DOCUMENTS
Senator BRAGG (New South Wales) (10:49): I take the opportunity again in this chamber to remind the Australian people that the government is in charge of the expenditure of taxpayer funds. When the Australian people elect this government, they don't elect bureaucrats or people who work in offices in Canberra to make judgements for the community's benefit or, in some cases, against the community.
The Australian people have hired this government, for better or worse, and they make the decisions on behalf of the Australian people. They decide where the money goes. And so the position of the government today in again obfuscating and covering up all the documents which belong to the people of Australia is another point in time where we see the government not willing to be honest, to act with integrity and to provide basic information.
The idea that the government is hiding behind bureaucrats, which no-one elected, is actually offensive, because the position of a democracy is that you can elect or vote out a government based on the decision-makers who were elected at the last election. The position to make, to extend that, is that no-one has been elected in this country, the country is running on autopilot, and someone down in the back is making all the decisions about where all the money goes.
We've got no documents and no papers, and it's a shambles. That's effectively their position. They are refusing to provide the basic information about how public funds were spent.
They spend their time in response to this order smearing and undertaking a political attack to cover up the fact that they are too afraid to say who made the decision. Who made the decision to give the funding and the money? Who has administered these programs?
This is basic accountability stuff. But when we look at the evidence in terms of the government's responses to Senate orders, freedom of information requests and transparency requests, we see—this is from the Centre for Public Integrity—this is the worst government since the Keating government, as measured by their responses. This is a pattern of behaviour.
This is not a particular, isolated incident where the government is refusing to come forward with the documents which were ordered by the Senate. They were ordered by the Senate so that the people can inspect how the decisions were made and how the money ended up in all these Labor electorates. We're talking in this case of half-a-billion bucks.
It might sound like chicken feed to the government, when they're running endless deficits and debt. But this is a significant program of money here. It is endemic across this government, in terms of its responses to the proper legal orders of the Senate.
It spends its time trying to destroy and undermine the attempts that others make, including former senator Patrick, to get to the bottom of a whole lot of things across this administration. Now they are seeking through the Attorney-General's Department to stop people actually appealing decisions made by the Australian Information Commissioner, which go to the AAT or go to the go to the courts.
They're trying to put all the costs onto the punter to cover up their tracks. They are so desperate to never provide pieces of paper to the Australian people for inspection that they are now seeking to effectively put up a wall of money to ensure they don't ever get properly exposed to public glare. In the cases of these golf courses, I think a lot of people in New South Wales will look at this Marrickville Golf Course—$6 million to Mr Albanese, who says he never went to the golf course.
Of course, he's been there 100 times. Meanwhile his Labor mates in New South Wales are destroying public golf courses. They destroyed the Moore Park golf course.
They completely destroyed it. But, meanwhile, they're giving six million bucks for this Marrickville Golf Course across the road. They're only a few kilometres apart.
In one case they're not doing housing. They're turning it into a park. Senator BRAGG: They're not doing that.
They're turning it into a park. Get your facts right. In one case they want to destroy a public golf course.
They hate public golf— Senator BRAGG: I would just like to know what the Labor Party's position is on public golf courses, because they have destroyed the Moore Park golf course, one of the most successful and visited public golf courses in New South Wales. But, meanwhile, they've given the Marrickville Golf Course six million bucks in a secret grant scheme that they want to cover up all the information about, pretending no-one made the judgements.
Mr Albanese said he never went there and doesn't know anything about it, but there's a lot of video evidence to show that he's been there on many occasions and that, in fact, at some stages he has been—maybe he even is now—a member of that golf course. This is a government full of hypocrites, and it is a government that is prepared to cover up all pieces of paper and all decision-making.
They are pretending that no-one made these decisions and that magically the money all found its way to Labor Party electorates without anyone ever doing anything.