men genuinely seeking work and, thirdly, single folk to take account of their domestic living costs?

Senator GUILFOYLE:
LP

– If the honourable senator is referring to the rates of unemployment benefit that are paid in those different categories, all matters of that kind will be reviewed in the context of the forthcoming Budget. I will take note of the different groups of people whom he has mentioned, bearing in mind that three different rates of unemployment benefit are paid for different categories of persons to take account of their responsibilities. But there is no separate review of a matter of that kind outside the context of the Budget for the next financial year.

page 1023

QUESTION

ABORIGINAL FUNDING

Senator KEEFFE:

-Will the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs inform the Parliament whether his Government intends to make further cutbacks in financial allocations for Aborigines during the current financial year as part of the Government’s program to reduce the deficit from $4 billion to $2.5 billion? Is the Minister aware that cutbacks already approved by him and his predecessor, Mr Viner, during the current financial year have proved to be disastrous for Aboriginal programs in housing, employment, land rights and land development, education, legal problems and health and in the latter case are the cause of a dramatic rise in Aboriginal infant mortality? Will the Minister give a promise to the Parliament that there will be no further cutbacks this year and that the total Budget allocation for 1978-79 will in fact be spent on Aborigines?

Senator CHANEY:
LP

-There have been no cutbacks in the expenditure on Aboriginal Affairs during the current financial year. The answer to Senator Keeffe ‘s question, therefore, is no. There have been no cutbacks to date and there will be no further cutbacks during the current financial year. With respect to what allocations will be made during the next financial year, I think that the Treasurer has made a statement recently about the attitude that is being taken with respect to speculation about the Budget. I would propose to follow the same course.

Senator KEEFFE:

– I ask a supplementary question. In reference to cutbacks, I ask the Minister: how does he describe the reduction in funds available for legal aid in particular, for medical services and for housing?

Senator CHANEY:

– If the honourable senator is suggesting that there have been reductions in the amounts made available during the course of this year in those areas I would suggest that he should produce those figures. If he is suggesting in his question that there has been a reduction this financial year as against the previous financial year, I would again suggest that he produce those figures.

page 1024

QUESTION

FISHING: JOINT VENTURE

Senator SIM:
WESTERN AUSTRALIA

– Can the Minister representing the Minister for Primary Industry advise what progress has been made in the long drawn out negotiations between Australian and foreign fishing interests on a joint venture in Australia? When can we expect the applications already made to be approved?

Senator WEBSTER:
NCP/NP

– I do not quite understand the thrust of Senator Sim’s question. My understanding was that negotiations were under way between the Federal Department of Primary Industry and the appropriate Departments in the various States on the feasibility of fishing studies being carried out. I recall that I responded to a question on this subject a week or so ago and indicated that activity was taking place, for instance, on squid fishing off the area represented by Senator Lewis who sits behind Senator Sim. I cannot quite understand the point of Senator Sim’s question. If he is seeking information relating to other ventures that may be under way, I certainly will seek that information from the Minister for Primary Industry and attempt to obtain an immediate response.

page 1024

QUESTION

POSSIBLE MERGER OF QANTAS AND TAA

Senator COLSTON:

-Can the Minister representing the Minister for Transport inform the Senate whether any study has been undertaken or is being undertaken to determine the feasibility or otherwise of an amalgamation of Qantas Airways Ltd and Trans-Australia Airlines, a takeover of TAA by Qantas or some other way by which the two airlines may be merged? If such a study has been undertaken, can the Minister give details of any progress which has been made?

Senator CHANEY:
LP

– I am not aware of any study of the nature that the honourable senator mentioned but I will check with Mr Nixon. Obviously the answer to the second part of the question depends on the answer to the first part.

page 1024

QUESTION

BUILDING INDUSTRY

Senator ROCHER:
WESTERN AUSTRALIA

-Will the Minister representing the Minister for Housing and Construction confirm the intention of the Government to exclude building industry organisations from deliberations on uniform building regulations and a proposed accreditation system? Does he agree that in the past the building industry has always participated in the development of building regulations on a State or Territory basis? Will he acknowledge that the building industry has established a national appraisal system for innovations within industry which would be invaluable in any deliberations aimed at amending or influencing building regulations?

Senator WEBSTER:
NCP/NP

-Senator Rocher asks an appropriate question about an industry with which he is very familiar. The honourable senator brings great expertise to the Senate from Western Australia-

Senator Walsh:

– Get on with it.

Senator WEBSTER:

– In this respect he is unlike the honourable senator who just interrupted. It is certainly not the intention of this Government to exclude building industry organisations from deliberations on uniform building regulations and an accreditation system. The honourable senator will understand that these issues are fundamentally matters of State responsibility and that, whilst the Commonwealth may express views in the appropriate forums, the extent of industry involvement will be determined ultimately by the policies of the State governments. I understand that the Minister for Housing and Construction recently had consultations on these matters with industry associations including the Master Builders Federation of Australia and the Housing Industry Association. Following the report of the National Inquiry into Housing Costs and the decision of the Local Government Ministers ‘ Conference to establish a group to review these questions, in a recent speech to the Housing Costs Conference which was sponsored by the Victorian Government the Minister said:

The Commonwealth has already assisted the States in an official review of the existing machinery. In light of the review I will be asking the State Local Government Ministers at their meeting in May to work with us to set up a new group that will have some cutting edge in this important question.

The statement goes on, but I think Senator Rocher may direct his attention to that particular conference and that particular remark. I believe that it is quite clear that action perhaps in line with that which Senator Rocher is suggesting could possibly take place.

page 1025

QUESTION

REINTRODUCTION OF TRAM SERVICES

Senator WHEELDON:
WESTERN AUSTRALIA

-Has the Minister representing the Minister for Transport seen newspaper reports to the effect that both the New York City Council and the Greater London Council have the intention of reintroducing tram services into their respective cities as a means of combating the present energy crisis? Will he make inquiries into the nature of the proposals of both of these cities in regard to what savings of energy they contemplate will result from the reintroduction of trams? I appreciate that the reintroduction of tram services in our cities is a State matter. Nonetheless, does the Minister not agree that this is a matter on which the Federal Government could be of assistance to State governments in view of the present pressing economic crisis that faces Australia, as it does the United States and the United Kingdom?

Senator CHANEY:
LP

– The honourable senator raises a matter which I think is regarded by all honourable senators as important, namely, the problems of saving energy and using our energy efficiently. I am not sure what facilities the Minister for Transport has to make the inquiries that have been suggested, but I will certainly direct them to him and support the idea that if possible they should be made. I am not familiar with the reports which have been cited, but the honourable senator will know that this is a subject of hot discussion in our own city of Perth. With the changes to transport arrangements in Perth that are currently being made, I think that the Commonwealth Department would have some contribution to make in this area.

page 1025

QUESTION

SUPERANNUATION FUNDS

Senator MESSNER:
SOUTH AUSTRALIA

– I refer the Minister representing the Treasurer to the recent interest shown by the Storemen and Packers Union in Victoria and other trade unions in superannuation funds of private companies. I refer to the trade unions’ moves to take over control of the management of those funds. Is it a fact that wage increases beyond indexation guidelines are being keenly sought by trade union leaders? Do such increases help to maintain high rates of inflation which undermine the job security of all Australians? Does inflation so caused also undermine the security of members of superannuation funds by destroying the financial basis of investments in such funds? If trade union leaders were successful in obtaining managerial control of private superannuation funds, would this not place them in an intolerable position of conflicting interest in undertaking their duties as trustees, which could lead to litigation against them personally by retired persons whose benefits could not be adequately maintained against high inflation caused by other activities of the union leaders?

Senator CARRICK:
LP

– I am aware of certain activities by the Storemen and Packers Union in Victoria in particular. I am aware- and I emphasise- that the activities to seek wage increases beyond indexation guidelines are a major, if not the major, factor in contributing to the pressure upwards of inflation. The fact is that if inflation were to increase it would erode the purchasing power of all existing wages, fixed incomes, pensions and benefits including superannuation. If inflation continued to increase it would destroy jobs. If one were to look at the shares register of, shall we say, a huge Australian enterprise such as Broken Hill Proprietary Co. Ltd, one would find that many hundreds of thousands of persons in superannuation funds, in fact running to very high figures throughout Australia, are the shareholders of these particular enterprises. If the structure of enterprise in Australia were weakened and inflation were to increase, there would be a destruction of the earning capacity of superannuation funds. Quite clearly, therefore, there would be a conflict of interests. The best thing that trade unions, in fact all Australians, can do at the moment is to work together to keep all costs within such control that inflation continues to come down. Then we will have more work and increased living standards for all Australians.

page 1026

QUESTION

NORTHERN TERRITORY: SECURITY NEEDS

Senator ROBERTSON:
NORTHERN TERRITORY

-Has the Minister representing the Minister for Administrative Services read the comments attributed to Mr Justice Muirhead when speaking at a symposium in Adelaide? He is reported as saying:

The Northern Territory today is a sensitive area, geographically exposed and because of its minerals and diverse ethnic groups subject to stress.

Mr Justice Muirhead is also reported as seeing a need in the Territory for a special branch of the Commonwealth Police as a counter to terrorism which he sees as a potential threat. Does the Government feel that the judge has assessed the situation in Darwin correctly? If so, what action does it intend to take?

Senator CHANEY:
LP

– I have not seen the reports of Mr Justice Muirhead ‘s comments but the extracts read to the Senate by the honourable senator make some sense. I think that there is stress in the Northern Territory because of the factors he mentioned. I will refer his question about the need for a special branch of the Commonwealth Police to the Minister for Administrative Services and seek a reply.

page 1026

QUESTION

HYDRO-ELECTRIC POWER

Senator MacGIBBON:
QUEENSLAND

– Has the Minister representing the Minister for National Development seen today’s reports that the Commonwealth, Western Australian and Northern Territory Governments were exploring the feasibility of installing a $90m hydro-electric power station on the Ord River to supply Darwin with power? Will the Minister give an undertaking to extend the feasibility study to the Burdekin Dam in North Queensland, which not only is ideally suited for hydro-generation but also, unlike the Ord River, is supported by a highly developed community infrastructure which will require additional electrical power in the near future for its industrial and residential expansion and, as such, is eminently to be preferred, in the national interest, to wasting further money on the Ord scheme?

Senator DURACK:
LP

– I am aware of the decision with which the Western Australian Government agreed, I think yesterday, that there should be a feasibility study of the proposal to establish a hydro-electric power station on the Ord River to provide power for Darwin, in particular, and other parts of the Northern Territory as well as parts of the north of Western Australia.

There is an obvious benefit in saving the costs of imported fuel. I understand that most of the power stations in the area are oil fired. This proposal represents a very positive use to which the Ord River water can be put and I would have thought it would be applauded by everyone concerned. Senator MacGibbon asks a question about a hydro-electric scheme on the Burdekin River in Queensland. I do not doubt his assertion in that there could be many advantages in having such a scheme. But the two propositions are not linked; a feasibility study in relation to the Ord River scheme would concern very different matters from those that he raises in relation to the Burdekin River. Nevertheless there may well be a very strong argument in favour of a scheme on the latter river. I will refer the question to the Minister for National Development and ask him to give it his early consideration.

page 1026

QUESTION

URANIUM MINING: NORTHERN TERRITORY

Senator MULVIHILL:
NEW SOUTH WALES

– I direct a question to the Minister for Science. I refer to the Government’s decision to have more than one uranium mining operation in the Northern Territory at the same time. I ask: How often does the Uranium Advisory Council propose to meet? Will the initial or advance surveys of the Chief Scientist to prove or disprove the capacity of the Alligator Rivers system to cope with the industrial waste disposal go first to the Minister? Will the reports be laundered before they reach the Uranium Advisory Council? What is the Government ‘s long-range plan to monitor effectively the load it is going to put on the Alligator Rivers system?

Senator WEBSTER:
NCP/NP

-The question is one that requires a lengthy reply. I think it would be more appropriate if it were to be put on the Notice Paper and I was to get a response for the honourable senator. Three points were raised. As to whether there would be more than one uranium mine in the Northern Territory, it is not for me to comment upon that. There could well be. The indications are that there will be more than one development, given the arrangements at present. The honourable senator asked about a uranium advisory committee. If my understanding of his question is correct he was speaking of a body which is basically a sub-committee of Cabinet and which is chaired by my colleague the Minister for Trade and Resources, Mr Anthony.

The uranium advisory committee to which the honourable senator referred, whichever one it is, is certainly not within my portfolio. But the activities of the Supervising Scientist happen to be within my portfolio. The question raised in that regard was whether the reports of the Supervising Scientist will be laundered in any way before they are put to the uranium advisory committee. I think the legislation which established the position of Supervising Scientist is fairly clear. It gives him a very appropriate role to perform. I see no way in which reports which come from that body will be laundered in any way before the information is gained by the Government, upon which information it will make a decision on this very important matter.

Senator MULVIHILL:

– I ask a supplementary question. I am talking about a uranium advisory council which has a host of members from the mining and conservation fields, including the Department of Science and the Environment. Does the Minister mean that he would be dubious about grasping the nettle at any time and slapping on an environmental order if he felt, following a report from the Chief Scientist, that the Alligator Rivers system was being overloaded? I am concerned about the line of communication between the Minister, as a middle echelon Minister, and the top brass, such as Mr Anthony.

Senator WEBSTER:

– I thank the honourable senator for his elevation of my position in this regard. It is very creditable. The general proposition that will apply insofar as environmental requirements are concerned is well set out. The environmental evaluations appear to me to be producing some requirements of those who will be involved in uranium mining. The restrictions or requirements that may apply in the future will be strictly applied to those who will be involved in mining. If any matter is brought to my attention by the Supervising Scientist or any other recognised evaluating authority which suggests that there is contamination of the waterways in the area, I will certainly see that that information goes to the proper authority.

page 1027

QUESTION

BASIC TEACHING TECHNIQUES

Senator PETER BAUME:
NEW SOUTH WALES

-Is the Minister for Education aware of the article that appeared in the Monash Review of December 1978 indicating that many new teachers do not acquire information about or mastery of basic teaching techniques during their first year of duty? If this finding is correct, or likely to be correct, what response is being made by the Government to ensure a more adequate professional performance by new teachers during the most vulnerable and uncertain period of their professional life?

Senator CARRICK:
LP

-I have seen the article. It is a description of a research project which was commissioned by the Education Research and Development Committee in 1976. The project arose out of the Committee’s concern for the problems of the beginning teacher and the lack of information about them. The research team, which was headed by Professor Tisher of Monash University, concluded its program late last year and presented a substantial report on its findings, which is being published in two volumes by the Education Research and Development Committee. The report is a significant contribution to identifying the problems of the beginning teacher and will provide a sound basis from which to develop future programs. The ERDC has made the report available to the National Inquiry into Teacher Education- the Auchmuty Committee. The terms of reference of the inquiry range over all aspects of teacher education and the Committee has been charged with making recommendations on any changes that might assist in achieving improved teaching and learning in Australian schools and pre-schools. Of particular relevance to Senator Baume ‘s question are the terms of reference dealing with the range and balance of skills required by teachers. The report is expected in early 1980.

page 1027

QUESTION

MOTOR VEHICLES: PETROL CONSUMPTION

Senator MASON:

– My question is directed to the Minister representing the Minister for Trade and Resources because I believe that it relates to a resources issue. Is the Minister aware of a report in yesterday’s Canberra Times that a test of the Holden Commodore SLE car revealed that petrol consumption of this car in new condition is 14 miles to the gallon around town and 17 miles to the gallon on the open road? In view of the Government’s widely expressed concern for conservation of motor spirit resources, will it take action to discourage the Australian motor industry from construction and promotion of such personal vehicles that are not capable of an average mileage of, say, 20 miles to the gallon? When will the Government discuss with State governments the application of penal road tax rates to such vehicles?

Senator DURACK:
LP

-I believe that that question really should be referred to the Minister for Industry and Commerce because his general area of responsibility covers the production of cars to meet more economical standards than appear to be the case in the test of the Holden Commodore referred to by Senator Mason. I will refer the matter to the Minister for Industry and Commerce. As far as the other question is concerned, I believe that that would be a matter for

Transport Ministers, Federal and State, but for good measure I will refer the question to the Minister for Transport.

page 1028

QUESTION

SOCIETY FOR THE PROTECTION OF THE PRIVACY OF THE INDIVIDUAL

Senator LEWIS:
VICTORIA

– My question is directed to the Attorney-General. Representations have been made to me opposing the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation Bill by a Ms Lindsay Crundall on behalf of a Melbourne group called the Society for the Protection of the Privacy of the Individual, and today I received some sort of newsletter from that group. Can the Attorney-General tell me whether this is a front organisation of a cult called the Church of Scientology? Is Ms Crundall in fact a member of the staff of this so-called church? Has this cult recently been involved in an organised campaign in the United States to harass law enforcement agencies?

Senator DURACK:
LP

-I have very little information in relation to the Society for the Protection of the Privacy of the Individual, but I also have received a newsletter, as it is called, from that society stating that the society is sponsored by the Church of Scientology. I understand that Ms Crundall is the secretary of the Society for the Protection of the Privacy of the Individual but I have no information about her relationship with the Church of Scientology other than the claim that the society is sponsored by that body. I have some information that the Church of Scientology has been involved in the United States of America in campaigns to criticise United States law enforcement agencies and their activities.

page 1028

QUESTION

PUBLIC SERVICE BOARD: INDUSTRIAL DISPUTES

Senator BISHOP:
SOUTH AUSTRALIA

– My question is directed to the Minister representing the Minister for Industrial Relations and refers to the now solved dispute concerning air traffic controllers. I ask the Minister whether his attention has been drawn to the very strong criticism by Public Service Arbitrator Watson of the actions of the Public Service Board in taking the dispute out of the hands of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission and otherwise frustrating what he considered to be a very reasonable claim. In view of the fact that the controllers and the public have been much embarrassed by the continuing frustrations, and in view of the fact that generally people consider that disputes are caused by employees, will the Minister ask his colleague to review the developments in this case with a view to ensuring that in future the Public Service Board more logically determines its attitude to important disputes?

Senator DURACK:
LP

-The Minister for Employment and Youth Affairs, Mr Viner, in fact is responsible for the Public Service Board. I am unaware of the criticism by Mr Watson referred to by Senator Bishop. However, I will draw Mr Viner’s attention to the question, and endeavour to have him consider the criticism and respond to it at an early date.

page 1028

QUESTION

RIVER MURRAY

Senator JESSOP:
SOUTH AUSTRALIA

-Has the Minister for Science and the Environment seen a report attributed to Professor Noel Hynes, who is Professor of Biology at Waterloo University, Ontario, in which he suggests that the River Murray could become a muddy canal with carp and little else and is in danger of losing traditional fish species? Has the Minister also noted that Professor Hynes, who is a world authority on fresh water biology, has also suggested that the River Murray, once a rich and major fishery, has declined and that we do not really know why? Is the Minister aware of the Professor’s allegation that nothing is being done about researching the river system’s present state and what will happen to it in the future and that he expressed astonishment that little or no money is being spent on fresh water research in Australia? What current studies, if any, are being carried out into the effects that European carp, willows and water hyacinth are having on the River Murray system?

Senator WEBSTER:
NCP/NP

– My attention was drawn to an article, I believe, by Barry Hailstone. I noted the comments of Professor Noel Hynes relating to the River Murray. Obviously, some aspects of that criticism do not come within my portfolio because the River Murray Commission has some responsibility for the matter. The various States through which the river flows certainly have an interest in the matter through the activities which they undertake. It is incorrect to say that little is being done on water research in the Murray River. For instance, within my portfolio research is being done by several divisions of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation which is relevant to pollution of inland water ways and the alleviation of the problem. The pollutants include salt, excess nutrients and industrial waste. The research is not concerned solely with the Murray River system and a number of principles and practices arising from it should be of value to those people responsible for the management of river systems.

Senator Jessop and Professor Hynes referred to the carp problem and the muddying of the river. This matter has been raised in the Senate on several occasions. It may be of interest for the Senate to understand the growth of the carp problem. I noted from a CSIRO publication that carp catches in New South Wales waters increased astonishingly from 1963-64 to 1976-77. In 1963-64, 3,465 kilograms of carp were caught.

Senator Wriedt:

– How many? I did not catch the figure.

Senator WEBSTER:

-The figure was 3,465 kilograms. The figure for 1976-77 will impress Senator Wriedt. In that year 445,403 kilograms of carp were caught. If we relate the size of that catch to other inland waters, we see that the problem is quite astonishing. I might be able to add more to the honourable senator’s question -

Senator Georges:

- Mr President, I am rising to order.

Senator Missen:

– Here comes the carping critic.

Senator Georges:

– Yes, I am a carping critic, and you make me one. I raise a point of order. That answer is obviously known to have been prepared. Surely the Minister, out of his own mind, could not give the information he is giving without prior knowledge of the question.

Senator WEBSTER:

– I am not out of my mind as much as you are.

Senator Georges:

– When I look at you from time to time with your half glasses on, I am reminded of Jerry Lewis.

Senator WEBSTER:

– I do not think you would know.

Senator Georges:

– Sometimes you perform at the same level. Mr President, that last answer is typical of the answers of which I have been complaining. Question Time is now nearing an end, and the Minister is taking up a considerable part of Question Time with planned answers to planned questions. It is fairly obvious, or it should be obvious, that he could not give so much information without having a prepared answer. He could not have brought so much detail to the attention of the Senate without previously being advised of the question and having an answer prepared by his staff.

The PRESIDENT:

– I cannot sustain the point of order, but I must again emphasise the need for brief questions and to-the-point answers at all times. I call Senator Sibraa.

page 1029

QUESTION

AGRICULTURAL USE OF AVIATION GASOLINE

Senator SIBRAA:

– My question is directed to the Leader of the Government in the Senate, or alternatively to the Minister representing the Minister for National Development. Is it a fact that the Government has already made arrangements to print the literature and tickets necessary to introduce the rationing of aviation gasoline for agricultural use, particularly for crop dusting and other related activities?

Senator CARRICK:
LP

– I have no information at all on that matter.

page 1029

QUESTION

EUCALYPTUS TREES

Senator MISSEN:

– My question is addressed to the Minister for Science and the Environment. No doubt his attention has been drawn to an article which appeared in the Age on 13 March 1979 relating to the disturbing reports by Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation entomologist, Dr Phil Carne, that much of Australia’s pastoral country could become a gum tree graveyard. Is the Minister aware of reports of trees in open pasture in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia dying off after defoliation? Is the Minister aware that insects which once lived in harmony with eucalyptus in their natural state are now killing them? What action does the Minister propose to take to ensure that major changes in the environment are not made without first considering the effect they will have on local species of plants and animals, so that our nation’s natural beauty may be preserved?

Senator WEBSTER:
NCP/NP

-As I rise to answer this question may I just comment, if you will permit me to do so, Mr President, that there are honourable senators who are particularly interested in science and the environment. I cannot be expected to answer questions such as that asked by the very intelligent Senator Missen without giving some detail. We do not get questions of the same intelligence from the other side. Senator Georges, who rises regularly to complain about the length of answers has not asked one question on an environmental matter in three years.

Senator Wriedt:

- Mr President, I raise a point of order.

The PRESIDENT:

– No point of order is required. The Minister will reply to the question as put.

Senator WEBSTER:

– To answer an important question such as this, relating to die-back in gum trees and the effect on the environment, requires a sizable answer. It would not be sufficient for me just to say yes or no. I think you acknowledge that, Mr President, because you have a deep understanding of the situation in which I am placed. There is an important answer to this, and it is one of which the whole community should take note. It relates to the clearing of forests. If Senator Missen will agree with your permission, Mr President, I will bring forward a full reply on another day.

page 1030

QUESTION

FUEL SHORTAGE

Senator ELSTOB:
SOUTH AUSTRALIA

– I direct my question to the Minister representing the Minister for National Development. As there is a shortage of fuel in many countries which must affect Australia in the near future, what steps have been taken to ensure that it will be possible to keep our essential industries and transport going in the future? When will this Government evolve a comprehensive energy policy for Australia?

Senator DURACK:
LP

-The Minister for National Development already has indicated on several occasions the situation in regard to policy on fuel conservation. I will refer the question to him for a more detailed answer for Senator Elstob.

page 1030

QUESTION

ASSISTANCE TO LONE FATHERS

Senator GUILFOYLE:
LP

-Yesterday Senator Grimes asked me a question with respect to assistance to lone fathers. I offered to provide him with information. I now advise that some States provide continuing assistance to lone fathers during the six-months waiting period for the supporting parent’s benefit. There is no cost sharing arrangement similar to that provided in the States Grants (Deserted Wives) Act in respect of lone fathers. Accordingly, States which assist lone fathers meet the full cost of any assistance they provide for this group of people. I am advised that no assistance is provided to lone fathers in Queensland and that the assistance available in Tasmania is usually a one-time emergency payment.

Any Commonwealth subsidy to the States to assist lone fathers in the first six months is the type of issue that would be considered in the Budget context. One of the difficulties, as will be seen from the paper which I will seek to have incorporated in Hansard, is that there are differences between the States with respect to the assistance that they provide. The lack of uniformity is perhaps a factor in deciding how the Commonwealth is able to assist in the first six months. But, as I have said, this is a matter for Budget consideration and it will be considered in that context. Mr President, with the concurrence of the Senate, I seek leave to have incorporated in Hansard a short paper which shows the amounts, and the testing arrangements, that are provided for assistance to lone fathers in the different States.

Leave granted.

The document read as follows-

STATE ASSISTANCE TO LONE FATHERS

Rates and means tests

New South Wales

Maximum Rate: Same as for Class A widows ‘s pension or supporting parent’s benefit. $p.w.

Basic rate………… 53.20

Guardian’s allowance…….. 4.00*

For each child……….. 7.50

Rent allowance………. 5.00

The maximum payable for a father with one child paying rent is $69.70* a week.

Plus $2 if there is child under 6 or invalid child.

Means Test: Nothing payable if ‘liquid’ assets exceed $500. The total amount payable is reduced by income in excess of $4 p. w.

Victoria

Maximum Rate: Same as for Class A widow’s pension or supporting parent’s benefit- see above.

Means Test: Generally nothing payable if ‘liquid’ assets exceed $500 plus $ 100 for each child. The total amount payable is reduced by any income received.

Queensland Lone fathers not assisted.

South Australia

Maximum Rate: Same as for Class A widow’s pension or supporting parent’s benefit- see above. However, a supplementary housing allowance is paid instead of a rent allowance.

Means Test: Payment may be deferred if ‘liquid’ assets exceed $750 (no ‘liquid ‘ assets allowed for wives of prisoners if the husband is serving a sentence of less than 9 months). The maximum rate is reduced by income above $18 per week, where there is one child plus $6 a week for each subsequent child.

Supplementary housing allowance may be paid to the extent that housing costs exceed $4 a week with a maximum supplement of $5 a week. Income of $ 1 a week is allowed without reducing the maximum supplementary allowance. Income in excess of $ 1 a week reduces the allowance on a dollar for dollar basis.

Western Australia

Maximum Rate: Same as for Class A widow’s pension or supporting parent’s benefit- see above. However, a supplementary housing allowance is paid instead of a rent allowance.

Means Test: Any Unearned Income reduces the maximum rate on a dollar for dollar basis except in the case of income from assets. The first $10 of income from assets is disregarded and only the excess reduces the maximum rate ona dollar for dollar basis.

Any earned income in excess of $20 per week plus $6 per week for each child reduces the maximum rate on a dollar for dollar basis.

The value of assets is ignored.

The housing cost allowance of up to $25 per week (of which $20 is subject to discretion) is reduced by income in excess of $ 1 a week plus $6 per week for each child.

Tasmania

Maximum Rate: Unlike other States payments are not made on a continuing basis. Assistance is usually provided by way of a one-time emergency payment or by way of a food order. The value in each case varies according to the circumstances but would not normally exceed the rate of Class A widow’s pension or supporting parent’s benefit plus rent allowance.

Means Test: The total resources of the father are taken into account in exercising a discretion to pay.

page 1031

QUESTION

ABORIGINAL FUNDING

Senator CHANEY:
LP

– During Question Time Senator Keeffe asked me a question about whether further cuts were going to be made during this financial year in various items in the Aboriginal affairs programs. In answer to that question I said that I thought that Senator Keeffe should produce the figures relevant to those matters. For the information of honourable senators, I very quickly cite some figures on the amounts provided for grants-in-aid in Aboriginal affairs under a series of categories for this financial year and the previous financial year. In the field of housing, this financial year the grants-in-aid totalled $16. 872m, as against $13. 738m last financial year. In health, $4.822m was provided this financial year, as against $3. 955m last financial year. In education, $2.950m was provided this financial year, as against $2. 765m last financial year. In employment, $6. 1 96m was provided this financial year, as against $5.6 15m last financial year. In welfare, $2.089m was provided this financial year, as against $ 1.735m last financial year. In recreation, $ 1.088m was provided this financial year, as against $0.785m last financial year. In legal aid, $4. 128m was provided this financial year, as against $3. 890m last financial year.

I refer honourable senators also to the payments to or for the States under those same categories for the same periods, which show rises in all cases but two. In the field of housing, the payments rose from $10.13m last financial year to $ 11.131m this financial year. In health, they rose from $ 12.366m last financial year to $ 12.654m this financial year. In education, the payments totalled $6.398m last financial year and $6.255m this financial year. In employment the payments for last financial year totalled $1.1 67m and this financial year totalled $0.644m. In welfare, the payments rose from $ 1.308m last financial year to $ 1.346m this financial year. I think that in all cases it can be seen that Senator Keeffe ‘s question was rather wide of the mark.

page 1031

QUESTION

JOINT VENTURE FISHING OPERATION

Senator WEBSTER:
NCP/NP

-During Question Time today Senator Sim asked me a question relating to feasibility fishing. He mentioned to me that his question concerned an agreement which involved Kailis brothers in Western Australia. The Minister for Primary Industry has given me the following information regarding the M. G. Kailis squid fishing project: A feasibility fishing project involving M. G. Kailis Fisheries Pty Ltd and Japanese interests was approved in 1978. The proposal involves two Japanese squid jigging vehicles operating in waters adjacent to Western Australia to determine the possibility of developing a squid fisheries. The venture has not proceeded. The Government is awaiting advice on such matters as the names of vessels and a copy of the agreement between the Australian and foreign partners. As the vessels would have foreign crews the project must be considered a joint Australian fishing operation and must comply with the relevant published guidelines.

page 1031

PERSONAL EXPLANATIONS

Senator GEORGES:
Queensland

-I wish to make a personal explanation.

The PRESIDENT:

– Does the honourable senator claim to have been misrepresented?

Senator GEORGES:

– Yes. I do not doubt that I teased the Minister for Science and the Environment, Senator Webster, into making a wild remark about my questioning of him. I seek to put the record straight. Senator Webster claimed that I had not asked a question concerning the environment for the last three years. I am certain that on reflection he knows that to be incorrect.

Senator Button:

– He has not answered one for the last three years.

Senator GEORGES:

-Possibly he has not answered one for the last three years; that might be more correct. But I ought not to go into facetious comment. I just remind him how wrong he can be. I asked a similar question to that asked by Senator Missen about die-back of gum trees. The Minister was good enough to give me an answer privately which concerned thrip infestation- I believe that is the insect concerned- of gum trees. That very answer belies the statement which he made that I have never asked a question on the environment. I asked a question on the very matter that Senator Missen raised.

The Minister will realise if he goes back over the past three years that I have asked many questions on the environment. I have asked questions about the Great Barrier Reef and associated matters. I have also asked questions on environmental matters concerning the Iwasaki project at Yeppoon. I do not doubt that on reflection the Minister will realise that his statement was possibly as wild as my previous accusation that he sometimes looks like Jerry Lewis.

Senator WEBSTER:
Minister for Science and the Environment · Victoria · NCP/NP

- Mr President, may I respond to that? I believe that Senator Georges is correct. He has asked questions previously on those subjects.

Senator McLAREN:
South Australia

-Mr President, I wish to make a personal explanation.

The PRESIDENT:

– Does the honourable senator claim to have been misrepresented?

Senator McLAREN:

-Yes. I claim to be misrepresented in an article in the Bulletin of 3 April, which is still a week away. I refer to the article entitled ‘A question of diligence’. The unknown writer of this article begins with the words:

Collectors of parliamentary trivia and ALP supporters may be interested in the results of a study of the number of questions without notice and speeches made by honourable senators during 1978- a sort of voters’ consumer guide to politicians.

The writer allocated prizes. He gave prizes to the honourable senators who made the most speeches and so. He also gave a prize to the honourable senators who have been ejected from the Senate. I will not name the honourable senator who was given the first prize. However, the writer stated:

Second prize went to Geoff ‘Feathers’ McLaren from South Australia who was ejected once.

I want to place on record the fact that as of this time I have not been ejected from the Senate in the period of nearly eight years I have been a member of it. I would suggest that the person who wrote this article should, as a question of diligence, do his homework more thoroughly.

page 1032

VICTORIAN GOVERNMENT: EXPENDITURE OF FEDERAL FUNDS

Matter of Urgency

The PRESIDENT:

– I inform the Senate that I have received the following letter dated 27 March 1979 from Senator Wriedt:

Dear Mr President,

In accordance with Standing Order 64, 1 give notice that tomorrow, 28 March, I shall move:

That in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The failure of the Victorian Government to exercise proper control in the expenditure of Federal funds.

Yours sincerely, K.S. WRIEDT

Is the motion supported?

More than the number of senators required by the Standing Orders having risen in their places-

Senator WRIEDT:
Leader of the Opposition · Tasmania

– I move:

Almost 18 months ago, the Opposition in the Senate pointed out that the negligence and the corruption involved in the Victorian land dealings contained serious implications for Federal funding of State activities. Since that matter was raised, a number of things have occurred. Sir Gregory Gowans has brought down his report on three of the transactions. Under the threat of being sacked, a federal Treasurer resigned; two Victorian Ministers have resigned; two member’s of the Victorian Liberal Parliamentary Party have been expelled from the Party; two people have been committed to trial in relation to certain offences and a series of mysterious burglaries connected with the participants have occurred.

Even after all that there were fresh disclosures of scandals almost on a weekly basis. The Opposition makes the following charges: Firstly, there has been and is serious maladministration by the Victorian Government resulting in the waste of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money. Secondly, most of the funds involved have been provided by the Federal Government. Thirdly, responsibility for this state of affairs can be sheeted home directly to the Premier of Victoria. Fourthly, in the face of overwhelming evidence of misuse of public money the Federal Government has done nothing. By now the Victorian Government’s record of misuse of taxpayers’ funds is so bad that it has little parallel in modern times in this country.

Throughout the 1970s Ministers in the Government, members of the parliamentary Liberal Party, various developers and some public servants have been involved in a series of transactions which has brought the whole Administration in Victoria into disrepute. The Gowans inquiry dealt with three of those transactions. In each case funds were being spent by government authority on the instructions of the Minister and with the consent of the Cabinet on land which was neither suitable for urban development nor zoned for that purpose. The prices paid for the land were far above what would have been a proper valuation. Almost $4m was thrown away by the Victorian Housing Commission in these three transactions. In his report to the Government Sir Gregory stated that the transactions involved manifestations of greed and ineptitude. It would be very hard to disagree with that finding. If those transactions had been isolated instances there would be little point in going over that ground again, but unfortunately such is not the case. Since the beginning of the decade there has been significant evidence of corruption in land dealings in Victoria, both at State and local government level.

The three transactions investigated by Sir Gregory occurred in 1973 and they were disclosed by the Melbourne Age newspaper in the middle of the following year. Nothing was done till the end of 1977 to investigate the loans of these substantial sums of money. It was only repeated disclosures and scandal after scandal which created such enormous public pressure that eventually the Government was forced into some form of inquiry and picked the three Housing Commission transactions of 1973. In the meantime there have been disclosures of similar types of operations on the Mornington Peninsula and in various parts of the western suburbs of Melbourne. Developers became even more ambitious in their plans, leading to the decision to develop Mount Ridley which would have been catastrophic had it ever been acted upon. By confining the inquiry to three transactions the Government hoped that the issue would go away. Unfortunately for it evidence of similar activities appears almost on a weekly basis.

Recently there has been a flood of evidence showing that these practices are continuing in Victoria. For example, the Housing Commission paid the Bond Corporation 29 per cent more than the Valuer-General’s valuation on land at Ballarat. The Victorian Housing Commission made extra payments to Tamar Holdings Ltd for land at Deer Park even though that company had received a sum in excess of the ValuerGeneral’s figure for the purchase of the land. As it turns out, Mr Vernon Hauser, a Liberal politician of course, was a shareholder in the company receiving funds and had been largely responsible for extracting the extra payment out of the Housing Minister, Mr Hayes. He subsequently misled the Parliament about the nature of his interest. Only recently it was revealed that the Housing Commission has brought flood-prone land at Sale at a price seven times that paid by the previous owner of the land. As the Opposition in Victoria pointed out, there have been 19 Housing Commission land deals since 1973 involving sums of over half a million dollars where Mr Riach was the purchasing officer and Mr Dillon was the real estate officer. Only three of these have been investigated by the Victorian Government.

The point I am making is that the flood of evidence supporting the charge of maladministration by the Victorian Government shows no sign of abating. If we are not dealing with isolated transactions we should be looking at this problem as it concerns the whole of Victorian government. We are dealing with maladministration and misappropriation on such a wide scale that it goes to the very heart of that government. For five years the Victorian Government and the public have been aware of the circumstances but no real attempt has been made to correct them. To date, all that the Victorian Government has done has been to attempt to cover up details. Sir Gregory Gowans brought down his report 12 months ago. It contained a series of recommendations to improve the administration of Victoria. Those recommendations were accepted by the Victorian Government, but 12 months later that same Government has done little to implement any of those recommendations. Clearly it intends to allow this situation to continue. It intends making no real attempt to prevent this misuse of public money.

The situation gets even worse with every month. Because it refused to establish an appropriate body to carry out the activities of the Urban Land Council, the Victorian Government handed those functions over to the Housing Commission. The powers of the Commission to carry out the sort of development that was necessary for the purpose of the Urban Land Council was recently challenged in the Supreme Court of Victoria. Mr Justice Marks found that the Commission was acting outside the scope of the Act in developing a site at Keilor. The Victorian Government had been aware that there were serious doubts about the Commission’s authority to act in such a manner but it allowed this illegal situation to continue. Under these circumstances, the Federal Government should be deeply concerned because it is federal money that is involved. Let there be no mistake about that. This was clearly spelt out in the Gowans report in paragrpah 2.9 which states:

The financial resources of the Commission came in the main from grants in the form of loans made by the Commonwealth Government under successive housing agreements between the Commonwealth and Victorian Governments and, to a lesser extent, from profits generated internally from the Commission’s housing activities.

Senator Missen:

– It is a Labor Government there.

Senator WRIEDT:

-I will be coming to that, so the honourable senator should be patient. That was the end of the quotation from the Gowans report. Since 1973-74 federal government have invested over $537m for purposes of public housing in Victoria. That money has been directed to the Victorian Housing Commission which is an instrumentality charged with the provision of housing for low income earners. It is clear from the continuing disclosures of maladministration that all of that money is in jeopardy. Since 1973-74, over $40m has been provided to the Victorian Government for land development by the Urban Land Council. These funds have also been passed over to the Housing Commission and there is already considerable evidence of similar misuse of these funds.

When we are talking about funds for the Housing Commission, we are talking about funds which are known, as tied grants because the Commonwealth attaches conditions to them. Those conditions are expected, in part, to ensure that the funds are not misspent. If the Victorian Government can get away with misusing these funds in breach of the conditions under which they have been received from the Commonwealth, what is happening to the funds to which no conditions are attached? It is important to note that we are talking about vast sums of money. Since 1973-74, over $12,000m in federal funds has been transferred to the Victorian Government. Currently the Federal Government is paying over $2, 500m a year into the coffers of the Victorian Treasury. It is about time we asked what is happening to the money. Clearly there is evidence of money being skimmed off the top of these funds which are being transferred to the Victorian Government. Even if only 1 per cent of the funds that have been transferred to that State since 1973-74 have been skimmed off the top, this would amount to a figure in excess of $ 120m. When we start talking about sums of money of this nature, it is obvious that there would be a temptation to misuse them and possibly even divert them into the pockets of individuals. If for no other reason than that, the Federal Government is obliged to view this situation with considerable seriousness.

There is no doubt where the blame for the present situation must lie. It can be stated categorically that the responsibility for the current malaise in the Victorian Government rests firmly on the shoulders of its Premier. Basically the whole problem has arisen because Mr Hamer, who is the Premier, has been far too weak in controlling his Ministers, his back bench and various developers and the establishment. In addition to that, he has been directly involved in all of these transactions even if not for reasons of personal gain. His direct involvement comes from several factors. Firstly, as Treasurer, he was until 14 December 1976 directly responsible for approving all purchases of the Housing Commission. Secondly, as Leader of the Government he has presided over Cabinet meetings which have authorised ministers and developers to carry out practices which have been against public interest. Thirdly, he has subsequently been a party to covering up the situation and has done his best to suppress any proper investigation of the circumstances. Fourthly, he has either buckled to or supported a number of ministers and back benchers who have been involved in these shady transactions. Finally, he has failed to establish a proper practice to see that the funds under the control of the Victorian Government are not misspent.

I will take each of these factors in turn. Under section 22 of the Housing Act of Victoria which operated until 14 December 1976, the Treasurer was required to approve all purchases by the Housing Commission. The practice had been for the proposal to be submitted by the Chairman of the Commission to the Treasurer for his approval together with the recommendation of the Minister. It was the stated practice that the Treasurer, that is Mr Hamer, had to be assured before giving his approval that the purchase price did not exceed the valuation of the Valuer-General. In 1 973 in his capacity as Treasurer, Mr Hamer, at the behest of Housing Minister Dickie, approved the purchase of $1 lm worth of land at Melton, Sunbury and Pakenham. That is well known. In giving his approval, the Treasurer authorised the purchase of land at a price which was $4m above the true value of that land. Such a situation should not occur under any responsible administration. However, the situation got worse. Even if the Premier was not aware of what he was doing in 1973, he certainly became aware that something was wrong when the matter became public in mid- 1974. Yet he continued to authorise the purchase of land by the Housing Commission at values far exceeding the true value.

As we now know from the Gowans inquiry, the whole valuation procedure adopted by the Victorian Government was unsound. It was incompetent at best and crooked at worst. Yet the Treasurer continued to turn a blind eye to these practices, continuing to give these approvals for over Vh years. When it became obvious that the Premier would be in political difficulty over these approvals, his response was to amend the Act to remove the need for Treasury approval of purchases. That is a very important point. In other words, when he was put on notice that something was wrong, his only response was to remove the one safeguard that could have pulled the situation back into line. Under these circumstances, he must take full responsibility for the money which was wasted by the Housing Commission. The Premier’s direct involvement also arose from his position as head of the Cabinet. In many cases, it was a Cabinet decision which set in train the funds which led to the misappropriation of funds. The most significant of these was the infamous decision on Monday 16 July 1973 as a result of which the Cabinet authorised the Housing Commission to purchase large areas of land at Pakenham, Sunbury, Melton and Kilmore.

This decision was a break with past practice in that Cabinet was invited to consider specific parcels of land. Armed with this decision, Housing Minister Dickie was able to give a series of directions to the Housing Commission which was to lead to this extraordinary waste of funds which became the subject of the Gowans inquiry. It was in the Cabinet that Premier Hamer demonstrated his greatest weakness. He was unable to stand up to strong ministers like Vance Dickie with the result that these ministers could seem to get their way even if their proposals were highly unsuitable. Apparently from the very beginning, Mr Hamer decided to run what was known as a concensus Cabinet. In other words, it was intended that all ministers would agree to a decision before Cabinet would adopt it. This enabled ministers such as Mr Dickie and others to obstruct the development of proper institutional arrangements to protect federal funds. For example, it was Mr Dickie who was largely responsible for the refusal of the Federal Government to establish a proper authority to carry out the functions of the Urban Land Council. It was the hard line Ministers of the Victorian Cabinet who prevented the Government from adopting proper planning policies and techniques, thus leaving the way open for the type of conduct which has since been exposed. Thus, in the negative sense Mr Hamer was too weak to force through the Cabinet proper proposals for control over public moneys.

His weakness is also demonstrated by being unable to resist the schemes of Mr Dickie to buy up large slabs of land around various parts of Melbourne for purposes which were never made clear. It was weakness in the face of pressure from developers and interest groups which caused him to support schemes like Mt Ridley. It was his weakness in the face of pressure from the back bench which prevented the establishment of a proper planning authority in Geelong. Just how subject the Hamer Cabinet was to outside pressure is demonstrated by a letter sent by the Planning Minister, Mr Hunt, to the T & G Mutual Life Society Ltd early in August 1975. This letter demonstrates just how much pressure outside bodies and the establishment could bring to bear on the Victorian Government. It is such a dramatic example that I will read the letter in full. It is addressed to Mr K. T. Blarney of T & G Mutual Life Society Ltd, and reads as follows:

Dear Mr Blarney,

I refer to your telegram of 23 ult to all members of the Cabinet and to a letter from Mr Perrott of 29 ult.

As a result of a telegram the issues raised were listed for Cabinet discussion, although I feel that I should mention that the listing was not made by me or at my instigation.

Following discussions and in the light of reports received of announced Government policy, Cabinet determined:

  1. That all departments and instrumentalities be instructed to give maximum co-operation to enable the Mill Park project to proceed and delays to be minimised and that the Country Roads Board, in particular, be requested forthwith to.finalise relevant road alignments; and
  2. That the Mt Ridley proposal be regretfully rejected at this stage.

If there is anything which I can personally do to expedite action on Mill Park, please let me know. Mr N. Haynes has also asked me to state that he will assist in every way possible and where, if requested, convene a meeting of senior officers of all departments and instrumentalities involved in or affected by, the project.

Yours Sincerely (Signed by the Minister for Planning)

That letter is a striking demonstration of the power of this institution to wheel over the Victorian Cabinet.

The three salient features are these: Firstly, the organisation sent telegrams to every Cabinet member; secondly, the organisation had matters listed for Cabinet discussion even though this was not done at the instigation of the responsible Minister; and thirdly, the organisation arranged a Cabinet decision which obliged all arms of the Victorian Public Service to give it every support in carrying out its major development at Mill Park. Even the Mt Ridley scheme, which was rejected at that stage by the Victorian Government, was subsequently accepted. Again, it was only public pressure brought on the Victorian Government which caused the Mt Ridley scheme to be dropped eventually.

It just shows the power of certain sections of the establishment in Victoria to put pressure on the Victorian Premier. I wonder if there is any significance in the fact that one of the SanfordBeggs family was a member of the board of T & G. Thus, as leader of the Cabinet, Mr Hamer has presided over all the decisions which have led to the problems in the Victorian Government. Having been made aware of what was going on, he went to great lengths to cover it up. His reaction when the first articles on Melton and Sunbury were published by the Age was to say that the State Government ‘had done its darndest’ to buy cheap Housing Commission land. That was an unbelievable statement for a Premier to make in view of the enormous overpayments made in respect of that particular land. The very best which could be said about the Premier under those circumstances is that he acted incompetently.

From then on, he decided that all information concerning these land deals had to be suppressed. He resisted calls for inquiries, he refused to disclose files, he continued to mislead the public by implying that the position was under control. It was only after extreme pressure that he finally capitulated and established the Gowans inquiry. Even then he confined the reference of the committee to three transactions even though substantial evidence dealing with many was available. Consistent with his attempt to cover up the circumstances, Mr Hamer was party to the sacking of Messrs Jennings and Francis when they insisted that the Government take action to prevent continued misuse of funds. No wonder Mr Jennings’ comment was: ‘People will think we are just a bunch of crooks’. Surprisingly, the Premier has continued to support ministers such as Mr Dickie, who opposed all of his suggestions in Cabinet, even after there are substantial grounds for dropping such a Minister.

The same has happened with the current Housing Minister, Mr Hayes. I have already referred to the extra payment which Tamar Holdings Limited got for the sale of land at Deer Park. This is interesting information. That company received as a purchase price for that land a sum in excess of the Valuer-General’s valuation. Through one of its shareholders, Liberal MLC, Vernon Hauser, the company approached the Premier to make an additional payment of over $25,000. This the Premier bluntly refused. In a letter to the Housing Commission Chairman, Mr Hamer said: ‘I am unable to see any reason why a further payment should be made’. That statement by Mr Hamer was made on 13 December 1976. It was on the following day that the requirement of the Treasurer to approve payments by the Housing Commission, to which I have already referred, was removed from the Housing Act. As a result, the company approached Housing Minister Hayes for the extra money. Hayes over-ruled Mr Hamer’s decision and paid over $25,000 to that company. Yet, even under these circumstances, Mr Hamer continues to support these Ministers in their activities. Why is that the case? One can only conclude that Mr Hamer’s position has been so weakened that these Ministers can stand over him, get what they want and even over-rule his decisions if they so choose. No wonder the administration of Victoria is in such a mess.

Another failing on the part of the Victorian Premier has been his failure to introduce proper procedures governing the expenditure of federal moneys. When a federal Labor Government wanted to insert safeguards in the arrangements dealing with the funds for the Urban Land Council, the various growth centres and for the Housing Commission, these requests were treated with disdain by the Victorian Premier who insisted that the State maintain control over its own affairs. For years he has been aware that the valuation practices of the valuers employed by the Victorian Government have been unsatisfactory to say the least. Yet, even repeated disclosures of scandal after scandal involving false values do not move him to change the practices relating to them. Even the recommendations of the Gowans Report have been largely ignored. Under those circumstances, what confidence can anyone, let alone the Federal Government, have in the conduct of Mr Hamer’s government? Even without his direct involvement in these issues, the mal-administration of the Victorian Government has been on such a wide scale that Mr Hamer in fairness should have resigned. His direct involvement in these issues makes it even more imperative that either he resigns or his electors throw him out.

Armed with this knowledge of consistent misuse of public money by the Victorian Government, what has the Federal Government done? When this matter was last debated in the Senate, spokesmen on the Government side suggested that the Gowans Report would clear the issue up and the matter would then be resolved. How do they now feel, armed with the knowledge that hardly any of the recommendations of the Gowans Committee have been implemented and that evidence of misuse of funds continues to surface? Quite clearly, we cannot expect anything to come out of changes to procedures as a result of the Gowans inquiry. By now it is clear that the Government of Victoria intends to continue the practice of misapplying federal money. In 1 973 the federal Labor administration tried to tighten up conditions which applied to transfer of funds to the States for housing purposes. It tried to put reasonable restraints on the operations of the Housing Commissions in relation to the purposes for which the federal funds could be put. As a result, there was a loud scream from a number of states, including Victoria, that their autonomy was being interfered with.

The current Federal Government’s attitude has been to water down conditions under the Housing Assistance Act allegedly to give the States greater freedom. In view of what the Victorian Government did when the conditions were more stringent, one can look forward with considerable trepidation to what that Government will now do with housing commission moneys. Under the new federalism policy, this Government insists on trying to transfer responsibilities to State governments- at least it says it does. It seeks to liberalise the conditions attached to large sums of money. It wants to reduce specific purpose grants to allow the States much greater freedom. I have been waiting for four months to get a reply from each Minister of the Federal Government as to what powers have been transferred by this Government to the State governments since this Government took office in December 1975. To date I have received one rely. The answer was none. The effect of these changes is that large transfer payments to the States are becoming increasingly uncontrolled by the Federal Government. As a result, federal authorities will have no say in the use to which those funds are being put and will not be able to tell whether the funds are being misapplied by any State government.

The Victorian Government has well and truly established that the mere provision of an auditor’s certificate is no protection against a government that is determined to misuse the money. Under those circumstances, how can members of the Government continue to rail against government inefficiency at the federal level? By allowing the Victorian Government unvetted discretion as to how it uses substantial amounts of taxpayers money, it is in fact promoting and encouraging inefficiency in that State. By not seeking a proper accounting of what the Victorian Government is doing with its money, the Federal Government is promoting and condoning inefficiency, ineptitude and corruption on a grand scale. As this is at the expense of the taxpayer, it is about time the Federal Government took some action. It is also about time it exercised some control over the vast sums of money it transfers to State governments.

Unfortunately, we of the Opposition hold out little hope that this Government will do anything about the inefficiency in Victoria. What can one expect when a former Treasurer who was actively involved in these transactions played a large part in the expulsion of the two members of the Liberal Party in Victoria who were trying to expose the corruption in the Victorian Government? The failure of the Federal Government to do anything about the situation means that taxpayers money will continue to be wasted in vast quantities under the Victorian Liberal Government.

Senator CARRICK:
New South WalesMinister for Education · LP

– Put in its true perspective, this whimper of a so-called urgency motion is just a cheap, ersatz propaganda speech that was written by Australian Labor Party propagandists for the Leader of the Opposition (Senator Wriedt), who mouthed every word of it avidly. If there had been any sincerity in responding to the report of the Gowans inquiry, all this ersatz indignation would have been raised on 1 5 March of last year, which was the day after it was tabled. But that was not so. I say with some sadness that today Senator Wriedt has gravely diminished his own stature and reputation by the use of the cheapest innuendo, smear and, indeed, slander under the protection of parliamentary privilege.

Senator McLaren:

– He was stating facts. What are you talking about?

Senator CARRICK:

– Speaking of stating facts, let Senator McLaren go outside and repeat what Senator Wriedt has said today. I simply say to Senator Wriedt and Senator McLaren- the noisy one- that they should go outside and say these things. We will then see their strength and courage. We will then find out the real situation. What the Opposition has done today has been simply to bring down a cheap propaganda stunt some five weeks before the Victorian State election. The people of Australia need to be reminded that the years in which these so-called scandals are alleged to have taken place- 1973 and 1974- were the tragic years of the Whitlam Labor Government. Assuming there was a need for an oversight by a federal government- and that has not been made clear- why did Senator Wriedt, as a senior Minister in the Whitlam Government of those days, not see these things with great clarity? Why did he not rise in indignation and appoint auditors to examine the affairs of the Victorian Government. If he is so sincere in his statements, why does he not find the mote in the eye of the Tasmanian Labor Government or the South Australian Labor Government? He does not do that at all. For the purpose of this exercise it has to be the Victorian Liberal Government. There has been muckraking by a person of whom I thought better and it has occurred one year and a week after the tabling of the report of the Gowans inquiry.

Senator McLaren:

– Jennings and Francis are the ones who exposed you, not Senator Wriedt, and you kicked them out of your own party in Victoria because they exposed you.

Senator CARRICK:

-It is an old trick that Senator McLaren is now playing. He is trying by noise and emotion to shout down the hard facts. He will not do it. Let him go outside into King’s Hall- I will go with him- and say out there the things which he is trying to scream with emotion for the benefit of the electors. The facts of this matter are simple. If the members of the Labor Party do not want to hide behind a coward’s castle and if they have the facts, they should do the honest, decent, fair-dinkum Australian thing- not the dingo thing of hiding in the coward ‘s castle here- and walk outside and state their facts. Of course they will not. They are using the device of raising an urgency motion simply to try to benefit a discredited, miserable and ineffectual Labor Party in Victoria- a party which, by its own inertia, has been rejected previously by the people of Victoria and will be rejected in the future.

Let us be perfectly clear about that. Because of the ineptitude of that Labor Party, whose leader is not known by the people- it is a leaderless party that is devoid of policy, as is its counterpart here- it finds that its campaigning must be attempted to be done from the protection of the floor of the Senate and not from the soap-boxes in the streets of Victoria. If Senator Wriedt seeks today to influence the people of Victoria by this device he ought at least to have the decency to go in public on a soap-box in Melbourne and say so. I ask the people of Victoria to make a judgment on this matter today. Unless Senator Wriedt is willing to say in public in Victoria everything he has said today, the people of Australia should reject what he has said and diminish him vastly in public stature. His speech was one of the meanest and most craven efforts that I have ever heard. The Labor Party, devoid of everything else, must have heard of the famous English writer of some 200 years ago who said: ‘Lie lustily; some filth will stick’. I will repeat that. Two hundred years ago the Labor Party’s motto was written for it.

Senator Wriedt:

– I raise a point of order. I think the implication in the quotation of Senator Carrick was that I was lying during the course of my speech. If that was the implication I want it to be withdrawn.

Senator CARRICK:

- Mr President, you listened very carefully to what I said. I did not accuse Senator Wriedt of lying. I shall repeat what I said. I said that the Labor Party has used the distortion of this kind of thing to enable it to go out in public and disguise its lack of policy. I said that it must have looked at the writing of an Englishman who said some 200 years ago: ‘Lie lustily; some filth will stick’.

The PRESIDENT:

– I am sure that that was not intended to be a personal reflection on Senator Wriedt.

Senator CARRICK:

- Mr President, I have reflected on the behaviour of Senator Wriedt today, but not in that fashion. I have said that by his use of sneer, smear and innuendo he has done much to diminish himself and not the Hamer Government.

Senator Button:

– I wish to take a point of order. Mr President, the Minister is canvassing your ruling. A minute ago you said there was no reflection on Senator Wriedt; now the Minister is saying that there was. That is a canvassing of your ruling.

The PRESIDENT:

– I ruled on the point of order that I could see no personal reflection. That must not be discussed further.

Senator CARRICK:

– To show this situation, honourable senators and the people of Australia have heard Senator Wriedt ‘s version of the Gowans report. Let me read what the Premier, Mr Hamer, said when he tabled the Gowans report a year and one week ago. One would have thought that we were dealing with two different countries and two different documents. The report bears out what Mr Hamer said. He stated:

The inquiry found no impropriety, no breach of law or duty, no act of negligence or dishonesty on the part of any Minister nor of any commissioner of the Victorian Housing Commission.

With all that heat and fury it boils down to the fact that here was the Gowans Commission and, looking at the Hamer Government, I repeat:

The inquiry found no impropriety, no breach of law or duty, no act of negligence or dishonesty on the part of any Minister nor of any commissioner of the Victorian Housing Commission.

Mr Hamer continued on to say:

Nobody who knew the people involved would have expected any other result but I rejoice with them that the inquiry has found not the slightest evidence to support the campaign of innuendo and vilification which was directed against them. That campaign of false allegations, insinuations of corruption and character assassination was pursued by the Labor Party, to its eternal discredit. It sought to impugn the honour and the integrity of two Ministers, in particular, as well as the chairman and members of the Housing Commission. The Labor Party now stands condemned in the eyes of all decent and fair-minded Victorians for its miserable lack of principle. It was disgraced by the meanness of its tactics, even before its own supporters.

That was the tabling statement of the report of the Gowans Commission. How different were the charges. It is true that what the Premier said is the fact, that the Gowans Commission–

Senator McLaren:

– The Premier, not the Gowans inquiry. Whose morals are they?

Senator CARRICK:

– There is an interjection by Senator McLaren. If Senator McLaren says it is different, the steps of Parliament are outside so let him go out and say so. This will be tested very simply. Unlike the Federal and State Labor parties when there is a problem within the Liberal and National Country parties we set up inquiries. The Gowans Commission was set up as a court of law. The ordinary rule of law applied. We were willing to take the judgment.

Senator Evans:

– You expelled the truth.

Senator McLaren:

– When they exposed the truth, you sacked them.

The PRESIDENT:

– Order! Honourable senators will have the opportunity to reply when they are called. Senator Evans will be called next. In the meantime, let us hear the Leader of the Government in his address.

Senator CARRICK:

-I am thoroughly willing for the people of Australia to hear the attempts at shouting, yelling and screaming by the Labor Party. That is its only alternative to the straight, plain and truthful arguments that the Government is putting forward. It is the oldest device on earth. Let us put this thing in its true perspective. This so-called scandal occurred in 1973-74, at the time of the Federal Whitlam Labor Government. The Labor Party says the present Government should be diligent, it should be looking around and peering over the shoulders of State governments, seeing what they are doing and rapping their knuckles. But what was the Whitlam Labor Government doing at the time? Why was it not doing this and why has it taken until now for the Labor Party suddenly to see in Opposition what it could never see in government? Of course, this is its whole track record. In the cold light of the Trappist monk benches over there, it occasionally sees a glimpse of truth. In government it trod the primrose path. It did not see this in government at all. It did not see the necessity to look over the shoulders of Liberal or

Labor State governments, however impertinent that would have been, however impertinent it is to think that one sovereign government has more right to the truth and a more paternalistic right to interfere and to meddle in the government of others.

What kind of a situation is it when a government which is supposed to believe that the ballot box is the judge in these matters holds that it shall decide in our case, and accept the verdict, but not accept the ballot box in Victoria. It is certain that the urgency matter refers to the failure of the Victorian Government to exercise proper control over expenditure of Federal funds. Thank God the Victorian electors year after year and election by election have re-elected a State Liberal government and have totally and abjectly rejected the State Labor Party. That is the judgment. That is the true test of who is right and who is wrong. The real auditors were the people at the ballot box. Year after year Victorians at the ballot box have said that they want the Liberal Party as the good managers, as the people who know how to manage; they reject the members of the Labor Party as the miserable failures they were and are.

One would have thought that there would have come along a series of things to show that here was a mismanagement but the Opposition could not go to the general conduct of the Liberal Government in Victoria because on any test one applies it is superlatively ahead of the State Labor governments in Tasmania and South Australia. For three years the track record of the Hamer Government has shown a reduction of taxes, good housekeeping and balanced Budgets. What has been happening in Tasmania and South Australia? They have been scrounging around, putting up taxes and mismanaging. Of course, this has to be restated as it is. The whole of Senator Wriedt ‘s speech was written word for word as a prepared propaganda document. It was written and broadcast today in a hopeless attempt to influence some people in Victoria in an election in five weeks. It was put against the background that people would forget, but if Labor supporters really had this fire in their bellies they would have acted one year ago when the Gowans report came out. It was said hoping that someone would not remind them that during the years 1973-74 a Federal Labor Government was in power and apparently was not solicitous then in its auditing of others. All these things now sound in a little better perspective. There was the inference and the innuendo. What a nasty, miserable smear on Stanford Beggs. Let anybody come out side and say what that smear means.

Senator McLaren:

– Let us have the truth about that. There was $100,000 of taxpayers’ money involved. It went to their Liberal friends.

Senator CARRICK:

-I am delighted with that interjection because, of course, it comes from a senator from South Australia where, I take it, they do not give loans of $50,000 a pop to people for disasters. That is so, is it, in terms of a Labor government? In fact the South Australian Government- a Labor Government- during 1977-78 made 20 loans over $40,000 including eight loans over $50,000 and one loan of $80,000.

Senator Archer:

-That could not be right.

Senator CARRICK:

– It cannot be right because, of course, by inference it is naughty to give a loan of $50,000, and so the dollies fall in Murray Bridge. It is wrong in Victoria for an independent commission made up of men of perfect integrity to make these loans but it is right in South Australia to make even bigger loans.

Senator McLaren:

– How many of the people who got loans also got compensation? Be fair. How many got $ 1 80,000 in compensation.

Senator CARRICK:

-We can hear from the kind of nonsense that is being screamed out today. We had better put this matter in perspective. It is an old-fashioned situation that one government respects the sovereigny of another government. It is to be that the Victorian Government is to look over the shoulders of the Federal Government and say to it: ‘You are mismanaging here. ‘

Senator Walsh:

– Why are you threatening New South Wales? Why are you trying to dictate policy to New South Wales?

Senator CARRICK:

– Lest Senator Walsh’s hypertension become too high even for him, he is referring to the granting of a 37%-hour week in New South Wales, which I described as a maverick act that would damage people in all of the other five States. I take it that Senator Walsh supports that kind of situation. That fact is that the Victorian Government has decades of reendorsement by the people of Victoria, but, of course, the Labor Party is above the electorate and that is why the electorate has rejected it in the past and will reject it again in the future. The Labor Party will not take the verdict of the ballot box. It has refused to do so here in recent times. It has said how, in the paternalism of Whitlam: We are going to meddle with these other governments. We are going to pry and we are going to use the protection of this Senate ‘. In my time in the Senate I have never seen a worse, a meaner, a more miserable or more snide attempt to abuse the forms of the Senate for party political purposes. Indeed, I have never heard arguments more incorrectly put, more inaccurately put. I have never heard the Senate Labor Leader to more disadvantage to himself. I have never seen him so demean himself and his party by the kinds of innuendos, totally unsupported, that he has made today, and all in an attempt to capture some quick headlines, all in an attempt to bolster a leaderless, miserable mob down there who cannot by themselves mount an argument. The Federal Labor Party is the surrogate parent of the Victorian Labor Party. It would have done the Labor Party credit if it had put this matter of urgency in the waste paper bin and not brought it in here today. I repeat that the people of Australia should judge it for what it is- a cheap propaganda stunt. If it is not to be judged as that, then let us test it on the soap box outside.

Senator EVANS:
Victoria

-All the fulminations of the Minister for Education (Senator Carrick), all the synthetic, sanctimonious passion that he brings to bear on occasions such as this, cannot disguise the fact that the misuse of Federal funds by the Victorian Government has been a long-running scandalous sore in Australian politics for the last four or five years. Of course it is a proper matter for the Opposition to raise in this Parliament, and to raise as a matter of urgency. Although it may not be a matter of concern to the Federal Government, although it may not be a matter of concern to Senator Carrick, the scandalous misuse of Federal funds by the Victorian Government is a matter of deep and acute concern not only to the people of Victoria but also to this Federal Parliament and to the taxpayers of Australia whom we represent. It is the taxpayers money that has been squandered in this way by this misuse, by this misbehaviour of the Victorian Government. Senator Carrick has said that the allegations that have been made today have been around for a long time. So they have been around for a long time, and more shame to those in whose power it is to make the allegations no longer applicable.

Senator Carrick also said that the allegations made today by Senator Wriedt were made under cover of privilege in the coward ‘s castle of Parliament. What a measure of his ignorance! What a measure of his incompetence to address the Parliament on these topics that he fails to appreciate the truth of this matter. The substance of every allegation Senator Wriedt made has been a matter of public newspaper record, most particularly and most obviously in the Age and in the National Times. Those newspapers deserve credit for an exercise in responsible journalism in producing this information for the benefit of the Australian public, information of which today we remind the Australian public and the Government. Senator Carrick said that the allegations are of long standing. Some of them, indeed, are of much more recent standing. Let me remind him of some of the allegations that were made in this Parliament on the subject of the Victorian misuse of Federal funds as recently as three weeks ago. On 7 March the issue was raised in the context of the Victorian misuse of Federal funds provided for rural finance. It was raised, of course, in the context- if Senator Carrick has already forgotten it-of the $100,000 loans given to the Beggs-Fraser family through the auspices of the Victorian Rural Finance Commission. Those allegations have been met from Victoria and from the Federal Government ever since that time- three weeks ago- with an absolutely deafening silence. A deafening silence is the Opposition’s reward for its responsibility in raising these issues of acute public concern. It is a silence that will not go unnoticed and should not go unnoticed by the Australian public.

Not the least of the allegations was one that I made. I remind Senator Carrick that it was made not only in this Parliament but also immediately afterwards on ABC radio in response to a challenge from one of his brave and intelligent members suggesting that we were unwilling to make these allegations outside the Parliament. To remind Senator Carrick, the allegation was that there was a clear prima facie illegality about the dispensation of the $ 100,000 without the signature of the Victorian Treasurer, as seems clearly to be required under section 38 of the Victorian Rural Finance Act. There was a clear manifest illegality, on the face of the legislation.

Senator Missen:

– You said ‘prima facie’.

Senator EVANS:

– A clear prima facie illegality. Perhaps there is an answer to that allegation, but we have not heard it. We have not heard it from Senator Missen; we have not heard it today from Senator Carrick. Certainly we have not heard it from any of the actors in the Victorian Parliament or the Victorian governmental scene. If there is an answer, let us hear it. Let us be shut up in that way- by truth, by substance, by facts. We will listen to that sort of thing. We will not be shut up by the kind of empty fulminations that we have heard today from Senator Carrick.

Today we have added to the debate on this subject by reminding the Parliament and the Australian people of just how long-running and scandalous a sore this question of misuse of Federal funds has been in the best known context of them all- the use by Victoria of Federal funds for land purchase. It is to that particular subject area that I, like Senator Wriedt, because of its intrinsic importance to the Australian public and taxpayer, want to devote the body of my remarks today. There is a long story behind the adoption by the Commonwealth and Victorian governments of the scheme under which these land purchases were financed. I am referring, of course, to the land purchases in Sunbury, Pakenham, Melton and a score of other places. Put simply, the position is that the Whitlam Labor Government, throughout its term in office, urged the State governments to adopt its policies on the purchase and development of urban land, policies that were designed to stabilise the price of serviced land at the lowest possible level. The Commonwealth, under Tom Uren’s leadership as the relevant Minister, wanted these land programs supervised by statutory authorities called Land Commissions, which would work under strict guidelines. These Land Commissions were established in South Australia and New South Wales. They worked according to their charters- long complex documents which set out in detail the duties and responsibilities of the administering authorities. They produced in those States the serviced land that they were supposed to produce. They produced it without a breath of scandal.

But the Victorian Government would not have a bar of the proposal for an independent statutory body managing land development. It wanted to keep its sticky fingers in the whole process and to keep its friends in private corporations in business, getting their own generous share of the profits. Any concern that the Victorian Government showed for the public in this exercise was minimal. The Commonwealth and Mr Tom Uren, the then Minister for Urban and Regional Development, in their anxiety to spread the benefit of lower priced land to all the States, undoubtedly in retrospect it must be conceded- I acknowledge part of what Senator Carrick said in this respect- acceded too much to the demands of Mr Hamer, Mr Dickie and Mr Hunt. The Commonwealth gave them too much independence and too much freedom to approve schemes which were inherently dubious.

I will readily concede in retrospect that the Commonwealth went wrong in accepting the bona fides of the Victorian Government. The

Commonwealth Government and Tom Uren as the responsible Minister did not believe- no one could have believed at the time- that the Victorian Government would indulge in the sort of murky dealings in respect of those funds that we now know took place. Instead of having an independent statutory body, the Victorian Government insisted on what it described as cooperative federalism. In the event the Commonwealth co-operated all right. It has co-operated to the tune of supplying some $40m, as Senator Wriedt said, since 1973-74 to Victoria for land development purposes. The form that the Victorian Government co-operation took in return was to feed the profits to its friends.

What happened in Victoria in regard to land financing was that the Commonwealth Government provided money on the sort of basis which honourable senators opposite have indicated so often that they applaud. It supplied money with very few strings attached. If the grants had been tied, as they had been in other States, there would have been no problems. But they were not tied in that way. The Victorian Government would not allow the money to be tied in that way. In particular, the Victorian Government refused the Commonwealth Government and the responsible Minister, Tom Uren, although he tried often enough and was insulted often enough for his pains in trying to get the relevant control, the independent power to check the valuations of the properties that Victoria wanted to purchase. That, said Mr Hamer, Mr Dickie, Mr Hunt and all the rest of them, would have been interference with the internal affairs of the Victorian Government which, as everyone knows, was respectable and reliable.

We were told that the Hamer Government made things happen. The Hamer Government was the businessman’s government. We now know the truth. The people the Victorian Government made it happen for were the Dillons, the Leakes and the rest of the sordid cast who were revealed in all their squalid splendour and all their dilapidation in terms of the ethics they brought to bear in this transaction by the clear-cut finding of the Gowans land deals inquiry. The schemes that we have been talking about and which were dealt with in the substance of Senator Wriedt ‘s speech were adopted. Perhaps they would have worked under an honest government. No one was to know that that appellation or description just could not be applied to the Victorian Liberals, that they were to misuse and to waste Commonwealth funds which could have been used and should have been used to lower land prices and to provide better services for the people of Melbourne and the outlying urban areas.

I will bring the matter up to date just one step further. The latest development in this whole affair, which Senator Wriedt mentioned just in passing in his speech, is one of really quite splendid irony. It is this: As a result of a decision of the Victorian Supreme Court on 1 March this yearjust four weeks ago- the whole legal basis on which the State of Victoria has been conducting its land purchase operations with federal money has been shown to be thoroughly unsound and legally shonky. The chickens have come home to roost for the Victorian Government. There remains a gigantic financial and administrative mess now to be cleaned up. Of course, the penalty for this will be paid once again both by the people of Victoria and the taxpayers of Australia who are bearing the primary burden of this misallocation, mis-use and administrative chaos of the federal funds which are the subject matter of this debate today.

I presume that Senator Carrick would not have heard of the case to which I am referring. It is that of Australasian Realty Corporation v. the Housing Commission of Victoria and the Keilor City Council. The case, decided by Mr Justice Marks, concerned 67 acres of land, most of it owned by the Housing Commission of Victoria and the rest owned by the Keilor City Council, which the Housing Commission of Victoria wanted to develop as a community centre with schools, a hotel, parkland and a shopping centre. The Australasian Realty Corporation is owned by another well-known property developer, Mr Alan Bond. The Corporation happened to own quite a substantial parcel of land nearby. It protested against the development permit being granted to the Housing Commission in respect of the Housing Commission’s land claiming that, as a matter of law, the Commission had acted beyond its legal powers in seeking and obtaining permits on behalf of the Victorian body, the Urban Land Council.

The argument which, in short, was upheld by Mr Justice Marks of the Supreme Court of Victoria and the decision of the Court was that the Housing Commission was acting illegally in purchasing and arranging for the servicing of this land with Commonwealth funds because it was not acting for purposes set down in the Victorian Housing Commission Act. Rather, it was acting pursuant to a joint Federal-State scheme being administered by the Urban Land Council. The whole shoddy apparatus that was negotiated and clamoured for by the Victorian Government and established in a way that allowed the Commonwealth nothing like the same control over the use of federal funds for housing and land purchases as it had in respect of the other States that participated in the scheme, has now come tumbling down. This has meant a massive cost burden. It has been an enormously expensive case. That cost burden has been borne once again by the taxpayers of Australia. I understand that the costs are being paid out of the funds supplied to the Victorian Urban Land Council.

More important than the immediate cost burden are the longer term implications of this decision. Mr Hamer is in the unhappy position of having two alternatives. He can wind up what is left of the whole shoddy Urban Land Council apparatus that he insisted upon in 1973-74. In doing so he will finally breach faith with all those Victorians who had some residual confidence that the Victorian Government believed in its protestations about the desirability of supplying cheap serviced urban land and keeping prices down. The suggestions are that this is exactly what the Victorian Government will do. It will wind up the apparatus. However, there is a small snag which the Victorian Government appreciates confronts it in this respect. The snag is that if the Victorian Government winds up the scheme, it will have to pay back immediately the whole of the 30-year federal loans on which this program so far has been funded. Mr Hamer has not yet told us, the Victorian taxpayers or the Victorian voters for that matter, how his Treasury proposes to sustain that burden.

The only other course open to Mr Hamer, given that the half-hearted little piece of remedial legislation that he tried to introduce last year will not, I am advised and believe, solve the problem, is for him to go all the way back to exactly the kind of scheme for urban land development which the Whitlam Labor Government endeavoured with all the will and energy in the world to introduce. It insisted upon such a scheme unsuccessfully in the case of Victoria in 1974. Of course, for Mr Hamer to accept this model which he has rejected with so much noise and antagonism in years gone by would be for him to concede that the Whitlam Government was vindicated in its whole approach to urban land policy. It would be to concede further what has been obvious to every independent observer for the last four years, that is, that the administration of federal funds in this area by the Victorian Government has been until now a thoroughly disreputable shambles.

Senator MISSEN:
Victoria

-I have much pleasure today in refuting the attack and the stupid allegations which have been put before the Parliament and the people that there has been in some way a failure by the Victorian Government to exercise proper control in the expenditure of federal funds. I do that as a member of the Liberal Party of Australia, which has constituted the government in Victoria for a record period, which has provided the people of Victoria with excellent service and which, I believe, will continue to do so with great success in the coming years. I believe that what we have heard today is another example of the practice of the Australian Labor Party to attack and to vilify under privilege of Parliament. In this instance it does so despite any of the findings of the Gowans inquiry. It ignores the fact that none of the allegations were found to be justified and that the attacks on Ministers of the Victorian Government were shown to be completely false. Let us recall again what was said about the Gowans report in the statement made to the Victorian Parliament by Mr Hamer. He said:

The inquiry found no impropriety, no breach of law or duty, no act of negligence or dishonesty on the part of any Minister, nor of any Commissioner of the Victorian Housing Commission.

Nobody who knew the people involved would have expected any other result …

This is what Mr Hamer said, and it is unrefuted. He went on: . . but I rejoice with them that the inquiry has found not the slightest evidence to support the campaign of innuendo and vilification which was directed against them.

That campaign is continued by members of the Australian Labor Party here today. They continue to make the allegations which were made at the inquiry, tested on evidence by a former judge of the Victorian Supreme Court, and found to be wanting. It is not surprising that this should be done, because representatives of the Labor Party, in Victoria have decided to halve their State council. They have decided that at the end of this month they will not dare risk having any longer than one day of this three-headed monster which is the Victorian Labor Party- the socialist Left, the so-called middle that Senator Evans apparently supports, and the Right, where Senator Button is alleged to be. These very curious little groups that make up the Labor Party are not to be allowed to talk publicly about these and other matters. The Labor Party has cut its conference to one half, and surely that is an indication of why honourable senators opposite make their accusations today. Instead of making allegations in public they come to Cowards’ Castle and under the shadow of parliamentary privilege make allegations previously made.

Let me look at one or two of these allegations. I will not spend the whole of my time looking at only part of the money which was spent so wisely over the years by the Victorian Government in the development of services for the people. However, I will deal with some aspects of expenditure on land. Senator Wriedt lead the debate for the Opposition. I think one could say that he has made another Blue Hills out of these allegations. He was followed today by Senator Evans, who proceeded to be ‘Little Sir Echo’, repeating the same allegations. Repeated, for example, were allegations that the Honourable Vernon Hauser, a very respectable member of the Victorian Parliament, had arranged sales and acted in some dishonourable way. That I refute. It has been refuted also in the Victorian Parliament. Of course, the allegation has been made here under the shadow of privilege. Other allegations have been made in relation to Mr Riach and another man who must stand trial for matters which have arisen out of the Gowan ‘s inquiry. Senator Wriedt made the extraordinary- I will not say lying’, because that is unparliamentary- remark that there are 19 transactions with which these gentlemen were concerned and that only three have been investigated. What is meant to be inferred from that snide allegation? Three allegations were investigated, and findings were given. What is he saying about the other transactions. These sorts of remarks, I stress, should not be made by any responsible member in a responsible parliament.

We are told about the Urban Land Council. We must remember that these loans were made during a period of raging inflation induced by the Whitlam Government and its mistaken policies, when some mistakes were made in purchases, and when prices went up very considerably. These mistakes are acknowledged, and they were found to be justified by the Gowans inquiry. The Government of Victoria has taken appropriate action to deal with them. As we know it has created a Land Purchasing and Sales Monitoring Division in the Department of Property and Services. That Division will ensure that purchases in excess of $100,000 are monitored. If there are any doubts about those purchases, they will be referred to Cabinet. The Victorian Government has set out in detail the way in which it proposes to ensure that land sales in future do not meet any of the problems which the Gowans inquiry found.

Senator Wriedt said that the Premier must take responsibility for what has happened in Victoria. The Premier has taken responsibility. The Premier has accepted leadership in Victoria. He has recognised where there are defects, and he has taken action to ensure that they do not recur. That is to his credit. It is very easy to say: ‘We can ignore everything’. Doing what he actually did, in ensuring that there was an inquiry by an eminent judge and then taking notice of the results of that inquiry will earn him credit which I think the electors assume ought to be paid to him. The allegations that have been made today are old allegations. They have been heard and they have been dealt with. The people of Victoria are justified in saying that the Victorian Government has taken steps to ensure that mistakes which have occurred in administration, not mistakes such as those for which Ministers were found by the inquiry to be responsible, will be properly handled in the future. As for the gentlemen opposite who want to rely on the words of Mr Jennings and Mr Francis, two members who have left the Government or who have been -

Senator McLaren:

– They were expelled from the Liberal Party. You expelled them.

Senator MISSEN:

– I put it in a nice way, Mr President. The Liberal Party certainly has expelled them. I voted for the expulsion of Mr Jennings, and I am proud of that fact. I believe it is perfectly proper that somebody disloyal to his whole Government in the way in which these two men were, should be removed from the party. It is a sign of the strength of the Victorian Liberal Party and signs of the strength of the Premier and his Ministers that they did not flinch at making their decisions.

Senator Walsh:

– The Victorian Liberal Party once expelled you, did it not?

Senator MISSEN:

-No. I am able to look after myself quite well, thank you. I will never need Senator Walsh’s help in my career. Honourable senators opposite have alleged a misuse of Federal funds in only one area. Federal funds are employed by all governments, and all governments have their problems. If anything I think the Victorian Government shines because of the way in which it maintained and met its objectives in a period of monetary stringency. Its objectives, as they still are in its present Budget have been to restrain departmental expenditure and insist on a strict economy and efficiency in all government departments and authorities, to reduce taxation and limit increases in government fees and charges as far as possible, and to maintain a maximum works effort and stimulate economic activity in employment in the private sector. If one looks at the Victorian Government Budget and looks at the way moneys have been handled in that State, one realises that it has achieved those objectives. It is true that the Victorian Government is a little more stringent than the Commonwealth Government in increasing expenditure this year. The Commonwealth Government increased its expenditure by 9.3 per cent; Victoria increased its expenditure by only 7.9 per cent, which indicates that, in a period of stringency, it has managed to act in a responsible way by using all the money available to it. It is because the Victorian Government has operated in this way that it can say that its achievement over recent years has been so outstanding among the States of Australia. Partly because of its use of Federal funds it has the highest average earnings of any State in Australia for full time employment. Victoria has the lowest rate of unemployment in Australia. Victoria has the highest savings bank deposits per head in Australia- $ 1 ,775 compared with a national figure of $1,300. Victoria has the highest rate of home ownership in the world. I think it is 79 per cent. That surely is a most significant factor. Victoria has the lowest road toll. Since 1 970 its death rate has dropped from 8. 1 to 4.6 per 10,000 vehicles, which is the lowest rate of any State. Victoria has the best ratio of teachers to pupils of any State. Victoria has 1,065 preschool centres which receive higher subsidies than those in any other State. I could give many other examples, but I point out finally that Victoria has the most comprehensive maternal and infant welfare service in Australia. Hearing those facts has caused silence opposite because those facts outline the real uses that are made of Commonwealth and State funds and indicate the proper administration of them. Those achievements have led to the Victorian Government being able to claim a proud record, which it will continue to be able to claim in the future. Implicit in the motion moved by the Opposition today is its concern to make a statement about how it would deal with federalism if it were in power. The motion claims that the following is a matter of urgency:

The failure of the Victorian Government to exercise proper control in the expenditure of Federal funds.

Implicit in the motion is the suggestion that the Labor senators know better; that they would like to tell the Victorian Government how to do better. In 1973 the Labor Government wanted to do different things in regard to loan funds. It wanted Victoria to do things the Labor Government’s way. On many occasions Victoria has chosen to do things its way. I believe that the people of this country accept that the States should not have to take orders from the Commonwealth Government. Indeed, contrary to the suggestion which is implicit in this motion, the States should not have to accept control by the Commonwealth Government. The Beggs loan issue was raised. That is a matter in which the Victorian Government accounts, as do all States, for loans which are made. Audited statements are prepared and provided to the Commonwealth. But Senator Evans wanted to be able to tell the Victorian Government in advance what it should do, whether it was right or wrong in doing what its officers did, and whether they had obeyed his opinion on whether it should have provided a loan to a person, no matter who that person might be. That is the very way in which members of the Australian Labor Party in this Parliament and in Victoria want to control the people of Australia, particularly the people of Victoria.

I have no doubt that the people of Victoria will not be confused. Many of them will remember when, back in 1973, the honourable member for Reid, Mr Uren, of whom we have heard today, flew over the Dandenongs in Victoria and said: This is what we’ve got to do. We mustn’t have buildings here. We must adopt this plan ‘. He did not even stop at the Dandenongs; he just flew over them and came down with a plan which was to be implemented in Victoria. The Victorian people know that they do not have just to take orders. They know that the money which they as taxpayers have to spend- it is not federal or State money; it is the people’s money, money which the taxpayer pays- is spent well by a government which is pledged to free enterprise and to the development and the security of the Victorian people. They know that such a government is a government which they will re-elect. I thank the Labor Party for drawing attention to the way in which it would control the States if it were in power. The socialist left brethren in Victoria of Labor Party senators are just waiting to get their hands on the Victorian people. I have no doubt that the Victorian people will recognise the foolishness of this motion and the foolishness of the Labor Party’s plans and will defeat those plans in the 5 May election.

Senator MELZER:
Victoria

-I rise in this debate astonished at the rhetoric that has taken the place of reason with some honourable senators on the opposite side of the chamber. Often I have listened to Senator Missen in this chamber and generally I agree with a great deal of what he has to say. I have a great deal of regard for him. But for the last 10 minutes we have listened to an apologia of irrelevant nonsense. As one honourable senator said, while we were talking about land scandals and about wasting the hard-earned money of the ordinary people of this nation, Senator Missen talked about the road toll. From him we heard purple prose about the Victorian Government, but he did not provide any example of the sound management of the Victorian Government which he claims we should support. Speaking of apologias, when talking about the Land Sales Development Commission which the Victorian Government brought into being to oversee government purchases of land, one cannot help but remember that that Commission came into effect only after the Ballarat by-election was held and the State Premier said that it appeared that they would have to look as though they were doing more about the land scandals and as though they cared more about the people of Victoria.

We have listened to allegations that we are just electioneering. It has been said that we would not say some of the things we say here if we were outside the House; that we would not say them in Victoria. I say here and now that whatever allegations I make I will make here, I will make outside in King’s Hall, I will make outside on the front steps and I will make all over Victoria. I would like to see members of the Liberal Party of Australia in Victoria agreeing with me or debating with me all over Victoria the points I raise. Today we have heard from two Opposition speakers appalling details of the misuse of Commonwealth money in Victoriamoney which is supposed to provide land for the housing of people in Victoria but which instead has been cynically directed into the pockets of profiteering land developers. This was condemned even by the Deputy Prime Minister (Mr Anthony). Even he was appalled. He was reported as follows:

The Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Anthony, said yesterday the Hamer Government’s $10.Sm Housing Commission land deals had been highly questionable.

The Victorian Government is running out of steam and when a Government runs out of steam, it gets into trouble’, he said.

It has now reached the stage where the Government is bogged down in some highly questionable land transactions. ‘

Senator Douglas McClelland:
NEW SOUTH WALES · ALP

– Who said that?

Senator MELZER:

-The Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Anthony, said that and who am I to disagree with the Deputy Prime Minister? I hope that the Minister for Education, Senator Carrick, is as appalled by that statement as he was by the statements, the truth of which he questioned, made by Senator Wriedt. But the cynicism, the lack of caring and the irresponsibility do not stop there. As Senator Missen said, it is the Victorian Government’s proud boast that it has the highest rate of home ownership in Victoria. Commonwealth moneys are made available to the States for building nouses for rent for people who cannot afford to buy their own homes. For years the Victorian Government has been taking that money but it is not building houses to rent with the money; it is building houses to sell. The Victorian Housing Commission’s report of last June showed that 12,963 people were waiting to rent homes. Six weeks ago the Victorian Minister for Housing said that 16,000 people were on the list waiting to rent homes. Yet the Housing Commission’s report states that in 1978 it sold 7,000 more homes than it rented to people. Obviously the Victorian Government does not have any care for people who cannot afford to buy homes. In doing that, is the Victorian Government acting in the responsible way in which Senator Missen said that it was acting?

It is interesting that only last week, in the election build-up, the Victorian Minister for Housing said that he had directed the Housing Commission to buy back properties from people who wanted to sell them. In the heat and the exposure of an election campaign, even he is starting to feel doubtful about the role of the Housing Commission and whether it should be selling houses or building houses for people to rent. Private rental companies have been buying Housing Commission houses from families who bought them from the Commission. Those private rental companies are letting those houses at an average rate of $65 a week. When we remember that 16,000 people are on the Housing Commission waiting list for rented housing alone, apart from all the other people in the community who need to rent houses, it is obvious that those private rental companies have a very good market for renting houses. Home buyers who are buying houses from the Housing Commission at a rate of payment of $11.50 a week have tenants alongside who are paying $65 a week to private companies for the same sorts of houses.

In the eastern suburbs of Melbourne there is a Housing Commission estate called the Frankston Pines Estate which has 150 houses which are owned by absentee landlords and investment companies. I presume that that is one of the outstanding achievements of the Victorian Government! Not only is the Housing Commission making money out of land; it is also making money out of houses which were built by the State with Commonwealth money for the benefit of people who could not afford to buy houses. In this outer eastern suburb of Frankston Pines Estate, an accommodation vacancy which is filled from the Housing Commission lists occurs only once a year. In that area there are only 267 rental houses and about 200 pensioner units to serve 460,000 people. That is a nice example of responsible government, of acting in a responsible way and of caring for all the people in the Victorian community.

If honourable senators think that that is tough on the white Australians in Victoria they ought to have a look at the Aboriginal people in Victoria. The State Housing Commission in Victoria is funded to be responsible for Aboriginal housing. Aboriginal people in the East Gippsland area of Victoria need nouses badly. They live in very poor, bad and overcrowded conditions. The Victorian Housing Commission received money from the Federal Government for Aboriginal housing. The Commission used that money to provide carports to all Aboriginal families who lived in Commission houses. It did not matter whether or not the Aboriginal family had a car. It did not matter whether or not the members of the family had a licence to drive. It did not matter whether or not anyone in the house could drive a car. These Aboriginal families were just given a carport. In fact good, standard, well-built garages were pulled down and carports were erected in their places. Rather than build houses for people who were living in sheds and in overcrowded conditions the Commission built carports for people who did not have a car.

Some houses in the same area contained old oil stoves. As a result the interior walls of the houses were stained and needed repainting. But the Commission would not undertake this repair work. In some cases old hot water services had worn out and leaked. The Commission painted the outside of the houses whether this was needed or not. Honourable senators would not be surprised to know that the Commission painted all houses in which Aboriginal people lived the same colour. Therefore if one walked down a street one could pick the houses in which Aboriginal people live. Nowhere in Victoria are Aboriginal people properly housed. Nowhere in Victoria is there sufficient housing for Aboriginal people. And yet we are told that no more houses can be built because, for one thing, the money is needed for maintenance. But nowhere are we told where the rents go for houses occupied by Aboriginal people in Victoria. Nowhere are we told why that money is not spent on maintenance and why the money that should be used to house people is not spent on housing instead of building carports and doing unnecessary maintenance in some areas.

The Victorian Government was funded for the implementation of Aboriginal health programs.

The State Health Department received the funding. The funding was made available. The aides were employed but no program was developed. The money was spent on aides who in some cases are used to ferry people to hospital but who are not used for any real health program in Victoria. This despite the fact that people in the area say that over 90 per cent of Aboriginal children in Victoria have hearing defects, despite the rising diabetic problem among Aboriginal people in Victoria and despite the alcohol problem among people in Victoria. The money is used in offices, in filling out forms, in taking people to hospitals but not on any real program. The situation is the same in the education field. Money has been given to the Victorian Government for Aboriginal education. But there are no Aboriginal teaching aides. It is interesting to read the 1 979-8 1 report of the Tertiary Education Commission. The report states:

Some States more than others have encountered impediments to effective forward planning. The Council is conscious of the efforts being made by the Victorian State Council for Technical Education to ensure that in future TAFE planning receives the necessary impetus. The problems to be dealt with are considerable. It is understood that accommodation of the projected increase of 14,000 enrolments in Victoria in 1979 will require increasing rather than decreasing reliance on a multitude of annexes, transportables and other forms of temporary accommodation. The outer western and northern areas of Melbourne lack a TAFE college, and college sizes, sites and courses for these areas are yet to be determined. Because Victoria’s forward planning has not yet matched its requirements for new and replacement accommodation, Council is recommending rather less for capital grants in 1979 than would be warranted on the basis of need.

If Victoria wishes to obtain the share of the funds being provided by the Comonwealth during the triennium appropriate to its acknowledged degree of need, it will be necessary for it to have developed by March 1979, a firm program for the next few years which incorporates realistic target dates for action to provide new places and overcome deficiencies.

In other words, the Victorian Government is so outstanding in its achievement, it is so responsible in the field of education, it is so responsible for the training of the thousands of young people in Victoria who are now out of work, that it nas not even put in the plan to use up the money that the Federal Government has made available for technical school building funds. The Technical and Further Education Council of the Tertiary Education Commission presented a report last year in which it said that Victoria faced an increasing reliance on temporary class accommodation. It said that Victoria’s forward planning has not yet matched its requirements for new and replacement accommodation. The report, which caused little fuss when tabled, is the first in which individual States have been criticised. It has yet to be accepted by this Government.

This Government evidently does not take on the responsibility. It has not said to the Victorian Government: ‘You have a large number of children in the western suburbs who will not get jobs because you say they are undertrained. You have done nothing about claiming the money which we have made available so that you can build the colleges to train the teachers and so that you can build the technical schools in which the kids can be trained.’ We have a Victorian Government which is so responsible that it has set up yet another child minding scheme in which young teenagers can be given cups of coffee and can talk to people on the telephone. But it has not done anything about the extra training that is necessary for kids to get jobs. It has done nothing about providing the jobs that those children need so that they can take their proper place in the world.

Senator Missen talked about what the Labor Government did or did not do. At least our Government felt responsible for people and trusted governments to do their best for people. The Victorian Government does not take up its responsibilities. It does not seem to care about any scheme from which one cannot make money. The Federal Government, apart from hurling abuse at us here today, has not done anything practical about urging the Victorian State Government to get on with the job that it is supposed to do. I again quote Mr Anthony- and who better than the Deputy Prime Ministerwho said:

The Victorian Government is running out of steam and when a Government runs out of steam, it gets into trouble.

Senator WEBSTER:
Minister for Science and the Environment · Victoria · NCP/NP

– The Federal Australian Labor Party has a great propensity to point the finger. That finger is usually pointed at government and perhaps this is that party’s role. Today the Labor Party has pointed the finger at a State government. Labor senators are totally disinterested in this matter. At the present time I see five Labor senators sitting in their places. I remind the Senate that we are debating a matter of urgency that the Opposition has brought forward. (Quorum formed). I appreciate Senator Coleman’s calling for a quorum because I was saying that there were only five members of the Labor Party present in this place. I am sure that the members of the Labor Party do not mind my saying that. Quorums are called in an attempt to cut down the speeches of honourable senators who may have some harsh things to say about the Opposition. The reason I made that comment was that the most important thing that Labor can discuss today happens to be something relating to Victoria. No other matter takes up as much of the time of this Federal Labor Caucus as that which is happening in Victoria at present. I need only say again that the Labor Party is so interested in this proposition that there are five Labor senators sitting in their places at this time. I think that should be noted by those who are listening at present. I hope that the Opposition will not attempt to cut down my speaking time as it usually does.

Senator Georges:

– When you make derogatory remarks–

Senator WEBSTER:

– I do not know whether Senator Georges is on his feet, but it is a fiasco so far as the Senate is concerned to hear Labor senators saying the things that they are saying about the Victorian State Government. Why single out Victoria? I believe that the debate would be far more informative for people listening if the motion embraced the expenditure priorities of the State Labor governments, which have followed the disastrous example of the Whitlam-Hayden recipe in this Parliament. That is what we should be listening to. I would have thought that it was another futile exercise in selfdestruction for Labor spokesmen in this place to talk about how public money should be spent. If the time is available to me I will speak of some of those things. I see opposite in the front row a former Minister laughing about this important matter of ministerial responsibility and the expenditure of funds. He was one of the Ministers in this place while a socialist government demonstrated how it would look after the public purse, about which Senator Melzer has just been speaking; and I hope to come to that in a few minutes.

Senator Wriedt set the stage for this debate. I took note of his comments. He criticised Victoria because he said that it has been and is the subject of maladministration. He said that most of the funds expended were provided by the Federal Government. He sheeted the criticisms home to the Premier of Victoria and he said that the Federal Government had done nothing. They were the four points that Senator Wriedt put forward. In my recollection there has been little parallel with the bad administration which was demonstrated by a socialist Labor government in this place, as honourable senators opposite well know. Labor’s whole administration and its ability to speak on any matter, particularly matters concerning finance, must be sheeted home to those Federal members of the Labor Party who speak in criticism of others. When that type of criticism is known it can be seen that they are obviously speaking from a very weak point of view. Senator Melzer went on with some appealing point about Victoria ‘s spending the hard-earned money of the people, and she spoke about profiteering land developers. Gosh, my mind went back to the days when Labor was in power and what it did about profiteering land developers.

Senator Georges:

- Mr Acting Deputy President -

Senator WEBSTER:

– I hope the honourable senator will not take up too much of my time.

Senator Georges:

– I have not taken any of your time.

Senator WEBSTER:

– I have some important points to make.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT (Senator Townley)- Order! Does the honourable senator have a point of order?

Senator Georges:

– Sure I have a point of order. I would like to attract your attention to the state of the Senate. The Minister has succeeded in driving 12 of his own members out of the chamber.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT -Order!

Senator Georges:

– I am giving you my reason for calling for a quorum.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT- The honourable senator does not need to give me a reason. He will resume his seat. (Quorum formed).

Senator WEBSTER:

– I was getting to a point made by Senator Melzer; I do not know why Labor senators are not anxious to hear me say it. Senator Melzer was speaking of profiteering land developers. If I had sufficient time I would recall a debate in this place that was brought forward by, I think, former Senator Wright when he described how Labor purchased- what was it- the trades hall council premises in Tasmania, or would it have been the debate that occurred when the relatives of one of the Ministers made so much money out of land development in Victoria? Are we to go back over those matters or are we again hearing so much humbug from the Labor Party?

Criticism can be levelled at State governments about their expenditure. I wonder why Labor does not do so in relation to the New South Wales Government. I remember that before Mr Wran came to power he promised tax relief for New South Wales taxpayers. Instead, today New

South Wales has become the most heavily taxed and charged State in Australia.

Senator Georges:

– What has that got to do with what we are talking about?

Senator WEBSTER:

-Listen to the cackle. What has it got to do with the subject? I see some people on the Labor side looking very glum. They are very unhappy to hear about this. The Wran Government has not yet got around to abolishing death duties. This is surprising. In its first term the Wran Government tried to push through legislation in some form or other which had the socialist thrust of land commission Bills and which would have allowed forced equalisation of owners’ properties by that Government, and not a word have we heard today about that from the other side of the chamber. Honourable senators opposite have come here with allegations against the Victorian Government. Why? They have done so purely because they think that the main thing that is going to occur next month is a Victorian election and they want to direct the attention of this chamber to try to get some cheap publicity for their action in Victoria. I think it does them no credit at all.

Because we have heard honourable senators opposite criticise a State government for maladministration, I wonder whether you, Mr Acting Deputy President, recall something that appeared in the Reader’s Digest. It was an article written by Anthony Paul and was headed ‘The Sobering Story of Australia’s BIG Spending’. Honourable senators may not have hear of this previously but it was an article which was written- I cannot even see the date on it- very shortly after Labor had gone out of office. I shall quote from this article.

Senator Wheeldon:

– Will you table the document?

Senator WEBSTER:

– I have a copy of it and I can table it. I would be very pleased if Senator Wheeldon would read it because I would like to quote it at length. This story shows how false it is for members of the Labor Party to criticise anyone for their financial activities.

Senator Coleman:

– Come on !

Senator WEBSTER:

– I shall quote a tew parts for the honourable senator. The article states that according to World Bank figures Australia was the West’s most egalitarian society. It was- until Labor came to office. It had the smallest gap between the rich and the poor. I ask honourable senators to listen. The article says that when Labor came to office in late 1972 unemployment was just 2.4 per cent and inflation 4.5 per cent, an economic performance matched only by West Germany. Of course, I am speaking of the performance of an anti-socialist government. This was a performance unmatched in the world until the socialist Labor Government came in. The article goes on to say that with 70 per cent of Australia’s oil coming from local wells she could have been relatively insulated from world inflation. Nevertheless, by 1974 Australia’s inflation had soared as high as 28 per cent in a single month. The July 1975 International Monetary Fund survey stated bluntly that the origins of the Australian recession are to be found in domestic developments.

Senator Wheeldon:

– Who wrote that?

Senator WEBSTER:

-Anthony Paul and the honourable senator knows it. He has read it on many occasions. The Labor Party took up a great deal of my time today by calling quorums so I ask all honourable senators to read this article. If anybody writes to me for a copy of it I will certainly sent it to them. Before the Labor Party criticises any government it should be inward looking to see whether its own policies are likely to bring Australia into disrepute. The darts which have been thrown by the federal Labor Party members- they are doing this, not any of their State colleagues- were directed at the Honourable Dick Hamer. Their allegations are totally incorrect and unjustified. Dick Hamer, the Premier of Victoria, is a man without peer in regard to honesty and integrity and I have the greatest confidence in him. The Labor Party would be well favoured if it had a man of the quality of the Premier of Victoria and I suggest that it look very hard not only at its own policies but also at the type of men who lead it throughout Australia. The Labor Party should not criticise.

Senator BUTTON:
Victoria

– I rise very briefly to take part in this debate. I suppose that I am largely provoked to speak by Senator Wheeldon ‘s repeated references to the Reader’s Digest which is undoubtedly -

Senator Wheeldon:

– It was Senator Webster, was it not?

Senator BUTTON:

– I am sorry. I heard Senator Wheeldon refer to it also but perhaps in more derogatory terms.

Senator Wheeldon:

– Yes, but Senator Webster told us it was from the Reader’s Digest.

Senator BUTTON:

-Senator Webster has quoted from the Reader’s Digest article in this Senate on every occasion that I can remember when there has been any urgency motion or matter of public importance raised by the Opposition.

Senator Webster:

– I do that so that you will remember it.

Senator BUTTON:

-I appreciate that. I know that repetition is something which Senator Webster learnt at school and that it is very important in his efforts to learn anything. The point made in the Reader’s Digest article becomes more and more remote from the subject of debates in the Senate. Senator Webster also indulged in a spirited defence of the Hamer Government, describing Mr Hamer as ‘a man without peer’ in respect of integrity and honesty. I was provoked to recall that it was only one month ago on 28 February when the Premier of Victoria, the same Mr Hamer, in a public interview, could not remember that he had signed a very important document the day before in relation to land transactions in Victoria. He could not remember what he had done 24 hours before he was specifically asked about it on the Australian Broadcasting Commission program PM. He could not remember that he had signed a document relating to a mortgage for the Beggs family. That provokes one to consider the circumstances which have given rise to this motion. If a Premier of a State is so incapable of either telling the truth or recalling events which occurred only a day before, a very serious situation arises in respect of the fate of federal moneys which are appropriated by this Parliament to Victoria.

Senator Webster:

- Mr President, I raise a point of order. The honourable senator is criticising the Premier of Victoria for his lack of memory. I hope that the honourable senator recalls that when Gough Whitlam made a declaration of his pecuniary interests he forgot to state that he had a very big flat in New South Wales. Our memories are at risk, are they not?

The PRESIDENT:

– There is no substance in the point of order.

Senator BUTTON:

-I recall the incident to which Senator Webster refers and it seems quite irrelevant to the matter being debated, as is the Reader’s Digest article. That article is not only irrelevant but also wrong in fact. I ask Senator Webster to consider the action which has been brought in the Supreme Court of New South Wales as a result of an allegation such as that which he made in this Parliament a short while age. Senator Webster is wrong in fact as well as in recollections. The point I was coming to was that we must be concerned about the fate of federal moneys which are paid to a State such as Victoria when the Treasurer and Premier of that State has such a poor recollection of events that he cannot remember what happened only a day before. Of course, if one studies Australian newspaper reports, instead of the Reader’s Digest, about the position in Victoria over the last 12 or 15 months, one will find that there is more relevance in them than there is in what Senator Webster has been saying in the last few minutes. For example, an article in the Age of 10 October 1978 stated:

The Housing Commission paid $2.3 m for land which a development company bought only a few days earlier for $ 1 90,000, a Supreme Court judge was told yesterday.

Government senators come in here and say one after the other that there was no finding of dishonesty against any Minister in the Hamer Government. That is true. There was no finding by the Gowans inquiry of dishonesty against any Minister in the Victorian Government. It is an extraordinary situation when electors in Victoria can read a statement that the Housing Commission there paid $2.3m for land bought by a private development company a few days earlier for $190,000 and Senator Webster in the Senate defends that sort of thing by reading selected quotations from the Reader’s Digest, of all publications. What an extraordinary performance.

If we look at the situation 8motion, Senator Wriedt, who moved this urgency motion was talking about and examine what has happened in Victoria over the last 1 8 months or two years we will find that again and again there have been examples of this sort of thing involving public money. The Victorian Government has been there too long and has become too slack in applying proper standards to public administration. This does not arouse criticism from the Australian Labor Party alone. We have been attacked here today because we as an Opposition have raised these issues in precisely the place where they ought to be raised- the Australian Parliament. There have been too many lectures from Government ministers and Government senators about the role of an Opposition in the Senate and the role of an Opposition in the Federal Parliament. They are very patronising lectures about what our function is and what we are supposed to do, but one thing which we are clearly not supposed to do is criticise maladministration where it occurs and misappropriation of Commonwealth funds whether by State governments or anybody else.

It is not only the Opposition here that is guilty, as claimed by people such as Senator Webster, of criticising the Hamer Government for misapplication of funds, gross waste of taxpayers ‘ money and matters of that kind but also prominent members of the Liberal Party in Victoria. They also are very concerned about these matters and have made very similar allegations. For example, Mr Jennings and Mr Francis suggested that in their view Mr Hamer was not a man without peer in regard to his honesty and integrity on these matters. The extraordinary thing about people such as Mr Francis and Mr Jennings who make these sorts of allegations is that ultimately they suffer a fate which no member of the Labor Party in living memory has suffered- they are expelled from their party in Victoria not for voting against their party but for not voting at all. They merely abstained from voting on an issue in the Parliament; they failed to vote. As a result of that they were expelled from the Liberal Party by some sort of hung jury- a Liberal Party State Conference in Victoria. No doubt Senator Lewis, who is smiling, was there. Senator Webster, of course, would not have been there.

Senator Webster:

– I recall Sam Benson being drummed out of the Labor Party.

Senator BUTTON:

-Senator Webster recalls Sam Benson being expelled from the Labor Party. It is true that Sam Benson was expelled from the Labor Party. He was expelled for standing against an endorsed Labor candidate. He was not expelled for merely failing to vote on a motion in which the Victorian Parliament was asked to affirm its confidence in the Victorian Premier and Government. The two members who just failed to vote were expelled for their lack of confidence. What an extraordinary party it is in Victoria that this sort of thing can happen. Of course, the criticism which we make here has been made much more explicitly by those two members. Look at the fate they suffered. No wonder there is concern by people such as Senator Webster to tell us what we ought to be doing. For example, if any of us failed to vote on an issue, should we be expelled? Presumably Senator Webster would wish to have us expelled from the Senate for the heinous crime of not being here when he is speaking.

As I have said, the whole saga goes back two years, beginning with the purchase by the government for the Liberal Party of Victoria of a building for the Liberal Party’s headquartersthe so-called Vapold transaction. That was one of the earlier transactions. It continued with the so-called land deals in Sunbury, and the land deals in the Berwick development area. Even as recently as a month or two ago we had further revelations of the same sort of activity, as if they had learned nothing from past experience, in relation to land at Sale.

Senator Wheeldon:

– A catalogue of infamy.

Senator BUTTON:

-As Senator Wheeldon properly says, it is a catalogue of infamy. If there is one thing that can be said by Government spokesmen in this debate, it is that the situation has improved for the Government in political terms. Since the recent revelations in South Africa in regard to the South African Government, it might be said by a political observer that even the Hamer Government in Victoria is starting to look good by South African standards. After all the Victorian Premier has never found himself in the position of having to deny his involvement in an assassination plot- not yet. But nearly every other allegation that has been made in South Africa has been made about the Victorian Government. Indeed, the South African Government makes the Victorian Government look good.

Senator Webster:

– What is the current one about Labor in Queensland fiddling the funds? I see it in the newspapers. Tell us about it.

Senator BUTTON:

- Senator Webster is concerned about the current one about Labor in Queensland of all places. That is an extraordinary thing to say. No doubt Senator Webster will get out the Reader’s Digest and tell us another little story from it about the Labor Party in Queensland. Of course, we happen to be talking about the Liberal Party in Victoria. Senator Webster, as a member of the National Country Party, would know that the leader of his party in Victoria, Mr Ross-Edwards, has been very critical of the role of the Hamer Government in relation to these land purchases by the Housing Commission. In Victoria the National Country Party sees it as its function to criticise maladministration in government, what it perceives to be dishonesty in government, but here we find Senator Webster, who has fallen into the role of being leader of the National Country Party in this place, pursuing a totally different line. That is an extraordinary thing that we will be able to tell the electors of Victoria in the forthcoming election campaign.

Thousands and thousands of people who have supported the Country Party in the past are concerned about this very question of the misappropriation of funds and the misallocation of funds in terms of the sort of relief funds that a government makes available to country people in times of difficulty. So Senator Webster is fulfilling an extraordinary role in the context of this debate. Like all the speakers on the Government side, he has not dealt with any of the issues about which this Parliament is properly entitled to be concerned, including the direction in which the taxpayers money goes. In Victoria is has gone in sums which amount to millions of dollars into the pockets of developers who saw the Hamer Government coming and saw the Premier and Treasurer as figures to whom they could sell gold bricks if they wanted to do so and they were able to get away with it because of years of neglect and malpractice of this kind. I commend the motion to the Senate.

Senator LEWIS:
Victoria

– It is always a pleasure to follow Senator Button in a debate. He speaks with his tongue in his cheek and a smile on his face so that we know that he does not really mean any of the nasty allegations that he makes and that we can tend to dismiss them. He made allegations about deals and such things. One wonders what might happen if one were to examine the deals which occur on the Labor side of politics in the federal sphere.

Senator Wheeldon:

– Name one.

Senator LEWIS:

– One could name one if one wanted to, but I think one should allow it to lapse for the moment. The subject of the debate is supposed to be the failure of the Victorian Government to exercise proper control in the expenditure of federal funds. The Opposition has talked about the purchase of land in Victoria. In a number of speeches, in particular one clearly prepared for the Leader of the Opposition by some left wing operator of the Labor Party in Victoria, every long bow has been drawn and every allegation that has ever been made has been repeated. Whenever any government buys land on a rising market one can always be sure that later, with hindsight, there will be people who will point out that the purchase should not have been made.

Senator Georges:

– Not in three days.

Senator LEWIS:

- Senator Georges is alleging that these purchases were not made on a rising market. As his party was in government at the time, one would have to say that it was a rising market because land prices were rising every day during the term of office of his party. After all, one must look at what has happened in the other States. Just last week the New South Wales Government announced that it was writing off $3. 8m for its land purchases. The South Australian Labor Government has now acknowledged that it has lost tens of millions of dollars on land purchases in that State. One wonders where the problems in relation to land purchases may end.

I do not want to push the problem of land purchases in relation to any government because it seems to me that with any of the land purchases, one must look at all the surrounding circumstances and weigh what proper compensation must be paid to a vendor as opposed to what amount would be paid to him on acquisition. Where there are proper vendors- I acknowledge that in Victoria one has some doubt at times as to whether some of the vendors are what I might call proper vendors- who are being deprived of their land for governmental purposes, it seems to me that a very fair attitude must be taken towards them in relation to the compensation which they are to be paid for their land. I repeat that the subject of this debate was supposed to be the failure of the Victorian Government to exercise proper control in the expenditure of federal funds. In fact, right from the word go- right from Senator Wriedt ‘s speech- it was made clear that the debate would be about the forthcoming election in Victoria. Every speaker from the Opposition side since Senator Wriedt spoke has debated the subject of the election coming up in Victoria and not the subject of the matter of urgency. Now I want to say something about the next Victorian election. In November 1978 the dominant left wing faction of the Australian Labor Party in Victoria- Senator Georges would know all about them; no doubt many of them are close friends -

Senator Georges:

– I raise a point of order. On the honourable senator’s own admission, that subject is irrelevant to the debate. How can it now be relevant? The subject matter is very much before us in the wording of the matter of urgency. Despite what Senator Lewis has said, each one of the speakers from the Opposition side kept to the subject matter. He is now on his own admission about to divert from the subject matter and talk about the internal matters of the Labor Party as he sees them. That subject is definitely not relevant to the matter before the Senate.

The PRESIDENT:

– I am listening to the honourable senator’s point.

Senator LEWIS:

-Thank you, Mr President. I will follow the subject of the debate which I have repeated on I think two occasions. I do not recall any Opposition senators repeating it at any stage. The debate is about the expenditure of Federal funds. I draw the attention of the Senate to the action a Victorian Labor Party would take in relation to Federal funds. The Victorian branch of the ALP has adopted the policy of socialisation of industry, production, distribution and exchange and has resolved that this objective, separately stated, should precede any other contemporary analysis of Labor’s philosophy. Regardless of what Mr Wilkes might say in the forthcoming election campaign and regardless of promises which he and his parliamentary colleagues might make, the people of Victoria will know that if they return Mr Wilkes and his colleagues they will give the ALP a mandate to introduce socialism.

In that event Federal funds will be used for the purpose of socialising labour, industry and exchange in Victoria. That will mean more than the purchase of land by the State Government; it will mean taking over by the Government of complete control of every aspect of business and private affairs in the State. That will become the issue to be faced in this election. Will the people of Victoria give the ALP mandate to carry on in this way? Mr Wilkes will not be able to hold them. In three years time, after such a government is returned to office, Victoria will prove to be a very different State from the State it is today. The people of Victoria will remember what happened from 1972 to 1975 and the changes which have taken place in Australia as a result of three years of Labor’s being in office. I believe that the Victorian people will not be so foolish as to give the ALP a mandate to socialise their State. I move:

Senator Georges:

– I raise a point of order. There is no quorum. How can the honourable senator move such a motion when we do not have a quorum?

Senator Lewis:

– With respect, Mr President, did I not move that the motion be put before the point of order was taken and before a quorum was called?

The PRESIDENT:

– I will count the House. (Quorum formed) Now I will put the question.

Question put:

That the question be now put. The Senate divided. (The President- Senator the Hon. Sir Condor Laucke)

AYES: 32

NOES: 24

Majority……. 8

AYES

NOES

Question so resolved in the affirmative. Question put:

That the motion (Senator Wriedt’s) be agreed to.

The Senate divided. (The President- Senator the Hon. Sir Condor Laucke)

AYES: 24

NOES: 32

Majority……. 8

AYES

NOES

Question so resolved in the negative. Sitting suspended from 5.59 to 8 p.m.

page 1054

AUSTRALIAN DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE AGENCY

Senator DURACK (Western AustraliaAttorneyGeneral) Pursuant to section 10 of the Australian Development Assistance Agency (Repeal) Act 1977, 1 present the final report of the Australian Development Assistance Agency for the year ended 30 June 1977. The delay in presenting this report has been caused by technicalities that arose in the context of the change in status of the Agency to a bureau within the Department of Foreign Affairs.

Senator RAE:
Tasmania

– by leave- The report is quite old and, in the same terms as I have moved previous motions, I move:

That the following matter be referred to the Standing Committee on Finance and Government Operations: The annual report 0f the Australian Development Assistance Agency for the year 1 976-77.

Senator GEORGES:
Queensland

-Since there is now a motion moved in respect of this report- it was anticipated that Senator Mason would move that the Senate take note of the report- perhaps I can speak to it.

The PRESIDENT:

– You can speak to the motion.

Senator GEORGES:

-I shall speak briefly. I take it that Senator Mason will follow because I know he has some comments to make. I am interested in this report because of the decision of the Government to withdraw aid to Vietnam. We are at a disadvantage in the Senate in that reports are not given to us prior to tabling. There is some technicality which prevents us having access to such reports. For that reason we generally move that the Senate take note of them and at some later stage we speak to that motion. It may be some months before we get to that stage. Therefore, it is necessary for me to make some comment now on this report. From a brief perusal of it I cannot find any mention of the support which was previously given to Vietnam but suddenly withdrawn. I think it was under this Australian Development Assistance Agency that support was being given to Vietnam for two projects a short distance north of Hanoi which were the subject of a question from a Government senator. If that is the case then I would like to make the critical comment that the Government, in making this very shortsighted and rather inhumane decision to withdraw aid from Vietnam surely should not have extended that decision to cover the two existing projects. These two projects north of Hanoi were accepted by the Vietnamese as being worthy projects and evidence of the goodwill of the Australian Government and people. The projects were only small but, nevertheless, were effective and directed to a special area of need in Vietnam.

Without going over the disputation and controversy that raged in Australia about the Vietnam war, I think it can be accepted that the intentions of the Government in providing this sort of aid were worthy and were to be commended. That being so, the withdrawal of that aid should meet with sharp criticism. It should be sharp criticism because it is the withdrawal not of a future aid commitment but of aid that was being given. It places Australia in exactly the same category in which China placed itself when it withdrew substantial aid from Vietnam at a time when Vietnam was endeavouring to reconstruct its economy and achieve a position of independence. By withdrawing this aid after the withdrawal by China of its aid to Vietnam, we have succeeded in thrusting Vietnam into an economic area very much under the influence of the Soviet or Eastern European bloc. That is to be regretted on economic grounds. On humane grounds it is to be despised that Australia should take such action. I should have thought that the Australian Development Assistance Agency would have tried to enhance its reputation in the area by continuing its support to Vietnam. As far as I can gather, there is no mention of it in this report. Is it that when the decision was made to withdraw aid from Vietnam this report was truncated, or is mention of this aid hidden somewhere in the report where I cannot find it? I know that the Attorney-General (Senator Durack) cannot answer that question at this stage but on some future occasion he may be able to tell me where in this report there is reference to that aid.

Senator Rae:

– That reporting period is 19 months before the date on which the aid was withdrawn.

Senator GEORGES:

-That should mean that that aid would be mentioned in this report.

Senator Button:

– They were plotting the withdrawal 19 months ago.

Senator GEORGES:

– I am now receiving assistance from Senator Button and I welcome it. Perhaps he would like to add to my comments. Even if the reporting period were 1 9 months ago, that still does not answer my question. Surely aid would have been given to Vietnam within the reporting period so there ought to be some mention of it in the report. I have only briefly perused this report because there has not been sufficient time in which to scrutinise it closely so I may be wrong.

I recapitulate the points I have made. The withdrawal of aid to Vietnam was shortsighted; it was most inhumane and it was based on a wrong premise. I think that the Government ought to reconsider that decision because it is quite unworthy of it to withdraw such aid. If the withdrawal of the aid also means a diminishing of further aid to other countries, the Government has embarked upon a shortsighted program which is to its discredit. I would have thought that aid of this sort was the best means by which Australia could sustantially advance its foreign policy. It is the means by which Australia can establish its goodwill with many countries that need our assistance. If withdrawal of aid from Vietnam also means that the Government intends to withdraw or diminish aid to other areas, this report ought to come under the close scrutiny of the Senate. I do not seek to continue my remarks later because I believe that other honourable senators may wish to make some comment at this time.

The PRESIDENT:

– Order! It being more than two hours after the meeting of the Senate, and in accordance with Standing Order 127, this debate is now interrupted.

Suspension of Standing Orders

Motion (by Senator Durack) agreed to: That Standing Order 127 be suspended Tor this day. Debate resumed.

Senator MASON:
New South Wales

– The Australian Democrats are anxious to speak to the report at this stage because it deals with a matter that is very close to our hearts as a political organisation and because we believe that certain matters should bc raised with the Government before this year’s Budget is framed. I will not add to Senator Rae’s comments about the lateness of this report other than to say that this modest 52-page document coming to us at this stage- a report for 1976-1977 arriving in March 1979- makes something of a mockery of accountability. Some $226m, rather more than half our aid in that year, went to Papua New Guinea, and the’ Australian Democrats agree that we ought to fulfil absolutely our obligation to assist Papua New Guinea to prosperous nationhood. We have no argument with that proposition, but we do argue with the proposition in the annual report, and this has been recapitulated by the Government since, for a steady reduction in the amount of aid to the rest of the world. In 1976-77 only $ 152m went elsewhere to a world with fast and evergrowing problems. Some $25m of that was necessary food aid, and I would like to believe that all Australians realise that those dollars saved lives everywhere. They saved lives from the ugly, protracted and painful death “which is the sort of death people have from starvation. I hope that no honourable senator is in any doubt about that, nor about the fact that, as often as not, the lives that are taken are the lives of children.

The strains now on the Third World are going to become greater because of higher oil prices. This factor will cause great and appalling crises involving millions more individual tragedies, perhaps more tragedies than there are people in the prosperous world. In 197 1 we ranked third in the world in our aid as a percentage of gross national product. Now we rank eighth. Briefly, over the past five years those figures dwindled from 0.56 of one per cent to 0.45 of one per cent. I remind honourable senators that the United Nations suggested target figure for prosperous nations, as indeed we are in spite of our problems, is 0.7 of one per cent- a little enough amount, heaven knows. There is a belief- I trust and pray a mistaken one- among people who ought to know that the Government proposes to cut our aid programs to 0.3 of one per cent of gross national product in this year’s Budget. The rationale is said to be that since that is the average percentage of aid of the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, why should we be doing any better? That is my main reason for rising now to speak to this report. I plead with the Government to rise above the thought I have heard expressed frequently- a cynical and despicable thoughtthat there are no votes in foreign aid. I ask the Government to increase our aid, if only modestly, to the Third World while at the same time maintaining our commitments to Papua New Guinea. I speak with some personal experience in this matter because at one time I was an Australian adviser working in the north-east region of Thailand

Senator Peter Baume:

- Mr President, I rise on a point of order. The honourable senator wanted to address a few remarks to the motion. Could he indicate to the Senate that his remarks are related to the report? I take it that this is a general statement on the question of Australia’s foreign aid program and policies. Is it appropriate that Senator Mason should confine his remarks, or at least relate them, to some aspect of the report?

The PRESIDENT:

- Senator Mason, you may continue your speech, but relate it directly to the motion before the Senate.

Senator MASON:

– I have read the report right through and I thought that I was relating my remarks to that report. I believe that we must speak in this Senate of realities. There are realities behind the report, in every one of those statistics, and I see no reason why we should deny them. As I was saying, I have been a witness to scenes of utter hopelessness amongst young people in villages that have grown haphazardly on arid land, villages without any real means of support in which half- I repeat half- of the children born do not reach 10 years of age. With respect to Senator Baume, I feel that this is a point worth making in relation to the report. It would be wrong of me to try to forget the shame, anger and frustration these experiences brought to me, and equally wrong of me not to try to communicate that now to honourable senators and, through them, to the Government. We are a lucky people through a sheer accident of our place of birth. I implore the Government to look outward from Australia with compassion when it frames the Budget in this regard.

My second major point relates to the statement on page 7 of the report to the effect that the main emphasis has been going to training and education of Third World people, especially within Australia, and I should like to raise this point again for the Government ‘s consideration.

The PRESIDENT:

- Senator Mason, you should bear in mind that the motion before the chamber at the moment is that this matter be referred to the Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Government Operations.

Senator MASON:

– May I not comment generally on the report that has been presented to the Senate?

The PRESIDENT:

– The question before the Senate relates to whether or not the report should be referred to the Committee.

Senator Georges:

– With your leave, Mr President, perhaps we should have moved that the Senate take note of the paper. I doubt whether we did that. I think we allowed the one motion to be put to allow the Senate to debate the matter.

The PRESIDENT:

– I will view this with tolerance, but I point out to Senator Mason the motion that is before the chamber.

Senator MASON:

– I must say that I believe that this place is the proper place in which these sorts of sentiments should be expressed, with no criticism of you, Mr President. If that cannot be so, then there is something wrong with the Senate. The main emphasis of the aid has been towards training people within Australia. Is it necessary that that should always be so? I have found, again from my own experience, that most people in the Third World at the level of headman or village councillor know exactly what they want. They know that there are certain things that would make their lives more prosperous. They know better than we do that there are areas of aid that are directly related to their present way of life. They do not want large hydroelectric schemes and nuclear powerhouses. They want impervious roofing for their houses so that they can have fresh water. They want better livestock and better seed for crops. I confess that Australia has done well in this regard by comparison with other countries. It is not the fault of these people that they are poor. In my experience, they work hard, usually in bad health, for little more than the means of their survival. Is it too much then to try to assist these communities in a decent and reasonable way, as we would help any other neighbour? I ask the Government to try to change some of the matters that are contained in this report, to change the emphasis of what has been reported to us, so that we do place a more definite accent on consultation and cooperation with people at the essential village level. I am aware of the exigencies of time on the Senate at the moment, and I seek leave to continue my remarks.

The PRESIDENT:

-Is leave granted? There being no objection -

Senator Harradine:

- Mr President, I do not see -

The PRESIDENT:

– I call the AttorneyGeneral.

Senator Harradine:

– Leave is not granted for Senator Mason to continue his remarks. I wish to enter the debate.

The PRESIDENT:

– I did not hear that. Did you object?

Senator Harradine:

– I rose in my seat.

The PRESIDENT:

– Did you register your objection?

Senator Harradine:

– I rose to enter the debate. I do not agree that at this stage the report ought to be referred to the Committee.

Senator Peter Baume:

– On a point of order, Mr President, the honourable senator has not been given the call. If he is refusing leave, that is fair enough, but it is up to you as to who you wish to recognise.

The PRESIDENT:

– I sought the leave of the Senate for Senator Mason to continue his remarks. I heard no objecting voice.

Senator Harradine:

– I rise and object.

The PRESIDENT:

– At the time I put the question no objection was raised.

Senator Harradine:

– The Government is not answering the accusations made by Senator Georges. I wish to do so.

Senator Durack:

– I raise a point of order. Senator Mason sought leave to continue his remarks later. There was no objection to that. That has the effect of a motion for the adjournment of the debate on the matter. I was about to rise to move that the resumption of the debate be made an order of the day for the next day of sitting. There will be an opportunity to debate the matter on another occasion.

The PRESIDENT:

– That is so. This course would not deprive Senator Harradine of an opportunity to talk on this matter in due time. The fact is that Senator Harradine registered no objection to the leave being granted.

Motion ( by Senator Durack) agreed to:

That the resumption of the debate be made an order of the day for the next day of sitting.

page 1057

PUBLIC WORKS COMMITTEE

Report

Senator MELZER:
Victoria

– In accordance with provisions of the Public Works Committee 1969 I present the 42nd general report of the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Public Works. I seek leave to make a short statement relating to the report.

Leave granted.

Senator MELZER:

– As in past years, the report summarises the Committee’s activities for the previous twelve months, in this case, the period ending 31 December 1978. In addition to activities relating to the six reports presented by the Committee, quite a number of the 49 occasions on which the Committee met were for the purpose of its inquiry into the proposed Defence Force Academy, which the Committee hopes to report on in the near future. In addition, at the request of the Presiding Officers, the Committee obtained evidence and provided advice on the proposed alterations to the front entrance of Parliament House. Included in the report is a summary of the progress of works previously reported on by the Committee, the likelihood of the Committee’s examining proposed works of selected statutory authorities in the future, a review of some aspects of the non-reference of defence works to the committee and a comment concerning changes to works proposed that have occurred after the Committee’s report to Parliament. The Senate may be assured that the Public Works Committee continues to examine works proposals in a manner which ensures that there is a need for the works and that the proposed expenditure is fully justified.

page 1058

JOINT COMMITTEE ON PUBLICATIONS

Ministerial Statement

Senator DURACK (Western AustraliaAttorneyGeneral) I seek leave to have the text of a statement relating to the Joint Committee on Publications incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The statement read as follows-

JOINT COMMITTEE ON PUBLICATIONS: INQUIRY INTO THE PURPOSE, SCOPE AND DISTRIBUTION OF THE PARLIAMENTARY PAPERS SERIES: GOVERNMENT RESPONSE

Recommendation 1

That where a printed departmental paper, tabled in Parliament, is given a full Parliamentary distribution, Senators and Members be excluded from receipt of the Parliamentary Paper version.

Response

Agree, on cost saving grounds. Recommendation 2

That departments, statutory authorities and other governmental institutions which are not required, by statute, to present an annual report to Parliament, but which had occasion to table an annual report in recent years, be encouraged to continue to present an annual report to Parliament on a consistent basis.

Response

With regard to departmental annual reports, this recommendation has already been agreed to by the Government and guidelines are being developed. Nearly all statutory authorities are required, by legislation, to present annual reports.

If more reports are to be required, there will be increased costs and problems in publication, in some cases with little gain in the amount of information made publicly available. Any authority or institution not already required by statute to present an annual report should do so only if this action would add signicantly to public knowledge. The Government is examining guidelines in relation to annual reports of departments.

Recommendation 3

That the Clerks of the Parliament advise the Chairman on any occasion where an author body has failed to meet a statutory requirement to table its annual report, return or other document within the stated statutory period, or within a reasonable period of time following the completion of the period to which the report refers.

Recommendation 4

That at the conclusion of each year’s sitting, or as often as may be deemed necessary, the Committee table a return in Parliament recording the titles of those reports of author bodies which have not been tabled during the stated statutory period or within a reasonable period of time following the completion of the period to which the report refers.

Response

While the Government is anxious to eliminate the fundamental causes of delays in the tabling of reports, it may not be possible to overcome delays completely. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, in consultation with other departments as necessary, will be undertaking an examination to identify delays and to formulate recommendations to the Government on how they might be overcome. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet should thus be in a position to obtain an overall picture of the situation in respect of the tabling requirements and performance of all departments and reporting bodies.

It is necessary, however, for the concept of Ministerial responsibility to be observed, and the Government would wish to ensure that Senators’ and Members’ inquiries concerning reports should be addressed to the responsible Minister.

Recommendation 5

That the publication guidelines of the Committee be amended to read as follows:

that all reports, returns and statements of departments, authorities, Parliamentary and ad hoc committees of inquiry, delegates to conferences, royal commissions, and the like, and documents comprising the Australian Treaty Series, which are presented to Parliament be recommended for printing;

that the previous resolution is not intended to include the interim annual reports of departments and authorities;

that papers which are regularly presented and subsequently printed as Parliamentary Papers should continue to be recommended for printing on those occasions when they constitute a ‘ nil ‘ return; and

that, wherever possible, the reports of the AuditorGeneral which are presented in conjunction with annual reports and financial statements of statutory bodies be included in the one printed document with those reports and statements.

Response

It is for the Parliamentary Committee to set its own guidelines.

Recommendation 6

That the free distribution list for the principal Parliamentary publications (excluding Hansard) be as follows:

that libraries of States, State Parliaments, municipalities, universities, colleges of advanced education, teachers colleges and other post-secondary institutions, secondary schools and Commonwealth departments (or in absence, the Secretary); and foreign embassies, newspapers, members of the Parliamentary

Press Gallery, political parties which contest Federal elections and which have a recognised National Secretariat, and appropriate addresses as determined by the Presiding Officers which are consistent with the terms of this recommendation, be entitled to be supplied with one free copy of each of the undermentioned publications, upon request: Parliamentary Papers, Standing Orders of both Houses and the Short Description of Business and Procedures of the House of Representatives;

that trade, business, employer, employee, professional, commercial and similar organisations be not entitled to receive free distribution of the above;

that, unless the Presiding Officers otherwise determine, all State, State Parliamentary, Commonwealth departmental (excluding statutory authority), university, college of advanced education and municipal libraries, and appropriate overseas addresses as determined by the Presiding Officers, be eligible to receive one free set of bound volumes of Parliamentary Papers, Journals of the Senate and Votes and Proceedings, upon request;

that the Presiding Officers advise current recipients on the free distribution list when the revised distribution scheme becomes operative, and instigate checks from time to time as they consider necessary, to ascertain whether recipients desire to continue to receive their entitlement;

that the free and advanced order lists be rationalised and maintained so that persons and organisations eligible for free receipt are not included on the paying lists; and

that the distribution arrangements for single copies of Journals of the Senate, Votes and Proceedings, Notice Papers, Bills and Tariff Proposals be the same as those refered to in (a) to (e) above, except that the maximum number of free copies be increased from one to five.

Response

While the Parliament itself may determine the category of recipients to receive gratis issues of Parliamentary publications, it is essential that the Parliament recognise the additional production, distribution and administrative costs of any extension or partial extension of the distributions. In the final analysis, the Government must decide what level of appropriation it will recommend to the Parliament and will have regard to:

Government economic policies as they apply to constraint in expenditure;

ongoing availability of funds within the Parliamentary appropriations and the AGPS Distribution vote; and

staff and other resources available within AGPS to undertake additional production and distribution.

AGPS would also need to be provided with adequate forward advice of any significant increases in free issues, in terms of quantities of publications to be produced and distribution requirements.

The appropriate Ministers will be examining the matter of the distribution of Parliamentary Papers in the forward estimates/budget process in the context of other proposed parliamentary expenditures.

Recommendation 7

That the grouping system used to determine the free distribution of Parliamentary Papers be revised and updated.

Response

This recommmendation is a matter for the Parliament itself. Recommendation 8

That the number of future sets of bound volumes held in reserve be reduced to twenty-five.

Response Agree.

Recommendation 9

That future volumes of the Parliamentary Papers Series be bound in high quality buckram material.

Response Agree.

Recommendation 10

That, following the tabling of a report in Parliament which:

is in an unacceptable form to enable its reproduction for inclusion in the Parliamentary Paper Series;

readily falls within the publishing guidelines followed by the Committee; and

is ordered to be printed, the originating department or statutory authority be levied with the cost of bringing the report to an acceptable standard for reproduction and inclusion in the Series.

Response

Agree. Responsibility for determining whether such reports coming to the attention of the Joint Publications Committee are in acceptable form for reproduction in the Parliamentary Paper Series should rest with the Australian Government Publishing Service.

Recommendation 1 1

That the Australian Government Publishing Service advise the Committee of author bodies which depart from AGPS production guidelines where it is known that the report will be tabled and printed as a Parliamentary Paper.

Response

Oppose. The Government does not support a system which would require one government agency to report spontaneously to a Parliamentary Committee about other agencies’ alleged shortcomings. AGPS will, of course, be taking up with author bodies any departures from the guidelines. The Committee, however, might obtain from the Australian Government Publishing Service, from time to time, a return or statement relating to such shortcomings, including the results of consultations between the Publishing Service and the author agencies concerned.

Recommendation 12

That where rime permits, all reports which are due to be tabled in Parliament and which fall within the Parliamentary Paper publishing guidelines laid down by this Committee should be typeset with sufficient copies being produced simultaneously to satisfy the Parliamentary Paper distribution.

Recommendation 13

That where it is necessary for a report to be produced with the utmost urgency, and, as a result, the necessary time required to typeset the document is unavailable and, if such report readily falls within the Parliamentary Paper publishing guidelines laid down by this Committee, then it is most desirable that such report be produced in accordance with the requirements of the relevant Australian Government Publishing Service Circular dealing with reproduction from camera-ready copy.

Response

The Government agrees with the general objectives of these recommendations. A working group composed of representatives from the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Public Service Board and the Australian Government Publishing Service will formulate specific guidelines based on overall economy, efficiency and maintenance of standards in the preparation and production of reports to be tabled in the Parliament. The Government is concerned that, wherever possible, reports due to be tabled in Parliament, are simultaneously produced.

Recommendation 14

That, at the commencement of each year’s sittings, and thereafter as necessary, the Committee determine whether or not certain papers due to be tabled that year fall within the publishing guidelines laid down by the Committee in this Report and that the Parliament be advised that, when these papers are tabled, it is the intention of the Committee to recommend that they be printed as Parliamentary Papers.

Response

Agree, with the reservation that acceptance should not be construed to mean that the Government will declare in advance to the Committee, or to the Parliament, what reports or other documents it intends to present to the Parliament.

Recommendation IS

That, following the adoption by Parliament of the reports of the Committee which contain its recommendations for the printing of Parliamentary Papers, such reports be included in the appropriate catalogue of the Australian Government Publishing Service.

Response Agree

Recommendation 16

That, for a trial period of two years, following upon the completion of the departmental versions of reports by a printing contractor or the Government Printer, the completion of the Parliamentary Paper versions of those reports be undertaken by the Government Printer.

Response

Agree. This practice has been in operation for some time. Recommendation 17

That, for a trial period of two years, the Government Printer undertake the printing of Parliamentary Papers on all occasions where Parliamentary Paper stocks have not been produced simultaneously with the departmental tabling version.

Response

Oppose. The recommendation would involve additional costs where original printing had been performed by a commercial house. The Government believes such instances should be determined by AGPS under its normal print allocation procedures.

Recommendation 18

That in the event of the Government Printer being unable to complete the Parliamentary Paper version of a report, he be authorised to refer the report to the Australian Government Publishing Service to arrange its completion through a suitable printing contractor.

Response

Oppose. The Government Printer is encompassed within AGPS. Implementation of this recommendation would reverse normal procedures.

Recommendation 19

That the Government Printer complete the Parliamentary Paper version by encasing the original departmental version with the standard blue Parliamentary Paper cover; such cover to include the tabling and printing details presently being recorded on the title page.

Response

The Government Printer has instituted the practice. The previous practice was that the standard blue Parliamentary Paper cover was used only to encase the text of departmental reports.

This procedure appears to be an unnecessary, impractical and costly variation to the previous practice. The Government proposes to review the procedure in 1 979, particularly with respect to the additional costs which are placed on author agencies for the printing of extra covers for the Parliamentary Paper series.

Recommendation 20

That the Parliamentary Presiding Officers examine the practicability of employing terminal production units in:

  1. the Committee Secretariat of the Parliament with a view to the Government Printer producing simultaneously, through his phototypesetting equipment, both the Parliamentary tabling and Parliamentary Paper versions of Parliamentary Committee Reports; and
  2. the Office of the Principal Parliamentary Reporter to enable the Government Printer to produce Parliamentary Committee evidence through his phototypesetting equipment.

Response

This matter is one for the Parliament to determine. Although this matter is complex and it will be some time before capital and ongoing costs can be accurately estimated, the Government supports, in principle, the recommendation on the basis of potential cost savings and greater service efficiency which should result.

Trials have been conducted between the Parliament and the Printing Office in respect of this recommendation and the Printing Office has made some forward provisions in the Estimates for updating computer facilities for this purpose.

Recommendation 21

That the Parliamentary Papers Index be consolidated for the period 1901-1975.

Response

This matter is one for the Publications Committee to determine.

Recommendation 22

That when production and financial considerations permit, the Parliamentary Paper Series be reproduced in a microform version.

Response Noted

Recommendation 23

That the publications deposit arrangement of the Australian Government Publishing Service be expanded to include the six State Parliamentary Librarians, upon request.

Response

Agree in principle. While the Government supports this recommendation in the interests of broadening existing exchange arrangements and the provision of adequate information and reference sources in the Commonwealth and State Parliamentary libraries, in considering any extension of the existing services, the Government will need to have regard to the staff and other resources available to AGPS in the context of overall constraints and priorities.

Senator ARCHER:
Tasmania

– by leave- I move:

That the Senate take note of the statement. I seek leave to continue my remarks. Leave granted; debate adjourned.

page 1061

GENERAL BUSINESS

Discharge of Item Senator RAE (Tasmania)- by leave- I move:

That General Business, Order of the Day No. 23 1 relating to a ministerial statement on a report of the Standing Committee on Finance and Government Operations be discharged from the Notice Paper.

I move this motion after discussion with the Committee and as a result of a decision by the Committee.

page 1061

FAMILY LAW AMENDMENT BILL 1979

Bill returned from the House of Representatives without amendment.

page 1061

AUSTRALIAN SECURITY INTELLIGENCE ORGANIZATION BILL 1979

Second Readings

Debate resumed from 2 1 March, on motion by Senator Durack:

That the Bills be now read a second time.

Upon which Senator Button had moved by way of amendment in respect of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Bill 1 979:

Leave out all words after ‘That’, insert “the Bill be withdrawn and redrafted to provide-

tha: Annua! Reports be presented to Parliament on the general operation of the Act and in particular the exercise of Special Powers under Pan III, Division 2 of the Bill;

that regular periodic judicial audit be conducted into the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to ensure-

that is complies with its charter and the law;

that it does not unjustifiably infringe civil liberties; and

that it operates effectively and efficiently;

that the responsible Minister be fully informed by the Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation with respect to any matter, other than the contents of files relating to particular individuals, on which he has sought information and advice;

that the Leader of the Opposition be fully and regularly briefed on all aspects of the operation of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, including the exercise of its Special Powers under Part III, Division 2 of the Bill;

the proper financial accountability of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, including the auditing of its accounts by the Auditor-General, as recommended by the Hope Report;

the redefinition of the concept of ‘security’, and in particular the element of ‘subversion ‘, in order to narrow its scope and limit the possibility of its misapplication;

the restricting of the circumstances in which, and the times for which, warrants may be issued under Part III, Division 2 of the Bill;

h) that communication by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to State authorities of security assessments information in relation to individuals be made only upon condition of adoption by such State of a Security Appeals system similar to that created by Pan IV of the present Bill;

that the Security Appeals system be given retrospective operation as recommended in the Hope Report;

that no person be denied notification of the existence of an adverse Security assessment made about that person; and

that the communication of information purporting to identify an Australian Security Intelligence Organisation employee or agent be penalised only when such information would endanger the safety of such person or itself be seriously prejudicial to security”.

Senator RYAN:
Australian Capital Territory

– The Senate is resuming debate on the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Bill and other Bills which will be debated in association with it. I wish to confine my remarks at this stage to the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Bill. This Bill seeks to repeal two earlier Acts of 1956 and 1976, and purports to give effect to the finding of the royal commission headed by Mr Justice Hope. To the extent that the legislation does give effect to the findings of the royal commission headed by Mr Justice Hope, the Opposition welcomes the introduction of this Bill. We accept that the general aim of the Bill is laudable. However, there are many inadequacies of the Bill as currently drawn. Although we welcome in principle the attempt by the Government to implement the findings of the Hope Commission, we cannot accept the Bill in its present form.

The Bill manifests the obsession with secrecy which is characteristic of the Fraser Government. Many of the secrecy provisions of the Bill as currently drawn are quite unnecessary. We hope to amend them. At the Committee stage the Opposition will move a series of 1 1 amendments, and at that stage we will explain in detail how the Bill should be improved. However, I would like to make some general remarks at this stage about the inadequacies of the Bill before us. Under this Bill ASIO receives new powers. For example, it will be enabled to enter arid search premises, place listening devices on premises, open mail, inspect telegrams. Before these powers are exercised, ASIO’s Director-General must apply to the Attorney-General for a warrant. However, the Director-General may himself authorise the use of listening devices or the inspection of telegrams for up to 48 hours if he or she considers the situation an emergency situation. Because the term ‘emergency’ is not denned, the Opposition believes that this aspect of the legislation will be open to abuse. There is, for example, no right of appeal against the issue of a warrant.

The Opposition has many reservations about the new powers which are given to ASIO under the Bill. The Hope report showed that in fact ASIO had always engaged in such activities as entering and searching and placing listening devices on premises, even though it had been authorised by legislation only to monitor telephones. The Opposition is also aware and very concerned that ASIO has in the past demonstrated a disregard for the civil liberties of Australian citizens. This legislation does nothing to prevent ASIO from carrying on in the same way. This Bill will also override any State legislation which regur lates more closely these methods of surveillance. I would remind honourable senators that the Hope report was very critical of the capacity for sound judgment within ASIO. The report said:

Intelligence assessment is no simple or routine activity but a highly skilled and subtle task. I must report that I saw little evidence in ASIO that the qualities of mind and expertise needed were recognised or available in any large measure.

Despite this assessment of the abilities of ASIO, the terms of operation in the Bill before us are dangerously wide and easily open to abuse. I would suggest that they are particularly open to abuse when the officers within ASIO are lacking in that critical ability and capacity for judgment, as the Hope report found. If new powers are to be given it is all the more important that the terms of the operation should be properly defined, and they are not. For example, in clause 5 ( 1 ) (b) of the legislation, subversion as distinct from terrorism or violent acts is denned as: activities directed to obstructing, hindering or interfering with the carrying out of activities by or for the Commonwealth for the purposes of security . . .

Earlier in the Bill ‘security’ is denned as protection from espionage, sabotage, subversion, active measures of violent intervention or terrorism. The definition of ‘subversion’ is crucial. For example, in the terms in which ‘subversion’ is currently defined, the Bill could well be used against people who are opposed to uranium mining. If an anti-uranium rnining group were to obstruct the activities of a mining company which had an agreement with or was in partnership with the Commonwealth Government, those activities would come under the definition of ‘subversion’. In clause 5(1) (c) of the Bill we find that subversion can be: activities directed to promoting violence or hostility between different groups of persons in the Australian community so as to endanger the peace, order or good government of the Commonwealth.

I suggest that that definition goes well beyond the bounds of what has come to be regarded as subversion. For example, it could include the actions of trade unionists against employers. It could also include, I suggest, the activities of the Queensland Government against the Aboriginal people. Is this the intention of the Bill? If it is not, the term should be more precisely defined. For example, looking again at the words ‘promoting violence or hostility between different groups of persons in the Australian community’, would such a provision encompass those who oppose government funding of church schools because they might provoke hostility or sectarian divisions within the community? This is one aspect of the Bill which is unacceptable to the Opposition. In the Committee stage of the debate we will be asking for a precise and proper definition of ‘subversion’ which will cover truly dangerous activities but which will exclude the possibility of this legislation being used against groups of people who are expressing a non-conformist or minority view.

The Bill introduces a new and quite specific offence and a new penalty, that is, anyone who publishes the identity of an ASIO agent or an informer who is paid by ASIO is liable to a fine of $1,000 or one year’s imprisonment. That is another provision which we must question at this stage of the debate. Surely it is in the interests of security that such agents and informers who are so stupid as to make themselves known should be exposed. In prosecuting anyone who publishes the names of bungling ASIO employees, ASIO would be merely confirming that that information was correct. In its present form the provision is ludicrous. A penalty should apply to the identification of an ASIO agent or informer only when such identification would be seriously prejudicial to national security.

Another extremely dangerous provision of the Bill is that it would give ASIO a right to bypass

Ministers of the Crown and to advise departments directly on security issues. This is perhaps the most fundamental inadequacy in the Bill before us. It means that ASIO will not be accountable to the government of the day. I suggest that that provision is contrary to the spirit of the Hope report. I suggest also that it is totally repugnant to the meaning of democracy to have powerful agencies investigating and reporting upon private citizens without those agencies being accountable to an elected body. We have had many examples in this country of ASIO- when not subject to scrutiny, to proper accountabilityabusing its powers.

In the 1960s ASIO regarded as subversion virtually any political activity which took place outside the arena of the main political parties and even some activities which took place within them, as the South Australian Salisbury affair demonstrated. Peace movements, anti- Vietnam groups, trade unionists and student organisations were spied on and harassed. ASIO refused to recognise the democratic right of the individual to participate in political activities and it used its information shamefully. In those years also there was political misuse of the information available to ASIO. I remind honourable senators of an incident which took place in this Parliament in which the ASIO file on the mother of a boy who had refused to become a school cadet was produced in Parliament. Mr Malcolm Fraser, who was then the Minister for the Army, used an ASIO file in the Parliament for party political purposes. In order to remind the Senate of this misuse of information gathered by ASIO, I will quote some extracts from the Hansard record of incidents which took place in the Parliament in the early hours of 29 September 1966 during the adjournment debate when Mr Malcolm Fraser, the then Minister for the Army, published information concerning a cadet who was the son of a Mrs Ann Margaret Butler Michaelis of 28 Redan Street, Mossman, New South Wales. Mr Fraser went on to describe in detail various political activities of that boy’s mother. Later that day, Mr Whitlam raised this matter at Question Time and asked the then Prime Minister, Mr Harold Holt-

Does the right honourable gentleman approve of the Minister for the Army using on the adjournment last night security or intelligence files to discredit a IS year of school cadet and to distract attention from his account of cadet training methods? Does he know and agree that dossiers are compiled with similar speed and revealed with similar recklessness concerning the mothers and other relatives of all critics of Government policies and Army indoctrination on Vietnam?

The then Prime Minister replied in the following terms:

The Minister for the Army did see me early this morning about this matter, and he brought to my notice the material on which his reply had been based. I say by way of comment that the Minister for the Army has a general responsibility, when the policies of his Department or of the Government come under attack, to defend those policies. When he has reason, on the basis of information coming to him, to question the bona fides of action taken, then that responsibility is enhanced. In this particular case, as I understand the facts, the episode in which this young man was involved was highly publicised and the Minister for the Army therefore had good cause to make a careful examination of the episode itself and the surrounding circumstances.

Those words of a former Prime Minister, Mr Harold Holt, seem to me to be a confirmation of what was done by the then Minister for the Army, Mr Malcolm Fraser, which was to raise in a public place- namely, the Parliamentinformation which had been collected by ASIO to use in a damaging way against private citizens for party political reasons. Even though that incident occurred many years ago, I raise it tonight to remind honourable senators of the misuse of power and the dangerous erosion of civil liberties which can occur when we have a security system which is not properly accountable and when we have an improper relationship between the political process and the security system.

I would say that the legislation which we are currently debating contains virtually no safeguards against similar abuses occurring. Of course, the Government will make much play of the establishment of the Security Appeals Tribunal, which will hear appeals from applicants for government jobs, citizenship, defence contracts and passports who have received adverse security assessments from ASIO. ASIO will be required by this legislation to notify each applicant of the adverse assessment and to inform him or her of the grounds on which that assessment was made. But that apparent safeguard is illusory because the Bill also stipulates that no such notification need be made if the AttorneyGeneral decides that such notification would endanger security. If the disclosure of the adverse assessment is perceived as a danger to security ASIO need not advise even of the existence of the assessment. So a person who is denied a job might never know why and might never be in a position to challenge the assessment or decision. In the case of someone who is notified of the assessment and who takes the case to the Security Appeals Tribunal, which is to consist of a judge and two other members, the appellant is not entitled to be present when ASIO presents its case and may not cross-examine ASIO witnesses.

This would be farcical if it were not so blatant a denial of natural justice.

The Hope report recommended that ASIO should be properly financially accountable- that its accounts should be audited by the AuditorGeneral. But this legislation does not provide for that. I think that my colleague, Senator Evans, spelt out at an earlier stage in the debate the inadequacies of the legislation in that regard. Nor is there any provision for regular checks on ASIO activities to ensure it is complying with its charter. The Opposition believes that there should be regular judicial auditing of ASIO so that it does not infringe civil liberties and operates effectively and efficiently. We also want to see a Bill which guarantees that ASIO is required to keep the responsible Minister fully informed of its activities and which also provides for the Leader of the Opposition to be regularly briefed on all aspects of ASIO operations.

Finally, there is a need for an effective ASIO and the Opposition supports that view entirely. There is a need for a body which protects the public interest and which works against those who would undermine our democratic system. But of this legislation is enacted without the amendments proposed by the Opposition it will itself undermine the democratic right of every citizen to participate in the political life of Australia.

Senator MISSEN:
Victoria

-I rise to speak on the second reading of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Bill and to the other legislation which accompanies it. I am conscious of the fact that we are dealing now with very important legislation- perhaps among the most important Bills that will come before the Parliament this year. I am also conscious of the fact that there is something of a ‘now or never’ attitude which we must adopt so far as these Bills are concerned. The Bills seek to replace the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Act of 1956, a very small Act which did not spell out powers to any great degree. We have before us very elaborate provisions which seek to give enormous powers to the Director-General and officers of ASIO and therefore they must be considered carefully. But these provisions have to be considered even more carefully by reason of the fact that we know, in this Parliament, that questions are not answered in respect of ASIO matters and that it is not a matter, of course, in respect of which we obtain from time to time any great knowledge. We in this Parliament are not experts on the subject of ASIO. Consequently I think we have to be all the more careful in respect of the powers that we may give.

Whilst I support many parts of the legislation which I consider to be substantial and valuable, I am concerned about a number of parts of it. I want to express my concern in the hope that my colleagues will be persuaded that there ought to be perhaps some amendment. I do not intend to go through all of the legislation or even to speak on the best parts of it. My colleague, Senator Puplick, in a speech which I think was one of the most distinguished contributions to this debate, set out the very great need for the security organisation with adequate powers. I substantially agree with the matters he raised. Therefore my speech will be somewhat unbalanced. I will deal mainly with critical matters that I think need to be brought to the attention of the Senate.

The legislation sets out- and I am mainly dealing with the ASIO Bill- the powers of the Director-General and the functions and powers of the Organization. It sets out the new security assessment system and has staff provisions. It is, I think, important to realise that it quite substantially implements, but not wholly, the Hope reports- the reports which Mr Justice Hope presented to the Government after a great deal of consideration. But it must also be understood that the second, third and fourth reports omit a number of matters which Mr Justice Hope felt could not possibly be made public. The third report, in particular, is a very thin report in which only some parts of the recommendations are open to public gaze. Therefore, whilst these considerable powers of search, the provision for listening devices and for postal inspection are, I think, terrifying powers in a sense, it is better of course that they should be set out in a Bill and not left as they were in the past to assumed powers which officers of ASIO sometimes undertook and which were criticised to some extent in the Hope report.

I believe that we should query these matters now in this Parliament. I note that we take on trust under a Bill like this the actions of the Attorney-General (Senator Durack) and the Director-General. I have known for many years both persons who hold these positions. I have very great faith and confidence in them and I thereafter do not fear misuse of power in their hands. But at the same time we are a government of laws and not a government of men, as has been said on many occasions by philosophers and writers. Therefore, I think we must be conscious of the fact that we can have mistaken or unfortunate officers at times who hold such vital powers. The Americans have had some examples of that with their recent and late directors of the FBI.

The public debate which has accompanied this legislation has been hurried and I think very sparse. There has been little contact of much use from organisations or from ordinary citizens. In fact some of the letters that I have received containing the most flamboyant criticisms of the Bill have asked for my views. Some of the writers of those letters have then failed to give me any address so that I could write and tell them. I therefore feel that the lack of public debate is something of which we in this Parliament must be conscious. Above all I say in this general statement about the legislation that we must be careful of the powers which are given because there is strong evidence in the Hope reports of the fact that there have been deficiencies in the past and that mistakes have been made. Mr Justice Hope on page 70 of the first volume of his fourth report talks about questions of the particular principles of propriety including legality to which ASIO should have regard in fulfilling its functions. He states:

Material before me establishes that there have at times been departures by ASIO from these principles. The departures have been of varying significance.

He goes on to say:

I do not propose to deal with ASIO’s transgression in detail.

He does not do that in the public report. After referring to the 1949 charter which should have been complied with, he then says:

But, beyond this, ASIO must always comply with the law. This second principle applies even though the matter with which ASIO is dealing relates to security. I have considered whether ASIO needs to operate in areas where, in the past, its operations were or may have been in breach of the law. Where it does I shall recommend changes in the law to confer or clarify the right to operate in those areas. But my recommendations shall include safeguards to ensure that ASIO does not exceed the recommended powers.

Beyond compliance with the law, it is important that ASIO should establish for itself standards of propriety.

On page 127 of the same report he goes on to speak of the Press and other media. He said:

Evidence is available to me that satisfies me that ASIO has in the past provided selected people with security intelligence material for publication.

The material provided was apparently drawn from information available in the public arena. It seems to have been ASIO’s intention that the material be not attributed to it.

He further criticises such activities in this way:

It is no part of ASIO’s intelligence dissemination function to publicise threats to security. Any DG of Security who reads sS ( 1 ) (a) of the ASIO Act as authority to engage in propaganda, however ‘laudable’, embarks on a misconceived enterprise. The likely result is to bring discredit to ASIO.

A propaganda activity of this kind crosses the boundary between provision of information, which is proper, and the taking of a ‘ measure for security’ which is not proper.

I believe that ASIO has probably changed its direction. I believe that such actions that have been criticised, including the special projects section which no longer exists, would have been greatly changed under the present Director-General. We should remind ourselves of the judge’s words:

These functions, if exercised by ASIO, would be improper in the extreme. They are all the more so, since, in the past, ASIO officers have shown a tendency to think of anyone they choose to call ‘left wing’ as subversive. These practices, which have not been carried out for some years, must not be allowed to resume.

I say in general that we must do what we can, in considering these Bills, to ensure that those practices do not resume.

Having put those general views, I want to turn to the question of what I might call the freedom of information implications of this Bill. As chairman of a committee of this Senate which is at present looking into the Freedom of Information Bill I am certainly concerned with this aspect of the legislation. There is no doubt that these matters are important. It may, of course, be that ASIO either in whole or in part is excluded so far as its records are concerned from the operations of the Freedom of Information Bill. Nonetheless, I think we need to consider whether this is a desirable course because we know that that Bill is not yet finalised. We may, after the finalisation of that Bill, want to change this ASIO Bill to conform more particularly with it. In the course of his fourth volume, Mr Justice Hope referred to this general trend towards more open government. He said: .

Submissions have been made to me that members of the public should have access to any records held by ASIO which relate to them, or at least to information as to the contents of those records.

He refers to the submissions made based upon the Freedom of Information Act in the United States of America and he points out that even under that Act many of the records of ASIO would be confidential information. He speaks of those matters which still would be left in the public domain and says:

I think that at present this is the limit to which it can reasonably be expected that disclosures should be made about security intelligence held by ASIO. I do not consider that a person who thinks that it may be suspected that he is a spy should be entitled to require ASIO to show him the records, or to give him the information, which relates to his case.

Mr Justice Hope says that in the future this may change. He states:

  1. . some classes of case will arise which will establish a need to enlarge the circumstances-

The position may change quickly. When we consider the final Freedom of Information Bill we may want to have a greater disclosure of information. When we look at the clauses in this Bill, we realise that there is certainly a difference in approach in the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Bill to that which is contemplated in the present proposed wording of the Freedom of Information Bill. Of course, the present wording of the Freedom of Information Bill may not continue to be its final form. Clause 1 7 of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Bill sets out the powers and functions which the Organization should employ. It points out that its functions include: for purposes relevant to security and not otherwise, to communicate any such intelligence to such persons, and in such manner, as are appropriate to those purposes;-

Clause 18(3) widens those purposes. It states that notwithstanding what is stated in paragraph 17, the Director-General may disclose information in certain circumstances to officers of police forces, to the Customs Officers and to the Office of National Assessments or the Minister. Therefore, such information may proceed to go overseas and be disclosed on a fairly wide basis. These are important questions of privacy with which the Freedom of Information Bill is concerned. Some worry exists about that clause. We must realise also that under clause 1 8 of the Bill there are strong prohibitions against the communication by an officer, and employee, contractor or ‘person who has any agreement or arrangement with the Organization’- very wide terms indeed- against disclosing any information acquired in the course of his service or arrangements with ASIO. It must be realised that these are wider provisions than those contained in Section 70 of the Commonwealth Crimes Act, provisions which have been widely criticised. Many people have suggested that they ought to be watered down. Under the Crimes Act, an offence by an officer of the Public Service relates to the disclosure of information. The Section qualifies it as information which:

It is his duty not to disclose.

Those words do not appear in the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Act. We must recognise that the powers given in this Act are stronger. We must look further than that and realise that accidental disclosure could well create an offence. Other clauses of the Bill also contain freedom of information implications. Clause 57 forbids certain disclosure by or to the secretary of the Appeals Tribunal. I will talk about the Appeals Tribunal later. However, the AttorneyGeneral can give a certificate which can cause the refusal of information in certain circumstances to the Tribunal itself when sitting on appeal. Clause 79 creates offences in regard to the disclosure by a member or official of a Tribunal. Clause 90 forbids the publication of the identity of an officer, employee or agent of ASIO. The mere giving or disclosing of that information is in itself an offence.

A general remark I make about these clauses is that the Freedom of Information Bill, as presently drafted, requires, in clause 28, that the only existing secrecy clauses that will continue are those that are prescribed by regulation. At some later stage we will have to consider in this Parliament under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, as I hope it will then be, whether such provisions in this legislation cought to be continued in that form or whether they are too extreme in accordance with our views of freedom of information.

Finally, we must bear in mind in respect of this freedom of information area what Mr Justice Hope said in the small part of his third report which was disclosed. He states in paragraph 42:

The Australian intelligence community is fragmented, poorly co-ordinated and organized. The agencies lack proper guidance direction and control. They do not have good or close relations with the system of government they should serve. In some cases, they have lacked funds and other resources (for example, adequate staff) to do the jobs expected of them. In other cases they have used lack of funds as an alibi for not doing jobs they should have done.

One presumes that much of that situation has been improved. But we should also bear in mind the warning Justice Hope gives in paragraph 46 of the report which states:

Although operational secrecy is essential for the effective discharge of their duties by the agencies, they have suffered from unnecessary secretiveness in some of their activities which need not be secret. On the other hand, the climate of leaks’ and ‘disclosures’ we have experienced lately is not to be taken lightly.

We must bear those comments in mind when we look at the parts of this Bill which relate to freedom of information.

Let me turn next to the position of the Director-General under this Bill and the whole question of parliamentary accountability. I recognise and applaud clause 7 of the Bill which provides that the Opposition shall be consulted before the appointment of the Director-General is made. I believe that this has been done in practice in the past and it is excellent that it is now incorporated in the present Bill. I welcome it. Clause 8 of the Bill, which deals with the powers of the Director-General, has been a subject of considerable criticism. It is a dual problem because it deals with the powers of the DirectorGeneral and points out that in regard to a particular individual it is not possible for the

Attorney-General or any other Minister for that matter to give the Director-General directions as to whether he should investigate that particular person. It also needs to be pointed out that this clause is subject to the general direction of the Minister. There is a real problem for government and security organisations, namely, that we do not want to have a Director-General who is all powerful and not subject in some way to parliamentary control. But at the same time, we do not want political interference directed into the question of who should be investigated. I believe that the balance that is struck in this clause is quite sound and I have no quarrel with this clause.

However, I do have some quarrel with respect to clause 9. It states that the term of office of the Director-General shall ‘not exceed a period of seven years’. I point out that that does not mean a fixed period of seven years. It could be a period of only one year. It could be a renewal of his term for one year. It could well be that the DirectorGeneral does not have a term of office that one would hope he would have. Mr Justice Hope also made this statement in his fourth report:

I think also that there is much to commend a principle of appointment to the office of Director-General for a stated period of years, perhaps five or seven. But appointments should be renewable, at the direction of the Government.

But the Bill does not do that. I regret that this is the case. I believe that really the appointment should be for a fixed period so that there is security of tenure for the Director-General.

Clause 20 is curious in that it states that the Director-General is to be free of influences and is not to show political partiality to any section of the community. It is a curious clause, but I suppose it is necessary to spell that out in the Bill.

I think that much of the main criticism relates to the fact that ASIO really will not be accountable to the Parliament. I have long held the view that there ought to be a small parliamentary committee of distinguished and long serving members of Parliament to supervise some of the work and activity of ASIO. I believe that this has been advocated often but Mr Justice Hope did not applaud it, nor does the Bill include it. However I remain of the view that that should be done. The annual report is to be made to the Minister, not to the Parliament. There has been criticism of the fact that there is no provision in the Bill for audit control. Mr Justice Hope, in his fourth report, expressed the view- and applauded the suggestion of the Treasury- that provisions for audit ought to be set out in the Bill. I believe that there is in fact an auditing of most of the activities of ASIO but I believe that there ought to be a provision in the Bill, as His Honour recommended, to make this evident and clear.

I pass now to a third aspect of which I am somewhat critical but also somewhat in praise. I refer to a reform, the establishment of the Security Assessment provisions and the Appeals Tribunal. I believe that this will give many people the opportunity to appeal against assessments which are unfavourable to them. In this regard the Bill generally follows the recommendations of Mr Justice Hope, but there are five matters which I think must be mentioned. The first is that there is no provision for retrospective operation of the provisions. People against whom assessments may have been made in the past will not have the opportunity of complaining and having their appeal considered. Mr Justice Hope, in his second report, came to a different conclusion about this aspect. He recommended that there should be a form of appeal. His recommendation was that ‘the function of the Tribunal be to review adverse or qualified security assessments and any supporting information provided by ASIO at any time since it was established ‘. It is clear that the Bill does not adhere to that particular recommendation, which I regret.

As His Honour pointed out, there are probably many people whose careers have been and still are affected by sloppy, inadequate or vindictive reports of the past. The opportunity to appeal should be in the Bill. It was also pointed out in the Hope report that International Labour Organisation Convention 1 1 1 requires the setting up of an appeal provision. If the appeal provision is not adequate we may not be complying with the provisions of that convention. My second objection to what I think is generally an excellent improvement is that unfortunately appeals are limited in three ways. It has to be determined whether people are to have access to secret information. The appeal provision also covers the areas of migration inquiry and citizenship. No doubt there are other cases where appeal might be provided. Mr Justice Hope pointed out in the second volume of his fourth report that there are other cases and they will not be covered by this provision.

At page 1 93 of his report, he pointed out the considerable number of areas where communications of intelligence are made: To some State public servants; to some local government employees; to some other key point employees; to some university and other educational staff members; to some officers and members of trade unions and some other persons employed in the private sector. At page 1 94 of his report he states:

In addition to the persons concerning whom ASIO communicates security intelligence, there are persons concerning whom it obtains security intelligence. These include persons such as members of organisations or groups regarded as subversive or potentially subversive, and persons who have contacts with the members of unfriendly intelligence services.

He weighed up the situation and did not find it possible, at that time, to suggest that appeals should be provided for them, but did point out that after the appeal system has been operating for a period it may be possible to expand the provision to include other people. I regret that that has not been done in the Bill as we may not see amendments to this legislation for some considerable time. One would like to see it in this Bill.

One is also concerned at the criticism which I think has been levelled fairly generally across the chamber in regard to the fact that persons may not necessarily be notified of the adverse or qualified assessment that has been made of them. There is a Catch 22 situation here. In fact they are in a situation where it is thought by ASIO that they are too dangerous to be told of the assessment and they are not informed. Not only are they not notified; they also have no right of appeal. If accidentally they learn of the assessment it does not matter. There is no appeal provided for them. I find this inadequate and I think it ought to be amended. In addition, the Bill allows the Attorney-General to make the decision not to give a notice. It is not the Prime Minister, as Mr Justice Hope recommended; it is the Attorney-General who can make the decision to deny a person the right of appeal on information which may be mistaken.

There is a fifth matter that I wish to criticise briefly. I refer to the people who are to sit on the Appeals Tribunal. There is to be a presidential member and two non-presidential members. The non-presidential member in the ‘general category’ is described as one ‘whose standing and reputation in the community is such as to ensure public confidence in his integrity and fairness’. That could be anyone. That could be John Smith from the local garage. That provision does not cover the situation as I think it should. I believe that that person ought to be someone whose knowledge and understanding of civil liberties and whose respect in the community in these areas are such that the Tribunal would have a greater standing. I do not believe that it has been sufficiently spelt out in the Bill.

I do accept the fact that there is no provision in this Bill for confrontation of witnesses. To a lawyer this would seem very objectionable. One’s first reaction to the fact that one does not meet the person who is making the allegation against you is that this is almost unacceptable. However I am satisfied that in the security area there is a need for this provision. I just hope that the tribunal will be strong enough to ensure that there will be adequate testing of evidence before it because what is proposed is not normal under British common law.

I have indicated that I accept the general definition of powers set out in this Bill. I know that some of my colleagues and other people in the community regard security as ‘a holy cow’; all you have to do is mention the word security and you must give everything. I do not believe that is so. I have a passionate belief in civil liberty and a determination that I shall not allow those rights to disappear in cases where that can be avoided. I am not entirely satisfied with the fact that this Bill may now go on unchanged for a generation. I put to the Senate- I hope that people will listen to this plea- that there ought to be a time limit on this Bill. Shortly after this Bill becomes an Act, five years or some other reasonable time, it should be reconsidered, looked at and seen by the Parliament to be doing its duty. It should be looked at to see whether it requires amendment or not. I hope there is some move to this effect because members of this Parliament are not experts on security. They will never become experts on security because we never have enough discussion about it. I believe we should retain what we can of our power of scrutiny in this Parliament. I hope there will be consideration of my proposal. I hope also that the Attorney-General can indicate in his reply to this debate whether he would be prepared to reconsider the terms of this Act when the Freedom of Information Bill comes into law.

In the context of the overall situation and the great powers that have been given to ASIO and will be given to it under this Bill, I hope that there will be a finite limit. Perhaps sunset legislation is what is required. I hope that there will be an opportunity at a relatively early date to reconsider this legislation. I am not necessarily saying that we should undertake an investigation such as that undertaken by Mr Justice Hope. That might be more than is required. But the reenactment of this legislation should come before this Parliament so that we can carry out our duties as legislators and ensure that we have not sacrificed the liberty of the people by giving too much power to public servants.

Whilst I will not support the amendments to be moved by the Opposition- some of them are good, some of them are not very soundly based but quite a few of them have a great deal of truth in them- I will urge in the Committee stage that a limitation be placed on the life of this legislation and I will also urge my colleagues in this Parliament to look closely at some of the provisions that I have mentioned.

Senator PRIMMER:
Victoria

– I rise to oppose this Bill and to support the amendments proposed by the Opposition. I am very pleased to follow in this debate a person such as Senator Missen. Perchance if a person of his mind had been in charge of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation over the last 10 years there would not have been a need for this legislation. One can only say that the amendments proposed by the Opposition seek to guard the civil liberties of the citizens of Australia in relation to this legislation. Under this legislation, any citizen, and perhaps all citizens, can come under the umbrella of what on past record can only be described as an insidious and dangerous organisation. According to evidence that is available from various quarters, it is an organisation that has been responsible for and may well have destroyed the lives and opportunities of many innocent people in our community.

I hold the view that an organisation such as ASIO is not required in any democratic society. The fact that we have such an organisation indicates to me that we do not live in a democratic society. It is rather funny in many respects to be debating a Bill such as this. If one is old enough and has been sufficiently involved in politics over the last 20 to 30 years one will recall the scorn and propaganda that was churned out daily at the height of the Cold War by all sorts of people in Australia and in the so-called free world generally about the problems of the people of the Soviet Union with the terrible organisation known as the KGB. There may be some degrees of difference between the KGB and ASIO. No doubt a lawyer would point out to me that there are many differences. But I suggest that in the totality of the matter there is not a great deal of difference between the organisation under which the Soviet people have been oppressed over the years and an organisation such as ASIO which, during the period about which I have spoken, has been allowed free reign and which, as I said earlier, may well have destroyed the lives and opportunities of many decent, honest citizens in this country. I wish to quote briefly some excerpts from the report of Mr Justice Hope. I refer to paragraphs 14, 15, 18 and 19 of the report. In paragraph 14 Mr Justice Hope said:

As an organisation, ASIO needs management. Over a number of years, ASIO’s management was not as good as it should have been. If Australia needs a security service- and I shall show that it does- it must be well run. Those working in it must have high personal qualities.

Reading between the lines, I think Mr Justice Hope is suggesting that over a period many people working in ASIO and perhaps high up in the echelon have not had high personal qualities. That is the only inference I can draw from that paragraph. Paragraph 1 5 reads:

I found that matters of management- definition of goals, financial affairs, staffing and recruitment, communication and records procedures- had not had the attention in ASIO that they needed. In Part E (which in my view should not be published), I examined these and related matters.

I repeat that Mr Justice Hope said:

In Part E (which in my view should not be published) . . .

I think that the citizens of Australia must realise the inhibiting factors that we in this chamber have placed upon us at a time when we are debating a very vital Bill. We do not know and we shall never know what Mr Justice Hope is not prepared to publish. As the elected representatives of the people of Australia, I feel that we should know some more about such matters in order that we can make a proper judgment on the value of this legislation, or just what ASIO has been all about and on what it is likely to be about in the future- whether it is worth the provision which is made for it in the Budget. We are actually debating in the dark. In many respects, we are debating a pig in a poke. Mr Justice Hope went on in paragraph 1 8 to say:

I received submissions and information papers in some number from ASIO. But I must say that those submitted in the early part of my inquiry, on examination, proved to be of neither the quality nor the reliability one might have wished.

That is a fairly damaging charge for Mr Justice Hope to make about an organisation which has been in existence in this country for some 25 or 30 years. He went on in paragraph 1 9 to say:

Accordingly, I took steps to make it clear to the management at the time that I had the right and the duty to inquire into any question, to speak with any witness, to examine any paper, no matter how secret or sensitive the subject was represented to be. I am satisfied that, in the latter part of my inquiry, the management has understood that point and has co-operated accordingly.

The inference I draw from those paragraphs is not only that the organisation was incompetent but also that it was quite obvious that those in charge of it had to have their arms twisted up their backs before they would give Mr Justice Hope the information he sought under his charter- a charter from the democratically elected government of the day. Such was the power, the feeling and the attitude that was adopted by the hierarchy of ASIO during the early part of that inquiry that they presented themselves to be a law unto themselves, a body of men who were not only out of touch with someone who was given a charter to investigate them but also completely out of touch with what they were purported to be in the first instance and who set themselves above every institution in this country.

I ask: What guarantees do we have that this will not happen again? I think the suggestion put forward by Senator Missen that some form of sunset legislation should apply to a body such as this is to be commended. I suggest that no more than five years should pass before this legislation and this institution, which in the past has set itself above the government of this country, should be reviewed, and reviewed very thoroughly. I go so far as to suggest that it would not matter what type of legislation was brought down by any government or any Attorney-General in this country because such is the nature of secret organisations anywhere in the world that they are not to be trusted. I think the history of any secret police organisation in any country shows that a stage is reached when that organisation is not to be trusted. At a time when the citizens and the Government of the United States of America are concerning themselves with an investigation into one of their own secret organisations- the Central Intelligence Agency- in relation to the pruning of some of its powers, we have the Government of this country being prepared to give a similar organisation greater powers.

In the next few pages of his fourth report, Mr Justice Hope went on to say much about espionage, subversion, sabotage, et cetera. He has done no more than dredge up the old Petrov inquiry. I would have thought that a learned gentleman such as Mr Justice Hope would have looked for a brighter star on which to hang his argument. Quite frankly, I believe that anybody who brings down a report that is based on the Petrov inquiry is hanging his hat on a very tender and fragile peg. The whole of that part of Mr Justice Hope ‘s report reads something like an extreme right wing journal at the height of the Cold War. Talk in the report of the expulsion of diplomats from various countries on the grounds of their alleged illegal activities reminds me of nothing more than a group of petulant schoolboys saying, ‘You expel one of mine and I will expel one of yours’- a kind of game that is played by the brotherhood of spies around the globe as, I suppose, a sort of public relations exercise to try to prove to the citizens of the country that the agents are worth the tax money that is spent on them.

Mr Justice Hope goes on to talk about the type of weapons that a security service such as ASIO needs to operate- telephone taps, bugs or listening devices, mail interception et cetera. Those areas are where I suggest on past record ASIO has again ruined many people’s lives by stickybeaking into areas in which it had no responsibility to stickybeak. When we read what has come out of some of the special branch files, particularly in Adelaide, one wonders whether God or anybody else knows the personal lives and secrets of thousands of citizens around this country.

Perhaps the greatest understatement in the whole report, in my view, comes on page 98 at paragraph 177 where Mr Justice Hope said:

There is in Australia some feeling of antagonism to agents, based I think on the deception that is involved. An agent has to be accepted by the persons about whom he is reporting as one of their number, and as sympathetic to their objectives. In fact he is not one of their number, and may not be sympathetic to their objectives.

So we have a situation where one of these people worms his or her way into an organisation, club, group or political party on the pretext that he or she wants to be part and parcel of that group and has similar views and ideals. Of course, no one ever finds out that he is not one of the group because he probably moves away from the district and slips out of sight. In my view, a person who adopts that life style, that type of action, is the lowest form of human being I can think of. Quite frankly, if such a person is ever discovered there is only one treatment for him- the good old Australian boot. That is the only treatment for such people; they are the lowest of the low. I suggest that because that attitude is held by many Australians, a very healthy and justified antagonism is held towards agents or, as I prefer to call them, spies.

One other area where I believe an organisation such as ASIO presents danger to a nation is the opportunity that such organisations provide for infiltration by really dedicated double agents and operators for foreign powers. To use just one example why governments should be a little more sceptical about setting up such secret organisations, I refer to the three British agentsBurgess, McLean and Philby- who worked for years in British security and used that organisation to feed information about Great Britain back to their masters, allegedly in the Soviet Union. In fact, had the security organisation not been established in Great Britain it may well be that the masters of Philby, McLean and Burgess would have been able to find out less about Great Britain than they were able to find out by virtue of the fact that such a secret organisation had been established.

I want to get on to another matter. If I sound very sceptical about ASIO and if I am critical of it, it is because of this matter. I ask myself: Of what worth is ASIO when the chips are really down? I suggest that in the past it has not been worth a crumpet. In July 1974 it was alleged that at the Watsonia Army Barracks in Victoria there was an assassination squad and that that squad has a short list of the Prime Minister of Australia and four of his Ministers- Senator Murphy, Dr Cairns, Mr Uren and Mr Barnard. It was also alleged that that assassination squad had conducted missions in Ireland and Indonesia. Strangely, I thought anyhow, around that period and Australian Army rifle or submachine gun- I cannot now recall which- was found in Ireland. The then Minister for Defence, in reply to a question, said that as far as the Department knew that weapon had been stolen from an Army barracks in South Australia. That may well have been so, but it seemed a little strange that that allegation was made about this group having conducted an operation in Ireland and that an Australian Army weapon should be found there. Subsequent investigations by the Commonwealth Police- honourable senators should note that they were conducted by the Commonwealth Police and not by ASIO- proved the allegations to be correct. Even more strangely, the allegations were made by two fairly ordinary citizens when one looks across the broad spectrum of society- a couple of people who were fairly strongly committed to their opposition to the Vietnam war. One would suggest, from reading what we know about ASIO’s past, that they would have been the sort of people who would have been on an ASIO file because they would have been described as somewhat radical left wingers. So in effect ASIO in that period was watching the wrong people, and that is one of the reasons for my scepticism about ASIO. If one has ever been through such an experience one knows that it is fairly good ground for being sceptical about any organisation. The second reading speech of the Attorney-General (Senator Durack) on the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Bill states in part:

Australia faces a number of serious threats to its internal security including persistent efforts on the part of hostile intelligence agencies to obtain intelligence from within Australia.

Such a statement would not stand up in a court of law without some supporting evidence. But we as citizens of Australia and members of this Parliament are expected, I presume, to accept that statement without any supporting evidence and without any question. One presumes that it comes from this very organisation about which we are debating tonight, and the only thing that I know about that organisation is the name of its titular head. Search as we may in the proceedings of Estimates Committees we have been unable to find the budget of the organisation. We can ask questions but we never get an answer as to how that money is spent and generally what the organisation does with it or what the organisation does in general other than apparently spy on ordinary people; and when the chips are down it is not worth a crumpet.

We give the Attorney-General and the organisation the benefit of the doubt with regard to that statement. Let us presume that it is a true statement. I then ask myself: What type of intelligence are we in Australia capable of providing to some enemy or foreign power which is hostile to us, particularly in a time of peace? I analyse the situation and I say: As far as I am aware, we have no sophisticated military equipment that is not available to any spy or foreign security agent in many other countries. I cannot concede that Australia’s industrial machinery or practices are so advanced that any foreign agent would want to be nosing around Australia looking for them. Certainly Australia has large mineral deposits but there seem to be any number of satellites flying round the world that can photograph all our mining operations. They can photograph our wheat crop and can probably tell their own governments within a few hundred thousand bushels how much wheat Australia has. They can probably count every head of cattle in the country. So I ask myself what is left for any foreign agents- allegedly enemy or hostile- to search for in Australia.

The only conclusion I can come to is that Australia, for its population, has on its soil a large number of foreign military bases and that this is the military intelligence for which a power, supposedly hostile to Australia, is searching. In reality, it is probably a power which is hostile to the country for whom Australia acts as host. If that is the case, and I believe that it may well be, I suggest that the simple answer is to ask that country to remove from our soil its military bases. It may be that then we could disband the foreign espionage and sabotage role of ASIO which, as far as I am concerned, in the final analysis would be used for one purpose only and that is to maintain the status quo.

Senator WALTERS:
Tasmania

-The speech by Senator Primmer was an extraordinary contribution to the debate. The Senate heard about the Philbys and Burgesses in the United Kingdom and it was said that that is a good reason for being sceptical about the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. The Senate heard of alleged assassination squads that planned to assassinate Mr Whitlam and former Senator Murphy and it was also said that because ASIO did not discover those plans we have reason to be sceptical of the Organisation. I am wondering how much inside information Senator Primmer has which leads him to say that when the chips are down ASIO is not worth a crumpet. Would he really know? Would he have have been told how often ASIO has acted and kept people under surveillance to guarantee the security of our country? There is no way that we in Australia can expect ASIO to look after the security of every individual if we tie its hands and do not give it the means of accomplishing that job.

The Government is implementing in this legislation the basic reforms recommended by the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security led by Mr Justice Hope. This Royal Commission was set up by the Opposition when it was in government. At that time it had considerable reason to believe that this Royal Commission would look into the structure of ASIO and produce a responsible report. So far the Senate has had a lot of quotations from the report of Mr Justice Hope criticising the way in which some ASIO functions were previously carried out. Senator Ryan and Senator Missen said that we are rushing through this Bill. Perhaps the honourable senators opposite have forgotten that the Prime Minister (Mr Malcolm Fraser), when tabling this report in October 1977 foreshadowed the introduction of this Bill. There has been considerable debate about the relevant restructuring of this Bill. All honourable senators have been lobbied; we know the people of Australia have had a good look at it but still it is being said that it is being rushed through.

This is a completely new Bill; the Bill which was introduced 23 years ago is being replaced. Already there have been substantial changes. There is now a complete oversight by independent senior officials of all the budgetary estimates of ASIO and this has resulted in a much more efficient management of the Organisation.

The functions of ASIO are to obtain, correlate and evaluate intelligence relevant to security; for purposes relevant to security and not otherwise, to communicate any such intelligence to the appropriate people; and to advise Ministers and authorities of the Commonwealth in respect of matters relating to security. It is emphasised that ASIO does not act as an enforcement agency; it cannot enforce measures. This is emphasised in clause 17(2) which states:

It is not a function of the Organization to carry out or enforce measures for security within an authority of the Commonwealth.

The Bill goes on to say that any information picked up by ASIO in any of its functions must relate to the security of the nation. There has been quite an amount of criticism that perhaps by way of, say, listening devices or the opening of mail some information not related to the security of the nation could come into the hands of ASIO. As a result the Government has provided in this legislation that if that sort of information is picked up it must be very serious information before it is passed on; otherwise it must not be passed on to any authority. The seriousness of the information is judged by the offence to which it relates being punishable by imprisonment for life. In other words, if in the course of its duties ASIO comes across information about a murder about to be committed or a murder just committed, it is entitled to give that information to the relevant organisation. The information can also relate to offences attracting a maximum period of imprisonment of not less than 3 years. I believe that no clear thinking Australian would expect ASIO if it came up with information on a murder about to be committed to say that that information does not relate to the security of the country and therefore cannot be passed on. It is only reasonable to expect information of such a serious character to be passed on to the relevant police force.

The second category of information referred to in the Bill involves an offence punishable under section 235 of the Customs Act. They would be offences in relation to narcotics. If ASIO came across that information unsuspectingly we would expect it to pass on that information. Again, if information comes into the possession of the Organisation outside Australia I believe that the Director-General must require that information to be passed on if he is satisfied that it is in the national interest to do so. If any information outside those guidelines is passed onthat is, information about a minor offence- it is punishable by a $1,000 fine or one year’s imprisonment or, in special circumstances, a 2-year sentence. I believe that these provisions underline what ASIO is all about. It is not a lawenforcement agency. It correlates and gathers information and passes on to the relevant Ministers and departments information about the security of the nation. Any information it picks up along the way is ignored if it is of a minor nature or, if it is of a major nature, it is passed on to the relevant people.

I would now like to talk about the additional powers that have been granted to ASIO under this Bill, a matter that seems to be of concern to quite a number of honourable senators. Those additional powers concern the entering of premises to search for records, the use of listening devices and the opening and inspection of mail. In relation to these three additional powers there are safeguards. The Director-General cannot decide of his own accord to issue warrants to enter premises, apply listening devices or inspect postal articles. A warrant must be issued by the Minister. In regard to the searching of premises the Minister must specify on the warrant the special hours, either daytime or night-time, and he can issue a warrant for a duration of only seven days. As far as listening devices are concerned, in a critical situation the DirectorGeneral can hand out a warrant, but for a very limited duration of only 48 hours. People have been critical of this provision, and Senator Ryan asked what sort of crisis would bring this about. If a telephone conversation were in progress the Director-General would hardly be able to get a warrant from the Minister. I believe that in those circumstances he ought to be able to issue a warrant to listen in to the conversation. As long as there are powers limiting the duration of the warrant to 48 hours, then I believe that that is reasonable.

Dealing with the appointment of the DirectorGeneral, whilst many people applaud our present Director-General, it is also said: ‘You never know who we might get next’. The Bill provides that the Prime Minister will appoint the Director-General in consultation with the Leader of the Opposition. The office of DirectorGeneral will be held for a period not exceeding seven years and after that, of course, the occupant is eligible for reappointment. He will not be reappointed after he has turned 65 years of age, and nobody who is 65 years of age can be appointed.

Senator Mulvihill:

– We do not want another problem such as the one with Edgar Hoover and senility.

Senator WALTERS:

-No, that is quite right. Those are the restrictions and safeguards that the Bill provides. In regard to a normal security assessment made in respect of employees of the Commonwealth, or a Commonwealth contractor, or in respect of a person for the purposes of the Migration Act, the Australian Citizenship Act or the Passports Act, if an assessment is made that is prejudicial to such a person’s interests then he must be given notice of his assessment. He can then make an appeal to a tribunal, and this is the first time, at least in a common law country, that such a provision has been implemented. There is complete protection of the individual’s rights. In normal circumstances, if a security assessment has been made, a person is told that this has been done and, if he so desires, he is able to take an appeal to a judicial tribunal. Of course, in regard to gross security assessments, a person would not be told. We could hardly expect that an enemy agent would be told that he was the subject of a security assessment, and in those cirucmstances, of course, such a person would not be given any notice.

Turning to clause 8, it is made very clear that the Director-General controls the Organisation. Senator Ryan was particularly critical of this when she said that the Minister of the day should be able to override the Director-General in every regard. I believe that that is entirely wrong. If we look at the areas in which the Minister has no power over the Director-General, we find that they are very limited. Of course, the DirectorGeneral abides by the guidelines set down by the Government. On the question of whether the collection of intelligence by the Organisation concerning a particular individual would or would not be justified by reason of its relevance to security, then the Minister could not override the Director-General. In other words, the Minister is not able to prohibit the Director-General looking into the background of a particular individual. If the Director-General considers that such a person ought to be investigated then the Minister cannot override that decision and say to the Director-General: ‘You shall not investigate Joe Smith. ‘ Again, I think that that is a very justifiable restriction on the Minister. Further, the Minister must leave it to the Director-General to decide whether information gained is relevant to security. If certain information is gained, then the Minister is not able to say. ‘No, I do not believe that that is in the interests of the security of the country.’ The Director-General must make that decision. The Minister cannot direct the Director-General as to what information should or should not be given either to another Minister or to the Minister’s Department or to an authority of the Commonwealth. I believe that that should be at the direct discretion of the DirectorGeneral and should not be in the hands of the Minister. The legislation provides also for complete co-operation between ASIO and the police forces and other State authorities.

I should like to return now to my main theme. If we want ASIO to carry out security in this country then we must allow it to do so without tying its hands too much. Senator Primmer ‘s criticism of ASIO I believe was completely irresponsible. We have to trust our law enforcement officers. We have to trust ASIO, which is gathering information necessary to give us the security that we believe is so essential in this country. I have very much pleasure in supporting the Bill before the chamber.

Senator MULVIHILL:
New South Wales

– I rise largely to substantiate what was espoused by the Opposition spokesman at the commencement of this debate and restated by my colleague Senator Wheeldon. The real crux of the issue is how in a democracy we can maintain objectivity without a security agency becoming the plaything of a political party. When talking of objectivity, I can think of no finer example than that of a very illustrious British Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison, during the cold war period of World War II, the phoney war period. In his memoirs he pointed out that within a week he had Harry Pollitt, a very left wing boilermaker, in one cell in Broadmoor, and two retired British Admirals in the next cell. Pollett was not there because he was a militant trade union boilermaker but because he was trying to justify the infamous Ribbentrop-Molotov treaty. On the other hand, and this is the important issue, the other people were part of the British establishment, former naval men who thought that Hitler was a good bloke, and Morrison put them in too. That is the sort of objectivity that I would like to have seen carried through into postwar Australia when Chifley appointed Justice Reed as the first ASIO Director.

All over the world people are polarised on the question of security. The present dilemma is that many countries are confronted with are terrorist groups which in a strict sense are not Marxist or even fascist. They are anarchist groups which have been responsible for some very highly successful political assassinations in Germany, Italy and other countries. For that reason I would say there is a need for a security organisation, whether it be the KGB, UDBA, MI5, the FBI, the CIA or our own ASIO.

I think I can speak for the Attorney-General (Senator Durack), although he cannot comment, and also for Senator Wheeldon, who served with me on the Townley Committee. We had the rare experience of dealing with the then chief of ASIO. As a socialist I would say without any shadow of doubt we came to the conclusion that the apparatus that had been created was not sufficiently vigilant in monitoring the activities of people whom I would regard as being on the far right. I say that deliberately. I do not think I am breaking any security regulations in saying so, but at the instigation of the former Prime Minister I did have the opportunity of testifying before Mr Justice Hope. At that time I felt that ASIO was not as well meshed in with Commonwealth and State police as it could be. I think of its own volition it did not keep up with monitoring Spremnost and other far right wing papers. I said to Mr Justice Hope and I say now that I do not mind a person on the Yarra bank in Melbourne or in the Domain in Sydney ranting on, as he is entitled to do, about what he thinks is wrong with society, but the fact is that in the history of Australia- and in this view I was buttressed by State and Commonwealth police testimony before the famous Townley Committee- no group on the left has used explosives, dynamite; but it has been used by people of the far right.

Among a host of documents received by the Townley Committee was correspondence dated 18 December 1969 between the then Acting Minister for Foreign Affairs and my local members, the Hon. William McMahon, and Tom Hughes, the then Attorney-General, about a spate of illegal and unlawful acts by a certain ultra right wing group of Croatians. Whilst I do not speak as an academic, I have been in my share of incidents. We have been very lucky that no deaths have arisen from some of these incidents, whether they be at the Macobean Hall, the Paddington Town Hall or any other place. I know that at times, as a democrat, I find phone tapping and kindred things repugnant. But because of what I have seen in such incidents as the Hilton bombing if I have to choose between a phone tap and saving people ‘s lives, I will choose a phone tap. However, I make one qualification and in doing so lean towards the view expressed by Senator Gareth Evans, Senator Tate and others. I believe that there should be effective monitoring.

The Townley Committee could have made political capital out of some incidents if it had wanted to. I will indulge in a bit of brinkmanship here. Mr Barbour gave evidence. There were rumours abroad that his second and third in command perhaps did not like the Labor Government and were gong to blow the gaff on some things. My colleagues, Senator James McClelland and Senator Wheeldon, and I said we would reserve the right, in a dignified way to question Mr Barbour, which we did. We also said that if any of his colleagues felt that they wanted to get some political kudos they would face our interrogation. Wiser counsel prevailed. I could go on a little further but I will not.

I do not envy the Director-General of ASIO in the problem he faces in a democratic state. I believe the ASIO aparatus should enjoy the collective trust of political leaders. I know there is a Catch 22 situation, because it might be argued that when Dr Evatt was told by the then Prime Minister, Mr Menzies, that Petrov had defected or was going to defect, he might have been pocketed to a degree. He did not know what would happen in the subsequent inquiry. I think my colleague, Senator Primmer, referred to some of the characters at that time. What used to worry me was that mentally disturbed people such as Dr Bialoguski were apparently deemed informants by security personnel.

Even in politics we get tips from different people, and we have to evaluate the person who gives them to us. We have to decide whether we think he is a bit too far one way or one of these people prone to exaggeration or inclined to playing something down. It is evaluations such as this that the security apparatus has to grapple with. It is all very well to say that Malcolm Fraser will talk to Bill Hayden and say: ‘We feel there is something on the verge of happening’. My own view is that if there is to be a massive expenditure, we all like to know what is happening.

I have raised the method of recruitment with the Attorney-General, but I doubt whether he will reply. We are in a position to know that the Government is indulging in more effective recruitment. I know that consideration has to be given to whether an industrial strike may develop political complications. I believe that sometimes some of our writers get caught up on continental literature as distinct from Austraiian trade unionism. I do not say that with a jingoistic attitude, but I believe there is a dividing line for somebody leading a legitimate strike at the dockyards for payment of dirt money. It does not mean that he is going to sabotage a modern submarine or some radar equipment. Unfortunately a lot of our dailies seem to take a fiendish delight in looking for something sinister in this area.

I have referred in this chamber many times to a very good paperback entitled The Hour of Maximum Danger, by Barlow. I do not know whether the Attorney-General has read it. It described i i people operating a spy ring in England. Three were aligned to political parties. The other eight felt that society had done them wrong. The girl who never became Miss Britain had a grievance. A South African felt that Britain was a bit tough with his country so he joined the opposition. I know that in cases such as this espionage authorities flushed out the truth. It is difficult. I simply argue that whatever may be said, I believe that the six senators on the Townley Committee, none of whom happened to be Ministers at the time, could have acted effectively on the experience they obtained. I can assure the Senate that they would not have wanted to look at personal dossiers on the sly.

In talking about the new order, I am grateful that up to the present we have not had any serious errors. At one time a woman who was a pacifist would come under suspicion if her son did not want to join the cadet corps. News Weekly used to be very suspicious of the truth. I have a shrewd idea of where those suspicions came from. But I will not degrade this debate. I have mentioned, by way of background, matters about which we have had a certain amount of fear in the past. We do not want to see this happen again. I emphasise again and again that I am unconvinced that honourable senators could not be trusted to form an Estimates-type committee which, if the estimates for ASIO went up by $1.5m, could ask what we were getting for our work? After all, it is not that long ago when a person I would call a trainee ASIO operative made overtures to one eastern European ambassador and was made to look very silly. There was another incident involving my former Victorian colleague, Bill Brown and an article that appeared in the Bulletin. A chap whose name started with ‘ W’ seemed to be the victim of hallucinations. I do not know how much he got from ASIO. I do not suppose anybody can expect to predict where bread he spreads on the waters will go to.

I would like to be reassured by the AttorneyGeneral. Surely all the head-shrinkers that we seem to have in the Commonwealth should be able to evaluate whether people will go around the bend at 35 or 40 if they face a bit of stress. Nobody has ever told why the naval rating who went a bit strange at Nowra was not found out before he set fire to all those aeroplanes. Yet there are people on fat salaries as psychiatrists. What do they do to earn the big money they are being paid? I do not know what method we use to evaluate people before they are recruited as ASIO operatives. I think some special evaluation should be made.

I suppose any person can give in to temptation. Recently in West Germany not one political party but all the parties have had secretaries seduced by East German operatives. I suppose that that is one minefield that we have to avoid. When that problem is linked with the worldwide narcotics problems and terrorism generally, I do not doubt for one minute that there is a need for such an agency but I repeat the recurring theme that if the Townley committee were resurrected perhaps we would not have a repetition of incidents such as that concerning the political activities of a mother being linked with the activities of her son at school. I know that such incidents have not occurred recently but, I repeat, we have big fears in that regard. Whatever has been written by Edgar Hoover, I believe that the Federal Bureau of Investigation did a very good job when it rounded up the GermanAmerican Bundist groups at the beginning of World War II. When it entered the Cold War era, some things went wrong, although the United States media had to accept some responsibility for what happened.

I wish to discuss in detail the establishment of the Security Appeals Tribunal, although I know it will be considered further in the Committee stage. I think that of all the injustices resulting from evaluations by the Asutralian Security Intelligence Organisation, the worst were suffered by some sections of the Yugoslav community. The people concerned certainly were radical but they had excellent trade union records. Some had served in our forces in World War II. When the Stalin-Tito schism occurred those people left the Communist Party. I did not become a member of the Senate until 1966. There were people then seeking Australian citizenship. To the credit of the then Administration, some of them obtained it but others did not until Al Grassby became Minister for Immigration.

I know of two specific cases in that regard. Irrespective of whether the government of the day is socialist or non-socialist, when a person can go to a Minister and get citizenship for a person within 48 hours somebody must have something to hide. I was able to get approval for citizenship for a couple of people of Yugoslav origin as quickly as that. Apparently they had been denied citizenship because the authorities determining eligibility were still referring to Communist Party records of about 1951 or 1953. 1 do not think that that speaks very well for our security records. There could have been people who flirted with groups of the Far Right- offshoots of the Australia First Movement- who were wrongly catalogued. No doubt serious mistakes were made in areas such as those.

Some of my colleagues have raised the civil liberties aspect. I can remember going to the home of one of the chaps I mentioned to tell him of the good decision. Frankly, I told him that I could make a good speech documenting his case. His 16-year-old boy said: ‘We are happy that Dad has Australian citizenship but, if you do that, how do you think 1 will cop it at school?’

Children and teenagers can be cruel. I believe that that man should have had more redress than he did but he settled for a small victory. I know that that is one of the difficulties which security organisations have to handle. On the other hand, I know of the dangers involved in hijackings and the blowing up of hotels.

I return to the heart of the matter and refer to Division 3 of Part IV of the Bill which deals with the establishment and organisation of the Security Appeals Tribunal. I took the liberty of drawing to the attention of the Attorney-General (Senator Durack) the matter which I will now outline. I refer honourable senators to a booklet entitled A review of operations 1967-70, which was prepared by the Canadian Immigration Appeal Board. I wrote to the Canadian Labour Congress, which is the equivalent of our Australian Council of Trade Unions, about its dealings with people of ethnic backgrounds on the matter of citizenship. The President of the Labour Congress, who replied to me, referred to a system involving a president and nonpresidential members. The Canadian body has nine members, any three of whom would constitute a sub-committee. I think that the modus operandi there probably is that three members would go to Montreal or Toronto rather than require people be brought to Ottawa for interrogation.

When we were in government, I think I had the confidence of a very fine Minister for Labour and Immigration in the honourable member for Hindmarsh, Mr Clyde Cameron. I know that then, as is the case under the present Government, there were people to whom I would not grant citizenship. They could have been involved in prostitution or the narcotics trade or they could have been genuine security risks. But I welcome the establishment of the Security Appeals Tribunal because, just as injustices were done in the period from 1950 to 1972 or 1973, some are being done at the moment also. I want to detail some of them. I know that it is sometimes very difficult with Middle East migrants to get police security reports, even when we might have some doubts about a particular person. I could mention people in the Armenian community who do not have citizenship. Some have not been allowed to enter Australia because of certain fears of groups over there.

I would like the Attorney-General to explain to me what the membership of this Tribunal will be when it is set up. The Bill makes fleeting reference to the membership including perhaps trade unionists and ethnic people, but what son of people will get onto the Tribunal? I would like to believe that a trade unionist will be included. I think that at the moment the Minister has before him the cases of seven people awaiting the establishment of this Tribunal. A case I am thinking about concerns a Latin-American who, it could be said, was a leftist in Chile. Such a person might have been very much to the Left there. So, when he comes to this country, do we automatically say to him: ‘You will never get Australian citizenship ‘? How do we evaluate such a case?

I would be quite happy if a judge were appointed as the President of the Tribunal, but I would like to believe that, because a person such as the person I have mentioned was a militant trade unionist, the Tribunal would not say to him: ‘That was the third strike in which you were involved; you will never get citizenship’. I would like to believe that the ACTU will be asked to provide a non-presidential appointee to the Tribunal. Even further perhaps, I would like to believe that the appointee will be a post-war migrant or someone of migrant stock. That is not an innovatory suggestion. It applies in Canada. The Canadian Labour Congress has different ethnic components to ours. There would be more Ukrainians and Poles there than there would be here. But we could offset that situation with Italians, Greeks and Yugoslavs. I would like the Attorney-General to be specific as to what sort of people we will appoint as non-presidential members.

I have heard some of my legal colleagues talk about there being three non-presidential members. I would like us to go ahead and have perhaps nine. We could have three legal people to constitute the sub-committee chairmen and the other six people could be drawn from a crosssection of the community. I know that it would be dear to the heart of the Minister for Science and the Environment (Senator Webster), who is at the table, if the appointees were to include a prominent rural producer from Victoria. Who knows, a Macedonian from Shepparton who is denied citizenship could appear before the Tribunal. In that event, who would be better than a member of the Potato Growers Federation and perhaps a National Country Party voter to be a member of the panel of the Tribunal hearing that case? But I would like to buttress such an appointment with the appointment of an ACTU representative or a militant Yugoslav or Italian.

I am putting it to the Attorney-General: If the Tribunal consists of nine members, I would like one third of that membership to be selected from the trade unions and ethnic communities. I would like to believe that there are watchdogs within the Tribunal. I know enough about numbers. That is what went wrong with ASIO when previous Liberal-Country Party governments were recruiting people in the Cold War period. I am not as extreme as some of my colleagues, but I have heard people ask who were ASIO’s trade union informers in those days. I could name one fellow who tried to succeed in about six ballots. Let us say the he got his money mixed up with union money. It was alleged around Sydney that some ASIO people used to come to him to obtain information. All I can say is that I am sure that he would give a lurid report on the terrible motives of some of the moderate trade union officials in Sydney if they exposed his weakness. Those are some of the problems we face.

I know that at this stage we are only in the second reading debate, so I sum up my contribution in this way: I believe that the amendments which have been foreshadowed by the Opposition are aimed at providing a stabilising factor to avoid the excesses that, perhaps unwittingly, occurred in the period from 1959, in particular, to about 1966. Secondly, I hope that the AttorneyGeneral, if not in this second reading debate then in the Committee stage, will respond to some of the questions asked. Perhaps some of my legalminded betters will be able to explain in a clearcut manner what the membership of this Tribunal will be. The Tribunal could do a lot of good or it could do a lot of harm. It might well be that one of the members of the Tribunal assessing the application of someone from the ethnic community is from the wrong side. So the matter is full of difficulties.

I do not think that we should become patronising, but there are many Anglo-Saxons who, when they are faced with a volatile person with a different background, seem to write that person off as being subversive. He is considered to be dangerous. The minds of those Anglo-Saxons go back to some of the early Sydney street bombings and those sorts of incidents. I make this point very strongly: If we want the Tribunal which is to be established under the provisions of Division 3 of Part IV of the Bill to gain the respect of the people at large, if the Government appoints nine members from a cross-section of post-war Australians, the Tribunal will play a very effective role. Having said that, I would like to believe that if the Government will not reappoint the Townley committee, with its illustrious membership, it will at least permit us to have greater latitude in Estimates Committee hearings because I believe that if we received an updated version of the answers that we were given to some of the probing questions that we asked in the period from 1972 to 1974 some of the myths which surround ASIO will be destroyed. I leave it at that.

Senator KILGARIFF:
Northern Territory

– I support the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Bill, the Telecommunications (Interception) Bill, the Telecommunications Amendment Bill and the Customs Amendment Bill (No. 2). I commend the Government for taking what I believe today to be a very realistic viewpoint and strong stand. I believe that by far the majority of the people of Australia is looking to government today to take the necessary actions. The position today is a far cry from the time when Australia was considered to be in a backwater. Over the last few years there has been an increasing build-up of subversive action and terrorism throughout the world. There has also been a build-up of these activities in Australia. We read day after day of acts of terrorism, murders and bombings that take place in this country.

The time has arrived when Australians must realise that the acts of terrorism that take place in other parts of the world are unfortunately a fact of life in Australia. Only last year two unfortunate men were killed when a bomb exploded outside the Sydney Hilton Hotel at around dawn. But this bombing is not to be looked at as an isolated episode. I think that over the years there has been a general feeling throughout Australia that there is an enemy within Australia- that we are being attacked within Australia. This sounds like a melodramatic statement. But one only has to look at the situation in terms of terrorism, subversive action or drugs to see the truth of that statement.

I come from the northern part of Australia. Many people from that area have believed for many years that action should have been taken in respect of certain activities. There are fewer people in the north of Australia and therefore the movement of people, vehicles and aircraft is more obvious to the ordinary person in the north. He sees things that he wonders about and which concern him. Of course, only last year a Royal Australian Air Force Hercules aircraft flying into Australia intercepted an aircraft which had not reported in. The aircraft was detected on radar and eventually it had to make a forced landing after being followed to Katherine. The pilot set fire to the aircraft which was, of course, loaded with drugs. This was an exceptional case. It was a case that was discovered.

I can assure you, Mr Deputy President, that many reports of unidentified aircraft, of lowflying aircraft just out to sea, are coming from people who live in the north of Australia. One wonders what on earth a light aircraft would be doing in such areas. The emergency services also receive reports of aircraft which fly in over the coast. Several of these reports have been unexplained. As I have said, it is perfectly obvious to people in the north that something illegal is taking place. One hears reports of drugs being brought down through the road system of the north. For example, it is claimed that packets of drugs are carried between two tyres on a semitrailer. There have also been many instances in the north of the detection and destruction of drug crops. I believe that there are many more crops which have not yet been discovered.

Ships and sailing boats come into Darwin Harbour from overseas. I can assure honourable senators that from my understanding of the situation many of these boats do not report in and on many occasions drugs have been and still are being brought in. I believe that these boats are part of the chain that eventually reaches the market in the eastern States. All of these factors add up to the conclusion that the average Australian is very concerned about what is happening to Australia today.

At Question Time this afternoon Senator Robertson, the other senator from the Northern Territory, asked a question about a statement that was made by a Northern Territory judge in Adelaide on 27 March. Mr Justice Muirhead of the Northern Territory Supreme Court said that the north is open to terrorism and more surveillance is needed. I know Mr Justice Muirhead and I think his remarks were very timely. I think it is rather appropriate that yesterday’s Australian should have run no fewer than half a dozen articles on terrorism at a time when we are discussing the provisions of this legislation. Mr Justice Muirhead is a very wise and aware person. One of the articles which appeared in yesterday’s Australian stated:

Australia’s north is exposed and vulnerable to terrorist attack but police there have no way to counter it, a judge told a forensic science symposium on terrorist activities yesterday.

Mr Justice Muirhead, of the Northern Territory Supreme Court, told the conference in Adelaide that one of the basic safeguards against terrorism was surveillance of suspects. But the Northern Territory Police Force had no Special Branch, or even a plane or helicopter.

I might just add that it is most unfortunate that the Special Branch of the Northern Territory Police Force was disbanded in, I think, 1973-74 by Senator Murphy, the then Attorney-General.

As a result the secret files- the confidential files - that were held by the Special Branch of the Northern Territory Police Force were destroyed. I think that this was most unfortunate. Perhaps the honourable gentleman at that stage did not envisage that Australia was going to be attacked- attacked by the enemy within. Because of the action he took valuable records were destroyed. I would imagine that the files that were destroyed at that time could have thrown light on many situations today. Perhaps they could have provided evidence to help apprehend many of the individuals who have escaped the law today.

Mr Justice Muirhead has called for the setting up of a special branch once again. He also called for more surveillance. Of course, this is not now a matter for the Federal Government because the Northern Territory has, as a result of the transference of power, its own form of selfgovernment. In this respect it will now be up to the Northern Territory police force once again to develop a special branch. It is a matter which is also completely within the hands of the force. We know that in present times human rights campaigners have been undertaking more than a moderate amount of lobbying. I think that some of their actions are excessive to the extent that if we are not careful Australians will become what I and many other people “have forecast has been developing for years. We will become a nation of soft Australians.

I am talking about the Northern Territory because, to my mind, the north is a nerve centre for all these various problems which we are talking about tonight. The Judge went on to state:

The Northern Territory is a sensitive area, geographically exposed, and because of its minerals and diverse ethnic groups, subject to stresses, . . . Yet its police can boast no Special Branch. It was closed some years ago, I assume on orders from Canberra.

His assumption was quite correct. He went on to say:

Surely a basic safeguard against terrorism involves surveillance of the movements of suspected persons.

This in turn must surely involve the maintenance of an efficient national intelligence agency- an agency which has the confidence of overseas agencies and which has components and information-gathering facilities in all States and territories.

In short, in this area, again perhaps the views of the human rightists who appear to have a deep suspicion of the collation of records and data for policy and security purposes, may require some modification if there is to be realism and awareness of the importance of a preventative approach to the problem.

They are very wise words from a person who, as I said before, has had considerable experience in the north. At this same conference, a police chief warned of nuclear blackmail and that terror was moving closer. Chief Superintendent J. Fletcher who is in charge of the Commonwealth Police counter-terrorist section stated at the same Sixth National Symposium on Forensic Sciences:

Internation] terrorism had a direct interest in Australian affairs.

The Chief Superintendent went on to say:

Australia is no longer immune from terrorist attack and the frontiers of international terrorism are moving closer . . . Australia could also become an easy target for proxy terrorism attacks designed to bring pressure on foreign governments.

That is the position today. The suggestion is made that it is quite likely we will see more terrorism and subversive activities in Australia. This has become more obvious in Canberra where there have been attacks on embassy staff. It is the responsibility of the Federal Government to see that a realistic approach is taken to the problems that exist today to ensure that Australia is protected. Of course, the necessity for the formation of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation has gathered strength. During World War II, security, surveillance and espionage took a much cruder form, if I may put it that way. These operations were certainly carried out during the last War. Reports broadcast by commercial radio stations indicated the movement of our shipping, including troop ships, in and out of our ports. Wireless sets were used to send messages in morse code and in other ways. Those messages were picked up by agents and carried overseas. Even with the cruder methods that were used in those days, a remarkable amount of information was transmitted from Australia.

It became obvious after the War in 1949 that an Australian Security Intelligence Organisation should be developed in Australia. Of course, we know that this was brought about by Mr Chifley, the then Labor Prime Minister. Mr Justice Reed established and organised ASIO. It continued in that form for quite some time. I believe that it was a tremendous effort for those days. But with the new sophistication of life and communications and the ability of people to adopt more sophisticated means of spying and surveillance, ASIO, as then structured, became out of date. In 1974, there was a raid on the ASIO headquarters by the then Attorney-General and another person by the name of Milte. I suppose that this was the worst point of the Organisation ‘s history.

Arising from those events, the previous Labor Government- I commend it for doing soinstituted an inquiry into ASIO. Mr Justice Hope was asked to look into the situation and to report back to the Parliament. No doubt, many members of Parliament and interested Australians have read the eight reports presented by Mr Justice Hope arising from the Royal Commission on Intelligence and Security. The reports make very interesting reading. I wish to deal with some of the matters that are dealt with in various parts of the reports. Although some parts of the reports have been quoted already in the debate, there are many other interesting matters that could be quoted from them. One of the important aspects is dealt with in the fourth report of the Royal Commission. Mr Justice Hope discusses at some length the ASIO situation and describes at some length subversion, sabotage, terrorism, security needs, disinformation, and other matters. In the introduction to the report, His Honour mentions that ASIO has been Australia’s internal security service since it was set up in 1949. It is required by statute to carry out certain intelligence and advisory functions for the protection of the Commonwealth from acts of espionage, sabotage and subversion. The introduction to the fourth report quotes what Mr Chifley said in 1949. He said:

A great increase in Australian security tasks and responsibilities has made it necessary to re-establish a separate security service.

This is what Mr Chifley had to say at the time he announced the establishment of the Organization.

In regard to the scope of the report he stated:

The essential part of my terms of reference is: ‘in the light of past experience, and having regard to the security of Australia as a nation, the rights and responsibilities of individual persons and future as well as present needs, to make recommendations on the intelligence and security services which the nation should have available to it and on the way in which the relevant organisations can most efficiently and effectively serve the interests of the Australian people and Government . . .’

From that point he commenced his mammoth task. It is of interest to read some of the matters he investigated and some of the information that he imparts in this report. In the report he speaks of disinformation and deceptive information. Although other people have read various parts of the report, I think it is of importance that other aspects of the report be cited and made known in order to give to the people of Australia an understanding of the necessity for developing ASIO. After all, that is the prime objective of this legislation. In regard to disinformation His Honour said:

Disinformation’ is the anglicisation of a Russian word ‘Dezinformatsiya’, first used in the Soviet Union in the nineteen twenties. It is false, incomplete or misleading information passed with these aims:

to influence the political decisions of other governments;

to reduce the effectiveness of inimical governments, parties, organisations or individuals;

to create a favourable climate in which to execute specific policies or to counteract an unfavourable climate or events.

I would think that if one considered the information that is put out these days in various quarters, one must agree that a lot of it must be classified as disinformation to influence the political decisions of other governments. I would suggest that ‘other governments’, in the light of what we are discussing tonight, means our own Australian Government. Thereby the necessity for a powerful organisation that can protect Australia’s security and the Australian people can be seen. Mr Justice Hope spoke of subversion in his report and stated:

Subversion is difficult to define but is nonetheless a very real, and maybe a very dangerous form of activity. In paragraph 35 I described rather than defined it as an activity whose purpose is, directly or ultimately, the overthrowing of the constitutional government, and in the meantime the weakening or undermining of it. ‘Overthrowing the government’ does not, of course, refer to the ousting by constitutional methods of the political party in power for the time being but the overthrow by unconstitutional methods of the established constitutional government or system of government.

I would suggest that there is considerable food for thought there. As I have said, Australia is no longer in a backwater. It must now consider itself in the forefront of terrorism. It is a part of the world where daily we see violent acts. Further on he discusses terrorism. He stated:

As with subversion, terrorism is difficult to define precisely. The act or threat of force designed to terrorise to achieve political ends needs including in any definition of terrorism. One description defines these elements in this way: the threat of violence, individual acts of violence, or a campaign of violence designed primarily to instil fear- to terrorise . . . Terrorism is violence for effect, not only, and sometimes not at all, for the effect on the actual victims of the terrorists. In fact, the victim may be totally unrelated to the terrorists ‘ cause. ‘

Finally I refer to what Mr Justice Hope said in regard to Australia’s security intelligence needs. He said:

I find, therefore, that Australia needs a security intelligence organisation like ASIO. The proper fields for investigation by ASIO should, however, be more clearly defined than in the present ASIO Act.

There he is describing the old Australian Security Intelligence Organization Act that was introduced by the Chifley Government in 1949. He saw the necessity for the upgrading of the Act. In fact, we are discussing more than an upgrading of the ASIO Act; actually, a completely new Act is being brought in. Referring to the fields to be covered by ASIO, he said:

They should include: Espionage.

Active measures’.

Subversion.

Sabotage.

Terrorism (politically motivated violence). Domestic activity related to violence and subversion abroad.

Much has been said regarding this legislation. It is quite true that most speakers before me have gone into the details of the Bill. A lot of honourable senators have indicated their strong support for it, others have indicated that they have some concerns. Might I suggest to the people who do show some concern, particularly about human rights, that in looking at Mr Justice Hope ‘s report and looking at the legislation that has been introduced one does find some variation. But after looking at and studying the variations between the report and the legislation I would suggest that the variations which have been introduced- there are not too many- are not tremendous. Where the old Act has been widened it has been improved.

I support the Bill and believe that quite a lot more could be said on this matter. I have dealt mainly with the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Bill but perhaps I could refer briefly to the other legislation, the Telecommunications (Interception) Bill and the Telecommunications Amendment Bill. They give real teeth to the authorities to be able to track down criminals and agents acting against Australia. We full well know that it is not the small crooks, the small spies, who are involved in these issues; it is people with immense finances and resources available to them. Only by upgrading our methods of detection can we be aware of these people, trace them, catch them and prove their guilt. Having in mind the safeguards that have been proposed, surely there is no one in Australia who does not see that Australia has to be protected, that authorities should have the right to use means of intercepting telephone calls and to use bugging devices, et cetera, to protect Australia. Surely this is something that all persons should support. I support the Bill.

Debate (on motion by Senator Douglas McClelland) adjourned.

page 1081

TASMANIAN NATIVE FORESTRY AGREEMENT BILL 1979

Bill received from the House of Representatives.

Ordered that the Bill may be taken through all its stages without delay.

Bill (on motion by Senator Durack) read a first time.

Second Reading

Senator DURACK:
Western AustraliaAttorneyGeneral · LP

– I move:

I seek leave to incorporate the second reading speech in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The speech read as follows-

The purpose of this Bill is to authorise the execution of an agreement between the Commonwealth and Tasmania for a program of native forestry. The program will assist in ensuring the supply of raw material to future forest product industries and we believe contribute to the longterm industrial development of that State, as well as enhance the environment. The implementation of that program will also assist in alleviating the current unemployment situation in, that State. In 1976, the Premier of Tasmania sought Commonwealth assistance to combat unemployment in his State. The Prime Minister commissioned Sir Bede Callaghan, C.B.E., to inquire into the structure of industry and the employment situation in Tasmania. Sir Bede’s report was tabled in Parliament in September 1977. The inquiry found that Tasmania had problems not encountered in other States. After considering the report, the Government has agreed that it would adopt a considerate attitude to policymaking affecting Tasmania. Sir Bede’s report stressed the need for the development of stable, efficient industries which provide opportunities for long-term growth. It also noted that forestry and its dependent industries were and would continue to be of vital importance to Tasmania ‘s economy. Forestry was seen as a means of providing worthwhile employment opportunities in both the short and long term.

The Industries Assistance Commission, in a recent report on timber and timber products, concluded that the forest product industries were generally low cost and efficient by Australian standards. The Government has recognised the potential of the fine paper industry in Tasmania to contribute to the State ‘s and the nation ‘s economy in its recent decisions on the protective requirements of that industry. The Government noted that the industry was efficient, decentralised and with a potential for expansion that would result in both replacement of imports and increased export sales. The Government shares Sir Bede’s view that short and long-term employment benefits would flow from an increased expenditure on forestry in Tasmania. The Government is aware that forests have value to the community besides timber production. It recognises that in most cases forests can be used for commercial purposes without impairing these other forest values for very long. It sees particular merit in proposals which seek to increase Australia ‘s forest estate, especially native forests.

Against this background, the Government viewed favourably a request from the Tasmanian Government for financial assistance for a program of native forestry development. The program approved comprises the establishment of eucalypt plantations on marginal farmland purchased previously by the State, the rehabilitation of forests damaged by fire and the thinning of blackwood regeneration to hasten sawlog production. The Government has offered to the Tasmanian Government loans of up to $ 136,000 in real terms for the five-year period which commenced 1 July 1978, on the basis that expenditure is matched by the State. In recognition of the time taken for forestry projects to yield a return on investment, the terms of the loans provide for a 20-year deferment of loan repayments. Interest payable at the long-term bond rate is capitalised in this period and repayments of capital and interest at the same rate are made in the subsequent 40 years on a six-monthly basis. The terms are similar to those agreed to by the States and incorporated in the Softwood Forestry Agreements Act 1978, but allow for a longer deferment and repayment period, reflecting the longer time required for the eucalypts to reach maturity. I commend the Bill to the Senate.

Debate (on motion by Senator Mcintosh) adjourned.

page 1082

PARLIAMENT HOUSE CONSTRUCTION AUTHORITY BILL 1979

Bill received from the House of Representatives.

Ordered that the Bill may be taken through all its stages without delay.

Bill (on motion by Senator Durack) read a first time.

Second Reading

Senator DURACK:
Western AustraliaAttorneyGeneral · LP

– I move:

I seek leave to incorporate the second reading speech in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The speech read as follows-

This Bill reflects in legislative form the proposals concerning the construction of the new Parliament House which the Prime Minister (Mr

Malcolm Fraser) announced in November last year. Since that announcement the Government has taken a number of steps in order to get the project underway .The names of the persons who have been invited to form the new Authority for the design and contruction of the House have been announced and a number of preliminary meetings have taken place. The panel to assess the competition to select a designer for the new Parliament House has been chosen. The stage has now been reached where soon it will be possible to proceed with the competition. Before it proceeds, however, it is necessary to establish the Authority which will control the design and construction of the new House. The purpose of this Bill is to establish it. It will be known as the Parliament House Construction Authority.

Since 1927 the Parliament has operated in a building intended to accommodate it for a temporary period. The growth of the nation since 1927 has brought with it increased representation of the people and more complex functions of government. As a result the temporary Parliament House has become increasingly unsatisfactory as a working place for members and senators, the staff who service the Parliament and the support services required to operate from Parliament House. From 1955 to the present day successive parliaments and successive governments have considered the question of the construction of a new Parliament House. In 1965, a joint select committee was appointed. Its main recommendation was to proceed with the new and permanent Parliament House. To facilitate this it recommended the establishment of a client committee which in due course resulted in the setting up of the Joint Standing Committee on the New and Permanent Parliament House. For a considerable time agreement could not be reached on a site for that new building. This question was resolved in 1 974 with the passage of the Parliament Act, which declared that the new and permanent Parliament House would be on Capital Hill. Since 1975, successive parliaments have appointed the Joint Standing Committee on the New and Permanent Parliament House, and the Committee has undertaken the onerous task of preparing the users’ brief for the building.

With the background of the several reports of the Joint Standing Committee, it has been decided that it is futile to proceed with short-term, stop-gap extensions to the existing building. As was announced by the Prime Minister in November last the Government has accepted the advice of the Joint Standing Committee and has decided to proceed with the design and construction of a new Parliament House with a view to its being opened on Australia Day, 26 January 1988. To give effect to this decision a powerful and competent authority will be established to undertake and carry out the design and construction of the project. The Authority will consist of a Chairman and five members. Five prominent Australian professionals and businessmen have already indicated their willingness to undertake the task. They are: Sir Bernard Callinan, Chairman, a leading engineer; Sir John Overall, an architect and formerly Commissioner of the National Capital Development Commission; Mr R. Ling, Chairman of Hill Industries Ltd; Mr N. Macphillamy, lawyer and businessman; and Mr L. Muir, stockbroker and financier. The sixth member of the Authority is the Commissioner of the National Capital Development Commission, currently Mr A. Powell.

The persons chosen to form the assessment panel are also men of great experience. They are Sir John Overall, Chairman; Mr John Andrews, architect of Sydney; Professor Len Stevens, engineer of Melbourne; and Mr I. M. Pei, an American architect. The Parliament will be represented on the panel by Senator Gareth Evans and by the honourable member for McMillan, Mr Barry Simon. The Authority will be a body corporate and in carrying out its task will have access to the skills and expertise of officers of the National Capital Development Commission, other Commonwealth bodies and persons outside the Commonwealth service. The Authority will have an executive officer who will be appointed by the Governor-General. Provision is being made for the Authority to engage specialist consultant services to supplement its resources as necessary.

Appropriate statutory recognition is given to the fact that the Parliament is the client for the new Parliament House and the Authority is required to have regard to any advice provided by the Joint Standing Committee on the New and Permanent Parliament House. That Committee will be the watchdog on behalf of the Parliament and continue the role it has played over the years in the development of the architectural brief. A resolution amending the terms of reference of the Committee will be presented to both Houses when this Bill has been passed by the Parliament. The Authority will of course be under the control of the Parliament and the Bill provides that the Authority must comply with any resolution passed by both Houses of the Parliament in relation to the design or construction of the building. It also provides that the responsible Minister may give directions to the Authority on any matter of policy, but these must be tabled before both Houses and shall not become effective for a period of five sitting days, during which time they may be disallowed.

Provision is made for both Houses of the Parliament to pass a resolution in each House by way of authorisation of stages of the building proceeding. The Authority will have paid to it, for its operations, such amounts as are appropriated by the Parliament for that purpose and the accounts of the Authority will be subject to the scrutiny of the Auditor-General. The Government is confident that through this legislation the design and construction of the new Parliament House will proceed to completion in 1988. The work of the Joint Standing Committee and the nominated members of the Authority has already set the scene for an architectural competition to select a design. It is the expectation of the Government that the new Parliament House will be truly the crowning achievement within the Parliamentary Triangle where already we have our great National Library and where the new National Gallery and High Court are now under construction. It is appropriate that the new Parliament House should become the focus of the bicentenary celebrations in 1988, as is the Government’s intention. The new Parliament House will be a place for the efficient conduct of the parliamentary affairs of the Commonwealth. It will be a symbol of the unity of all Australians. I commend the Bill to the Senate.

Debate (on motion by Senator Button) adjourned.

page 1083

AUSTRALIAN SECURITY INTELLIGENCE ORGANIZATION BILL 1979

Second Readings

Debate resumed.

Senator Douglas McClelland:
NEW SOUTH WALES · ALP

-The Senate is debating the Australian Security Intelligence Organization Bill and associated Bills. To the motion that the Bills be now read a second time, the Opposition has moved an important amendment which, because of the flow of the debate, may have been lost in the record. For the sake of the record I again read:

Leave out all words after ‘That’, insert, ‘the Bill be withdrawn and redrafted to provide:

that Annual Reports be presented to Parliament on the general operation of the Act and in particular the exercise of Special Powers under Part III, Division 2 of the Bill;

that regular periodic judicial audit be conducted into the Australian Security Intelligence Organization to ensure:

that it complies with its charter and the law;

that it does not unjustifiably infringe civil liberties; and

that it operates effectively and efficiently;

that the responsible Minister be fully informed by the Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization with respect to any matter, other than the contents of files relating to particular individuals, on which he has sought information and advice;

that the Leader of the Opposition be fully and regularly briefed on all aspects of the operation of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, including the exercise of its Special Powers under Part III, Division 2 of the Bill.

the proper financial accountability of the Australian Security Intelligence Organization, including the auditing of its accounts by the Auditor-General, as recommended by the Hope Report;

the redefinition of the concept of ‘security’, and in particular the element of ‘subversion’, in order to narrow its scope and limit the possibility of its mis-application;

the restriction of the circumstances in which, and the times for which, warrants may be issued under Part III, Division 2 of the Bill;

that communication by the Australian Security Intelligence Organization to State authorities of security assessment information in relation to individuals be made only upon condition of adoption by such State of a Security Appeals system similar to that created by Part IV of the present Bill;

that the Security Appeals system be given retrospective operation as recommended in the Hope Reprt

that no person be denied notification of the existence of an adverse Security assessment made about that person; and

that the communication of information purporting to identify an Australian Security Intelligence Organization employee or agent be penalised only when such information would endanger the safety of such person or itself be seriously prejudicial to security. ‘

In proposing that amendment the Labor movement is saying that it accepts the concept of a security system within the internal operation of Australia but that until such time as the matters that are suggested in our amendment become embodied in the legislation and become part and parcel of the charter by which the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation conducts its affairs any government, particularly this Government, will find it hard to sell the concept of an Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to the ordinary man and woman in the Australian community- men and women who believe that they have a right to say what they want to say, to do what they want to do and to think what they want to think without necessarily being subjected to the spying and Sprying that go on in what is or might become a police state. Just because someone says something against the government of the day, it should not be taken by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation to be a subversive utterance against the security of the state. I, like all of my colleagues who spoke earlier in this debate, am one of those who believe that the internal security of the nation should be fully and completely protected but that it is paramount that at all times the political rights and civil liberties of the ordinary man and woman in the Australian community have to be protected.

As one who has had a fairly lengthy period of service in the Labor movement and now a fairly lengthy period of service in this Parliament, regrettably I cannot escape coming to the belief that in past years, particularly during the era of the Menzies Government, the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation either was being used for political purposes by the government of the day or was itself operating outside its charter in order to engage in political espionage for the benefit of the government of the day. My mind goes back to the period of the early 1950s- about 1954- when the Menzies Government, after it had been in office for a mere five years, was under challenge at a general election. Suddenly a rabbit was pulled out of the hat and a man called Petrov appeared on the Australian political scene. Instead of the drama of the election being whether the old age pensioners of this country would receive a pension free of the means test, the drama of the day became whether members of the Labor movement were engaged in political sabotage or espionage in this country. I genuinely and strongly believe that but for the activities of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation being used as a political arm of the Government of that day a Labor government would have been elected in 1954.

Senator Cavanagh:

– We got 49 per cent of the first preference votes.

Senator Douglas McClelland:
NEW SOUTH WALES · ALP

-As my colleague Senator Cavanagh says, we got 49 per cent of the first preference votes. I think that if the political records of this country are perused it will be seen that we had to get only about 200 votes over about four seats throughout the length and breadth of Australia and a Labor government would have been elected. Having been the campaign director for the Labor Leader at the time in the electorate of Barton, I am convinced that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation was used then as a political arm of the Government of the day. I have no doubt that that sort of activity continued throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s and was used by the conservative governments of the day for spying and prying, particularly into the affairs of young men and young women who were opposed to Australia ‘s involvement in the war in Vietnam.

I come to an article that appeared in the Canberra Times on 10 June 1968. We will recall that at about that time our erstwhile colleague, Dr Cairns, had claimed that a conversation between him and a conscientious objector had been intercepted through bugging. He had first alleged that ASIO was responsible and then he thought it might have been the Special Branch of the Victorian Police Force. There were questions in Parliament. Answers were given by Ministers and then eventually a statement was made by the then Attorney-General, Mr Bowen. The Canberra Times of 10 June 1968- 1 1 years agocommented thus on that incident:

Even if Dr Cairns cannot take it any further, the matter ought not to be allowed to rest: it raises questions of great importance about the proper place of a security organisation in a modern and stable democracy like Australia.

I interpolate here to say that the remarks which appeared in the Canberra Times on 10 June 1968 and which I am about to read are apposite to the situation which exists in Australia in 1 979. The Canberra Times went on to state:

In the first place, it does not seem to have been seriously disputed that some sort of official eavesdropping did take place and that, whoever compiled it, a report ofthe conversation found its way into the hands of government ministers. Furthermore, it seems likely a number of senior public servants were sufficiently disturbed about the propriety of such surveillance of a Member of Parliament that, at some risk to their own professional positions, they let Dr Cairns know he was being watched. If these propositions seem preposterous, it has to be said that the Attorney-General would neither confirm nor deny the first two. As to the third, Mr Bowen virtually conceded Dr Cairns ‘s point by saying that he ‘would express some surprise and concern if that were the position because in this country . . . there are very tight statutory provisions about the disclosure of secret documents’.

The most disquieting implication which flows from this incident is that the security service has become involved in Australian domestic politics, which is not its intended or proper concern. It is not subversive to be opposed to national service, or to the war in Vietnam; it is not subversive to demonstrate against either, or indeed to demonstrate against an act of the government of the day. Disagreement, and the ability to express it, is what democracy is all about. A security service engaged in the photographing, phone-tapping and shadowing of people exercising their normal political rights and responsibilities as citizens of this country is not merely abusing the purpose for which the service was set up; it is a chill breath of the police state.

As I have said, those words that I have read from that excellent article in the Canberra Times of 10 June 1968 are apposite to the situation that prevails in this country today. Until our amendments are written into the legislation that is now before the chamber or until the present legislation is withdrawn and redrafted to contain the provisions set out in our amendments, the Labor movement will not be satisfied that the political rights and civil liberties of the Australian people are protected by the legislation. The Labor movement has always expressed its concern about the existing state of affairs. I say frankly that but for the advent of the Labor Government in the period from 1972 to 1975 there would have been no attempted reform of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation and indeed we would not have this sort of legislation, no matter how bad it is, before the Parliament today, because it was the activities of the Labor Government that set Australia about the task of reforming what has been an horrific situation so far as political activity in this country is concerned.

Our erstwhile colleague, Senator Murphy, a former Attorney-General in the Labor Government, has been much maligned, criticised and abused by our political opponents for his role as the Attorney-General of this country and as the Minister in charge of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. We have all heard from time to time from our political opponents opposite about the ‘raid’ on the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation, but I remind honourable senators opposite that at about that time there was to take place in this country a visit by the then Prime Minister of Yugoslavia. I remember that at the time the Yugoslavian Prime Minister called at Parliament House there were snipers in the trees and there were military personnel around here to give protection not only to him but also to the Ministers who might have been meeting him. That was as long ago as 1 973.

That brings me to the situation that is occurring in the State that I and my colleague, Senator Mulvihill, represent. In New South Wales not long ago people were being picked up, arrested and charged with having planned to blow up the Sydney water supply. In Newtown a Yugoslav entertainer went to a theatre and this minority section, this extremist section, this extreme right wing section of the community threatened to blow up the place and shoot those who attended the performance. Again we saw police snipers and sharpshooters. Then our attention moves to the South Coast of New South Wales where we find people engaging in paramilitary activities.

In the 1950s and 1960s the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation was hellbent on spying on, say, a Labor member of the Waterside Workers Union who might be seen talking in a hotel with a communist official of the Seamen’s Union because the two unions had a matter together before the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission in respect of a wage determination; and the fact that those two were seen talking would be reported on their files while all these right wing extremists were being allowed to go scot-free But, as I have said, we owe a debt of gratitude to our erstwhile colleage, former Senator Murphy, for some of the actions that he took in this regard. I draw the attention of the Senate to a statement that he made shortly after the Labor Government came into office. It was made on 20 December 1972, the day after the Whitlam Labor ministry was sworn in.

Debate interrupted.

page 1086

ADJOURNMENT

Parliament House- Trade Union Activities

The PRESIDENT:

– Order! It being 1 1 p.m., in conformity with the sessional order relating to the adjournment of the Senate, I formally put the question:

That the Senate do now adjourn.

Before putting this question to the vote I wish to reply to a question directed to me by Senator Coleman on 2 1 March. The honourable senator asked me questions concerning the role of the Commonwealth police who patrol the roads surrounding the parliamentary building. She also asked whether the role of the Commonwealth police had been expanded recently in connection with their Parliament House duties. In reply to the first part of the honourable senator’s question, it is not accurate to say that any person entering the public conveniences at the rear of Parliament House is questioned by a Commonwealth police officer. Questioning does occur if a person parks a motor car on the service road at the rear of Parliament House. With the concurrence of Mr Speaker and myself, parking of motor vehicles on the service roadway at the rear of Parliament House is restricted to certain authorised vehicles, as determined by the Secretary of the Joint House Department. Where parking occurs, Commonwealth police are required to verify such authorisation and record the number of the vehicle, the name of the driver and the time the vehicle was parked there.

The second part of Senator Coleman’s question asks whether I am aware that concern is being expressed by Commonwealth car drivers because a Commonwealth police” officer inspected a car parked outside the Senate transport office, and that even the contents of the glove box were examined, without the express permission of the driver concerned. I am not clear on the date and full circumstances of the incident referred to, but I can assure Senator Coleman that Commonwealth police security powers at Parliament House have not been extended beyond those which have been operating since September 1978.

Senator ROCHER:
Western Australia

– This evening I wish to raise a matter that concerns the welfare of three tradesmen who live and work in Perth. They are plumbers who appear to be at the very least the victims of the bureaucracy of their union. It involves the blatant victimisation by a union of three of its members. I will omit the names of the individuals involved as mentioning them will add little to the events I will attempt to describe. Another reason is that I do not wish to take advantage of parliamentary privilege unnecessarily if, indeed, that need be a consideration. The tradesmen concerned were and as far as I know still are employed by a plumbing contractor engaged in construction work in Western Australia. The events and circumstances I will describe arise out of a campaign conducted by the Western Australian branch of the Plumbers and Gasfitters Employees Union of Australia to obtain Federal award coverage. The campaign took place late last year. A series of disputes was organised by the union in pursuit of its objective and the matter was eventually referred to and resolved by Commissioner Brown in proceedings before him.

Those proceedings comprised a series of conferences and formal hearings and a record of the latter was kept. Resolution of the dispute led to the granting of federal coverage. Agreement was reached between the parties to the dispute that there would be no victimisation of any persons involved in the campaign. Subsequent to the issue of the award, three employees of the plumbing contractor mentioned earlier were charged by the union with a breach of its rulesrule 13 headed ‘Offences and Charges’. I seek leave to incorporate rule 1 3 in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The document read as follows-

page 1086

QUESTION

RULE 13-OFFENCES AND CHARGES

Always provided that no member may be expelled and/or lined without having been given a full opportunity to be heard and that no member elected to an office shall be dismissed from any office within the Union unless he has been found guilty in accordance with the Rules of misappropriation of the funds of the Union a substantial breach of the

Rules ofthe Union or gross misbehaviour or gross neglect of duty or has ceased according to the Rules to be eligible to hold office, a Branch or the Committee of Management of such Branch shall have the power to expel and/or fine any member of such Branch any sum up to, but not exceeding, two hundred dollars (S200) for each offence, who-

  1. fails to comply with or violates any rule of the Union or any Branch;
  2. b ) works knowingly in contravention of any Award, Determination Order or Agreement between the Union ora Branch and an employer or employees;
  3. refuses or fails to obey any motion duly resolved in the affirmative at any annual or special meeting of such Branch or of its Committee of Management or of the Federal Council or Federal Executive;
  4. allows his arrears of contributions to exceed the sum of four dollars ($4.00);
  5. fails to attend, without reasonable excuse or apology, a meeting of the Branch or the Committee of Management, when summoned to do so by the Secretary ; (0 commits any fraudulent or unlawful act in relation to the funds or property of the Union, or in relation to any election held under the Rules;
  6. is guilty of wrongfully applying for work with the intention of depriving another member of his situation.

    1. No penalty under this section shall be imposed unless the following procedures shall have been carried out:
  7. The charge shall be made in writing and be accompanied by a fee of $10.00 by a member to the Branch Secretary who shall thereupon arrange for the charge to be dealt with by the next most convenient meeting of the Committee of Management.
  8. The member charged shall be summoned to attend such a meeting by a written notice specifying the time and place of the meeting and forwarding a copy of the charge.
  9. The summons may be served personally or by registered post to the member’s last known place of abode.
  10. Not less than seven (7) days notice of the meeting shall be given to the member charged.
  11. At the appointed time and place or at a time and place to which the meeting is adjourned, the charge shall be investigated whether or not the member is in attendance. (0 The member laying the charge and the member charged shall be given a full opportunity of being heard.
  12. Should the Committee of Management find the charge frivolous, the complaint shall be dismissed and the deposit of ten dollars ($10.00) may be forfeited.

    1. After a penalty of expulsion and/or fine is imposed by the Committee of Management an appeal against such penalty may be made in writing to the Secetary within twentyeight (28) days ofthe decision.

The appeal shall be dealt with at a special summoned meeting of the Branch and the member laying the charge and the member appealing shall each be given a full opportunity of being heard.

  1. If the member charged or the member laying the charge is dissatisfied with the decision of the Branch an appeal may be made by notice in writing forwarded to the General Secretary within twenty-eight (28) days of the decision appealed against.

The appeal shall be dealt with at the next meeting of the Executive of the Council or the Council held thereafter. At least seven (7) days notice of such meeting shall be given to the member charged and to member laying the charge by notice sent by registered post to the last known place of abode of each. Each shall be entitled to attend the Executive of the Council or the Council meeting and be heard on the appeal or may make representations in writing to the Executive of the Council or the Council concerning the appeal.

  1. In the event of an appeal being lodged in accordance with the provisions of this rule the President after consultation with the General Secretary shall have power to direct that the decision to expel and/or fine shall not become effective pending determination of the appeal.
  2. Any member shall have the right to lay a charge against any member or officer direct to the General Secretary and/or President. Such charge to be dealt with by the Federal Executive under the provisions of Rule 33.
Senator ROCHER:

-I thank the Senate. On 6 February 1979 the Plumbers and Gasfitters Employees Union wrote to the three employees who were alleged to have been in breach. The union attached to the letter a copy of the rule and a copy of the signed charge dated 6 November 1978. The union letter set out the charge in the following terms:

The charge states that you did work whilst members of the union were in dispute in support of the union’s campaign for a new plumbers Federal award.

I ask the Senate to note that the charge is that the men worked while the union was in dispute. Honourable senators will be aware that disputes can take many forms and that in the majority of cases they do not involve stoppage of work. The union ‘s letters of 6 February to the three men involved stated that at a hearing set down to commence at 7.30 p.m. on 2 1 February 1 979 at Perth Trades Hall all parties would be heard and an opportunity given to those charged to put their cases. The union committee of management would then decide on their guilt or otherwise. The copy of the charge which I have mentioned, dated 6 November 1978, had been signed by four individuals, but the addresses of those laying the charge were not given.

The union hearing took place as indicated and two of the persons charged attended. After those who had laid the charge and the two alleged offenders in attendance were heard, the union committee of management undertook to communicate its findings to the accused in writing in due course. The union conveyed its decision in a letter dated 23 February 1979. In that letter the accused were described as defendants. By implication this attributed a legality to the proceedings which would suggest things such as legal representation and the taking and giving of sworn evidence, et cetera. So far as I am aware, that did not happen. This wording has overtones of intimidation or at least bluff, which I find particularly offensive. Furthermore, the union imposed a fine of $200 each, as well as a threat that similar future action could lead to more severe penalties. I will read the decision and omit mentioning the names.

Senator Cavanagh:

– Tell us who the scabs are.

Senator ROCHER:

-I understand that a scab is a dry encrustation which forms over a sore as part of the healing process. If this is part of the healing process I will be very pleased indeed. The decision reads:

Having heard all the submissions by all of the parties at the hearing and having given careful consideration of the facts of the dispute with a clear indication from . . . and . . . that they knowingly worked and broke picket lines against the decision of the Union and having pleaded guilty to all those charges, the Committee of Management of the Union finds . . .’, ‘ . . .’ and . . .’ guilty of refusing to cany out decisions of the West Australian Branch of the Union and imposes therefore a fine of two hundred dollars ($200) against each of the three named members under the provisions of Rule 1 3 of the Union Rules. Further that they be severely reprimanded for their actions and warned that any future similar action could lead to more severe penalties.

Defendants are reminded of their rights of appeal to a General Meeting of the Branch, to the Federal Executive of the Union or to the Council of the Union. Such appeal must be lodged within twenty-eight (28) days of receipt of this decision.

One of the accused had this to say, as best he was able to express it, concerning the circumstances prevailing when the alleged breach of union rules took place before the kangaroo court hearings to which I have referred:

The charge is that I worked during a dispute in which the Union was involved, a dispute that had been applied by the Executive of the Plumbers’ Union to support a new Plumbers ‘ Award in Western Australia.

It is hard to answer this claim because so many other people worked during the dispute. I did nothing more than probably a 100 or so members of this Union did during that period. The only trouble was that the work that I was on was selected by the Union to be the point where its campaign would be made felt.

I know people who worked on the Marmion Shopping Centre and on all the other city jobs which were under construction at the same time. It was a joke around the members that the Union’s black bans were being worked through and we were under no illusion that the work was in fact going on.

There were cases like the Art Gallery and Fremantle Hospital as well as many others where bans were worked through and I would be very surprised if the Union Officials did not know that that was going on.

I think we are being made to carry the blame for a campaign that the Union conducted which did not work and we are being singled out when many other people should be made to carry the responsibility for what went on.

It was in the newspaper that the Commissioner involved in the exercise said that no one was to be disadvantaged or victimised by anyone and that was the reason he made the awards he made, the reason he forced employers and the Unions to give in from where the positions they are in. I don’t believe that I should be victimised because of other things I do not understand. This Commissioner said and it was in the paper that he would protect everyone from victimisation and I can’t understand why the Union would carry on with its prosecution when the Commissioner stated that it wasn’t on. I have looked at the letters which have been sent to me and I don’t understand why these four fellows have been able to lay a charge against me in the way set out in that letter. I mean it looks like they have all got together to do it. If they have done so they are trying to get me thrown out of the Union and they have acted to do that. I don’t think they would know those rules and be able to write that language in the letter and it looks like it has been written by an expert and I don ‘t see how it is a real complaint if that is so.

I think the complaint is to be set out as if they are real and doesn’t really tell me when I worked or whatever. I have come here and I don’t know what I am supposed to say particularly when a 100 other fellows are in the same situation. Why have they singled me out? Why have these four people done this? What difference has it made to them?

I think that the charge should not go ahead, I think that it would damage this Union. I shouldn’t be barred from working in this industry because it is my livelihood and if you do expel me you have to expel everybody else who worked during that time.

The reason I worked was that I did not know when the bans were off or on. I was confused. Different Union officials said different things at different times and moved the bans. How could I know that I was not supposed to be working when the bans kept shifting. When the Union Secretary said there was bans on everything yet the work was continuing around the place and everyone knew so how can you single me out?

Senator Bishop:

– They had a poor advocate in you, Senator.

Senator ROCHER:

– Criticisms of the grammar may be valid but not of the case and question so simply put. Of course, it did not impress the union hierarchy. The man was confused, and it is reasonable to assume that the other two were confused also. In fact, all but two of his fellow unionists in Perth were confused to the extent that they continued to work, bans or no bans. I base that comment on the fact that only three were charged by the union.

Let me touch briefly on broader issues. I pose the question: Is loyalty to an employer a crime that warrants a hefty fine or other penalty? Is it reasonable to impose such a disincentive on workers? Is a confused union executive able to excuse that union’s own inadequacies by making scapegoats out of decent Australian workers? If the answer to any of those questions is yes, will economic recovery, full employment and selfrespect ever be possible in this country? Presumably, if the victims of this abominable exercise elect not to appeal and do not pay their fines, further action by the union is contemplated. Will the unions sue for recovery of the debt? Will the union expel them.

The noble genesis of the union movement is no longer in evidence. The ideal of the principle and practice of voluntary freedom of association no longer exists. Compulsory unionism is with us in the form of blatant compulsion or is camouflaged under the cloak of preference at the point of employment, or by intimidation of waiverers or by rendering ineffective conscientious or other objection by an obligation on claimants to show cause why they should be allowed the privilege of freedom of voluntary association. Personal freedoms have become negotiable in industrial relations matters and the case that I have outlined has confirmed that they do not -

Senator Cavanagh:

- Mr President, I take a point of order. I refer to Standing Order 406 which states:

No Senator shall read his speech.

I believe that this is not the first offence of Senator Rocher with regard to his reading his speeches.

Senator ROCHER:

-May I speak to the point of order, Mr President?

The PRESIDENT:

– No. I have noticed that you have been adhering to your notes very closely, but carry on; you have nearly completed your speech.

Senator ROCHER:

– Personal freedoms have become negotiable in industrial relations and the case that I have outlined has confirmed that they do not exist in that area. Coercion with the backing of law exists only for the benefit of unions such as the Plumbers and Gasfitters Employees Union. That is the only group in the community to benefit from laws which enable or prescribe a monopoly to say who works, where, when and under what circumstances. The Industrial Relations Bureau appears to have a role to play in introducing some sanity into the affairs that I have described. Specific instances of union fines, expulsions and suspensions require the attention of the Bureau. I requested the Minister to draw this matter to the attention of the Minister for Industrial Relations (Mr Street) and, if possible, to the notice of the Industrial Relations Bureau for its urgent attention.

Finally, I want to make one further observation. It is something of an understatement to say that I find the rules and actions of the unions incongruous as well as disturbing. The Australian Council of Trade Unions and many other unions are on record as being vehemently opposed io penal provisions being applied against them. They threaten confrontation over what they see as some form of injustice in the socalled penal provisions in legislation, which has been enacted by universally and freely elected governments. Where is the justice for the three men to whom I have referred? Where are the vaunted principles of the ACTU? At least the union movement has access to and the right to legal representation; not so the victimised three, the so-called defendants.

Senator McINTOSH:
Western Australia

– I sat here tonight listening to Senator Rocher and was absolutely astounded at the stuff that he was coming out with. He has an appalling ignorance of the trade union movement. He is set on some kind of witch hunt, talking about kangaroo courts and the breaking of rules. If a person joins a union, in doing so he is well aware of the rules. If he breaks those rules then he has to face the consequences.

Senator Walters:

– Not if he breaks the law.

Senator McINTOSH:

-Senator Walters can get up and speak after I have finished. If he breaks those rules he has the opportunity to defend himself. I do not care which union it is. A member of that union has the opportunity to defend himself. I do not know what evidence has been submitted against the three or four people who have been accused and I do not know exactly what is the case against them. But I do know the Plumbers and Gasfitters Employees Union of Australia. I know its reputation. It always has been an upstanding union. It may be that some of the members of that union worked during the strike. Union employees who worked at hospitals were mentioned. If honourable senators knew anything about the union they would realise that during a strike it makes allowances for its members who work at hospitals and for ambulance drivers and a whole host of other people. The union makes pretty clear which people will be exempt from taking part in a particular strike action or action of that kind. I do not want to go into the merits or demerits of the case because I am not fully aware of them and I am quite sure that Senator Rocher is not aware of them. I want to read a letter which I just happened to have in my drawer. It is a letter written by a Mrs Lippiatt. It is probably a couple of years old now. This letter may be a bit of an education for Senator Rocher. Mrs Lippiatt was answering a letter from a Mr Clive Rutty to a newspaper a while ago. He was going on with a lot of rubbish like the honourable senator was going on with tonight. The letter reads:

  1. . I say that if he would guide his children along the standards set by the trade union movement they won’t go far wrong.

Explain to them that without unions their world would be a lot different.

Unions have been responsible for our holiday pay, tea breaks, lunch hours, working conditions, long-service leave and pay leave-loading. These have been mainly achieved by the militancy of pacesetter unions, usually by strike action.

Let your children know who opposed the Vietnam war and all the horror, suffering and evil that it brought about and from which we are still feeling the effects.

Praise the tug crews who went out into the storm to rescue a stranded tanker and the SEC workers who go out and fix damaged wires.

Tell them about seamen and waterside workers who give generously from their pay packets to help their fellow beings.

Explain to them the danger of nuclear war and how the unions want the uranium kept in the ground so that their future may be safe.

Teach them to protect their environment and let them know how the unions want it left unspoiled.

Tell them about the comradeship enjoyed by unionists and the unity that exists and how they are prepared to fight for a cause if they think it is just.

Let them learn about principles and how much they count.

Inform them who will fight for safety conditions at their place of employment.

Explain that without unions no one will be prepared to fight for their rights.

If you tell your children about the good things that are done by unions, your children won ‘t want to go out and do the bad things that are a result of a society full of greed and selfishness.

I think there is a lesson to be learned from Mrs Lippiatt’s letter. I feel that if the honourable senator had been responsible he would have made a full inquiry into the matter. He would have made contact with members of the trade union movement and asked them what it was all about and then judged the case. I dare say that the honourable senator never once contacted the Plumbers Union in Western Australia. If he did, let him say so. The honourable senator’s silence answers me. He went to those three people because he was determined to go on this witch hunt.

Senator Rocher:

– I did not go to those three people. I do not even know them. I may know one of them.

Senator McINTOSH:

– I have listened to the honourable senator in the past. He always makes an attack on the union in some way or another, the same as his colleague sitting next to him. He should go along to the Plumbers Union in Western Australia and find out the other side of the story and then come back and speak during the adjournment debate. I do not think the honourable senator has acted responsibly in raising a matter when he has heard only one side of the story, just because it suits his motivating force.

Senator CAVANAGH:
South Australia

– I think I must say a few words about this matter. Whilst Senator Rocher may be excused for displaying his lack of capabilities early in his time in this Parliament, there has never before been anything so lamentable as the complete lack of capability he showed tonight in speaking on the trade union movement. The honourable senator took objection to charges that have been made against members of a union. He had incorporated in Hansard the rules of the Plumbers and Gasfitters Employees Union of Australia. These rules are registered under the industrial laws of this country. They give the union power to try members for breach of the rules of the organisation. The courts have always held the view that they should not unduly enter into domestic trials, as long as there is the right of a fair hearing. We have been given information tonight that four men were called up on charges. Two of those men accepted the invitation to defend themselves. Two did not. Some resentment is expressed because they were called ‘defendants’. What were they? They were people who were charged with breaching the rules. A person is not only a defendant when he is defending himself against the law of the land; he is a defendant when he is defending himself against any accusation.

Senator Walters:

– Any intimidation.

Senator CAVANAGH:

– Any accusation. There is no suggestion that these defendants were not given a fair hearing. After a fair trial, and in accordance with the rules, the Committee of Management, which had been appointed by the members- the four men concerned had voted on the membership of that Committee- decided in its wisdom to impose a penalty upon the defendants. If there is anything tyrannical or oppressive in the rules of the organisation the defendants have redress to the industrial court. For an incompetent politician to victimise these heroic people whom he will not even name in the Parliament shows a lack of knowledge of the trade union movement. He considers a scab to be a big crustation over a sore. He has never read the works of Jack London who pointed out that from what God had left over after making the snake, the toad and all the vile things on earth he made the scab. A scab is a person who defies his organisation or his union that exists for only one reason- to better the conditions of the members of that organisation. A scab deprives them of the ability to fight, to earn the bread and butter for their children. As Jack London pointed out, even Judas Iscariot had the decency to go out and hang himself. But the scabs from Western Australia get Senator Rocher to defend them in the Senate.

We say that the actions of the union have been upheld. But the scabs are not only the lowest as described by Jack London. They then turn pimps. They cannot complain about what the union has done if they knew that they were supposed to go out on strike. There are 100 other workers at the shopping centre. Why did not Senator Rocher mention them? These men are disappointed about the fine, but they want to pimp on their mates. What type of people are they? Are these the people whom we protect by not disclosing their names? Are these the people whom honourable senators on the Government side defend in this chamber? Is this a matter of which the trade union movement should be ashamed? Of course, these men will be expelled if they do not pay their fines. What union fighting for improved conditions for its members wants such scum in its organisation? I am glad that this matter has been ventilated. It has shown the type of people whom Senator Rocher will champion in the Senate.

Question resolved in the affirmative.

Senate adjourned at 1 1.28 p.m.

page 1092

ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS

The following answers to questions were circulated:

Air Services: North Queensland (Question No. 1055)

Senator Colston:

asked the Minister for Transport, upon notice, on 2 1 November 1978:

  1. What is the scheduled Ansett direct fare Thursday Island to Cooktown.
  2. On which days each week is there a direct Ansett Thursday Island to Cooktown flight.
  3. What is the scheduled Ansett Thursday Island to Cooktown fare via Weipa.
  4. On which days each week is there an Ansett flight from Thursday Island to Cooktown via Weipa.
  5. 5 ) On which days each week is an Ansett Thursday Island to Cooktown passenger obliged to travel via Cairns.
  6. What is the scheduled fare Thursday Island to Cooktown if the passenger is obliged to travel via Cairns.
  7. If there is any difference in the fares for ( 1 ), (3) and (6), what is the reason for the difference.
Senator Chaney:
LP

– The Minister for Transport has provided the following answers to the honourable senator’s question:

  1. 1 ) and (2) There are no direct Ansett flights from Thursday Island to Cooktown and no direct fare. To travel by airline from Thursday Island to Cooktown one must change aircraft at Cairns and, on certain days, fly via Weipa. On most days it is necessary to overnight at Cairns.
  2. and (6) The published fare is $69.90 irrespective if travel is via Weipa. Where there is an overnight break of journey, sector fares will apply.
  3. There are no such flights, airline travel requires a change of aircraft at Cairns.
  4. 5 ) Monday to Friday, there are no flights on other days.
  5. There is no difference in the fares between (3) and (6) if the passenger does not over-night at Cairns. If the passenger does over-night at Cairns sector fares will apply because the airline incurs the additional passenger handling costs. Question ( 1 ) is not applicable.

Imports of Seal Blubber (Question No. 1327)

Senator Mulvihill:

asked the Minister representing the Treasurer, upon notice, on 27 February 1979:

  1. 1 ) How much seal blubber was imported into Australia in (a) 1976, (b) 1977, and (c) 1978.
  2. From what countries did this product originate and for what purposes was it used.
Senator Carrick:
LP

– The Treasurer has provided the following answer to the honourable senator’s question:

  1. 1 ) and (2) No information is available on imports of seal blubber as this commodity is not separately identified in the statistical classifications used to record Australian imports.

Imports of Seal Pelts (Question No. 1328)

Senator Mulvihill:

asked the Minister representing the Treasurer, upon notice, on 27 February 1979:

  1. How many seal pelts wire imported into Australia during: (a) 1976; (b) 1977; and (c) 1978.
  2. From what countries did they originate and for what purposes were they used.
Senator Carrick:
LP

– The Treasurer has provided the following answer to the honourable senator’s question:

  1. 1 ) and (2) No information is available on imports of seal pelts as this commodity is not separately identified in the statistical classifications used to record Australian imports.

International Social Security Association (Question No. 1415)

Senator Grimes:

asked the Minister for Social Security, upon notice, on 6 March 1979:

  1. What countries are members of the International Social Security Association.
  2. What countries are members of the regional group of the ISSA meeting in Canberra on 5 to 8 March 1 979.
  3. What countries were represented at the Canberra meeting.
  4. 4 ) When were the invitations sent out.
  5. 5 ) What other people were invited to attend.
  6. Why was the press excluded.
  7. What was the cost of the conference to the Government.
Senator Guilfoyle:
LP

– The answer to the honourable senator’s question is as follows:

  1. The ISSA publication, of June 1977 sets out information on the 246 affiliated member organizations in 104 countries, and 79 associate member organizations in 37 countries.
  2. Countries with member organizations in the ISSA in the Asia and Oceania Region are:

Australia; Burma; Fiji; India; Indonesia; Iran; Iraq; Israel; Japan; Lebanon; Malaysia; New Zealand; Pakistan; Philippines; Republic of Korea; Sri Lanka; Syrian Arab Republic; Turkey; USSR and Vietnam.

  1. Member organisations from the following countries were represented at the ISSA Regional Research Meeting held in Canberra from 5 to 8 March 1979:

Australia; Fiji; India; Japan; Malaysia; New Zealand; Republic of Korea and USSR.

  1. ISSA has advised that a list of ISSA meetings in 1979 issued to all member organisations on 1 9 July 1 978 showed details of Canberra meeting. Specific invitations to the Canberra Meeting together with registration forms were issued by ISSA to member organisations on 19 October 1978.
  2. On the suggestion of ISSA, the Department of Social Security, which hosted the meeting, issued invitations to a number of Australians outside the Department whom it considered might contribute to and benefit from participation in the meeting. Thirteen such people attended the meeting. Another Australian acted as General Reporter for the Meeting.
  3. The press was not excluded from the opening or closing sessions of the meeting. In view of the Meeting’s emphasis on research, it was not considered appropriate for the Press to attend other sessions. However, copies of the papers presented at the meeting have been made available to the press, and a full report of the meeting will be published by ISSA
  4. The cost of the meeting to the Government is estimated to be:

$13,909.30.

Exposure to Chemicals

Senator Guilfoyle:
LP

-On 7 March 1979 (Hansard, page 556) Senator Elstob asked me, as Minister representing the Minister for Health, a question, without notice, concerning regulations governing the health of workers exposed to occupational carcinogens.

The Minister for Health has provided the following information:

Legislative and administrative responsibility for the health of workers exposed to occupational carcinogens rests primarily with the States and Territories. To assist the responsible authorities in this matter, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NH & MRC) endorsed, in 1978, ‘Model Carcinogenic Substances Regulations’ and recommended they be adopted by the States and Territories. I am arranging for a copy of these Regulations to be placed in the Parliamentary Library for reference by honourable senators.

Cite as: Australia, Senate, Debates, 28 March 1979, viewed 22 October 2017, <http://historichansard.net/senate/1979/19790328_senate_31_s80/>.