The PRESIDENT (09:31): I remind senators that the question may be put on any proposal at the request of any senator.

Senator RUSTON (South Australia—Minister for Families and Social Services, Minister for Women's Safety and Manager of Government Business in the Senate) (09:31): by leave—I move:

That consideration of the business before the Senate on Wednesday, 9 February 2022 be interrupted at approximately 5 pm, but not so as to interrupt a senator speaking, to enable Senator Mirabella to make his first speech without any question before the chair.

Question agreed to.

Senator PATRICK (South Australia) (09:32): I seek leave to move a motion relating to the consideration of the Australian Federal Integrity Commission Bill 2020, as circulated.

Leave not granted.

Senator PATRICK: Pursuant to contingent notice of motion standing in my name, I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent me from moving a motion to provide for the consideration of a matter, namely a motion to give precedence to a motion relating to the consideration of the Australian Federal Integrity Commission Bill 2020.

I will quickly address a concern that Senator Ruston will no doubt raise in her response to my short contribution here. She will say this is a stunt, brought on to waste government business time, but it's not.

One of the roles of the Senate is to make sure that we oversee the government, to make sure that the government does its work properly and to make sure that the government meets the commitments it has made to the Australian public. I draw the Senate's attention back to 13 December 2018, when the Prime Minister promised the Australian public that, were he to be given the opportunity to govern again, he would introduce a federal integrity commission bill. I don't know whether that was a 'core' promise; I don't know whether it was a promise. I don't know whether it was a commitment or an undertaking. I don't know which one of those it was or how the Prime Minister may consider each of those sorts of commitments. But I know that the Australian public would expect that, prima facie, if the Prime Minister says that then the Prime Minister will do that. But he hasn't. Either he was lying to the public or he has simply misled them. It's not like we're at the start of the 46th Parliament; we're at the end. There was a commitment by the Prime Minister to deal with a federal integrity commission, and it has not been met. That's why this is urgent and that's why this must be dealt with today, otherwise we'll have run out of time.

We don't have a bill that the government has brought to the chamber, so there's a bill that I've tabled which has been worked up by eminent experts in this area, former judicial officers included—and thanks to the member for Indi, Helen Haines—and we need to deal with it. We need to deal with this urgently. We have a situation where a government went into the last election, knowing full well that there's no federal integrity commission, engaging in car park rorting. I say that with the backing of the Auditor-General. We find that in the Treasurer's own seat four car parks were allocated. One of those car parks came in at a cost of $220,000 per car park.

Let me explain how this principle works. We are supposed to take taxpayers' money and spend it on the basis of need and on the basis of merit. That's what we're supposed to do. Yet, against the rules, against the objectives of the grant program, the Treasurer announced grants to his own electorate. If you are a public official and you subvert process and give money for the purposes of personal benefit—that being getting re-elected—that is corruption, and we have to be able to deal with that. We've seen sports rorts, where people or communities were given a grant not on the basis of merit but on the basis of a colour coded spreadsheet. That is wrong. We've seen water purchases that well exceed market values. We find that, in one instance, the department seemed not able to understand a valuation properly.

We've got blind trust, where ministers are getting paid a million dollars from unknown contributors and the government is not standing tall and saying, 'That's wrong.' There are so many issues that we need to have addressed, in relation to corruption, so that people can regain confidence in this place and in the other place. That's why we need to urgently deal with this bill. I ask that senators support my motion to suspend.

Senator BIRMINGHAM (South Australia—Minister for Finance, Leader of the Government in the Senate and Vice-President of the Executive Council) (09:37): The government does not support Senator Patrick's motion to suspend. The government does not support it—on the basis that we have a well-developed draft legislation established, published, in relation to the Commonwealth Integrity Commission.

There are many misconceptions peddled by some in relation to these debates and they're peddled in the context of, seemingly, wanting to create an impression that there is no anticorruption framework in Australia, which is patently untrue. We have existing frameworks that tackle corruption, clearly, already. Under the frameworks, multiple agencies across the Commonwealth government have responsibilities for preventing, detecting and responding to corruption.

These agencies, such as the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, bring specialist skills to address corruption across law enforcement agencies. The Australian Federal Police have the power, and work across partner agencies right across the Commonwealth, to leverage their expertise and capabilities, information and data collection capabilities, to respond to serious and complex corruption offences, including any allegations of fraud or bribery or the like, under existing corruption laws. The Commonwealth Ombudsman considers and investigates complaints where people believe they've been treated unfairly by an Australian government department. Even in relation to matters such as our own expenses, we have the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority that advises and reports on expenses of parliamentarians and their staff. This is set within laws, clearly enabled and established, that deal with corrupt conduct and all of the other elements of scrutiny applied within this parliament and a free media across our democracy. But we have seen benefit in acknowledging that having greater consolidation, greater coordination, across those different entities and efforts for handling corruption matters would be a positive.

That's why we've gone through an extensive process in relation to developing the legislation around the Commonwealth Integrity Commission. The integrity commission that we propose, backed by several hundred pages of legislation, detailed modelling, will investigate the most serious forms of criminal corruption that threaten good public administration; however, it won't duplicate the roles of existing bodies that already investigate corruption.

The arrangement we're proposing reflects the different nature of the corruption risks that exist across law enforcement bodies as opposed to those that exist in the public sector. When we talk about the public sector, we mean of course across the public sector from office holders at ministerial level right through the Public Service and public sector. Where the public sector division of our proposed Commonwealth Integrity Commission found evidence of a criminal offence, it would refer a matter, rightly, to the Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, ensuring that the courts remain the relevant arbiter of whether someone is innocent or guilty of a corrupt offence.

We have put in place funding arrangements for the Commonwealth Integrity Commission: the 2019-20 budget committed more than $106 million of support for that in addition to more than $40 million for the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity. The substantial investment that we've made is in stark contrast to the very low levels of budgeting and support that had been provided under previous governments for anti-corruption and related activities and enforcement.

We've already implemented phase one of our Commonwealth Integrity Commission by expanding the jurisdiction of the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity to cover additional agencies: the ATO, ASIC, APRA and the ACCC. The work is there; the legislation has been developed. What we're very clear about is that we're not interested in establishing Star Chamber type processes. We're not interested in establishing processes that are simply there as political playthings. So, the invitation stands to the crossbench, the Greens, the Labor Party: make clear your support for the model the government has developed for an integrity commission. That will clearly bring together the elements of being able to further strengthen and uphold Australia's anti-corruption framework and we will see that legislation passed. We're not interested in entertaining a model that simply creates opportunities for more political grandstanding that becomes a kangaroo court or a show trial model. This has got to be done in the proper way that our government has proposed.

Senator GALLAGHER (Australian Capital Territory—Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) (09:42): Labor will be supporting the suspension of standing orders this morning, and we certainly support the motion being moved by Senator Patrick, should the suspension get up. We have been calling for an anti-corruption commission for some time. The government promised a national anti-corruption commission 1,154 days ago. Then today we hear from the Leader of the Government in the Senate all the reasons we're not in a position to debate a government bill.

The reality is: over 1,154 days ago this was a promise, a promise by the Prime Minister. It was a promise by a Prime Minister under pressure because of the scandals, the failings and the lack of integrity in his government and the lack of trust and public trust in his government. He had to politically manage a situation at the time, so he promised an anti-corruption commission, he promised he would bring in legislation and then the government spent three years ensuring that they don't deliver on that promise. This has been a conscious decision by the government, because a government without integrity doesn't want an integrity commission. That is a fundamental problem for a government without integrity, for a government with ministerial scandal after ministerial scandal, where, after you do a bit of time on the backbench, on the bleachers, you get forgiven and brought back in. All of the sins that were committed and the standards of ministerial accountability that used to exist in every other government of both political colours, which have been kicked to the curb, have been rewritten under this government. You can be rehabilitated. Everyone's guaranteed a spot in the cabinet room, regardless of what offence they commit. That's the standard this government has set. So why on Earth would they want to bring in an integrity commission, when they fundamentally have a massive problem with integrity? They don't want scrutiny.

And when they did work out their draft bill, it was a model that had no teeth, that set a lower standard for ministers and politicians—what a surprise!—and was universally rejected by every organisation and every expert who understands anything about anticorruption commissions. That was a big achievement! And I think it was a conscious decision by the government. They wanted to ensure that they had a work plan for the past 1,154 days that ultimately didn't deliver an anticorruption commission in this country, and they have systematically and comprehensively gone about their business making sure that never happens—and they've achieved it. I think in every sitting week for the past year or so, when someone in this place has brought forward a motion and had the numbers on a bill that had passed in this place for debate on another bill, the government has opposed it and then tried to point the finger at everybody else, who were actually arguing for a stronger anticorruption commission.

Let's make no mistake about why this government's in this position. We have had scandal after scandal, with ministers like Minister Taylor—remember the forged documents? Remember that old chestnut? Remember 'grassgate'? That was also in his portfolio. And we had 'watergate'. We've seen all these rorts and the funds that have been established, where the government doesn't even pretend that they're trying to do the right thing—billions of dollars hidden in the budget to splash out on seats they either need to hold or want to win. We know that in the last midyear update $16 billion of our money was hidden in the budget for more election gift-giving to certain seats. We've got a Treasurer in this country who appropriated money for all of us through the budget and then went and awarded himself, his own seat, four car parks; I don't think any of them have been built. That is the standard, by which the Treasurer, the Prime Minister—senior ministers—conduct themselves, without integrity, doing everything they can to resist the bringing on of debate for an anticorruption commission. The Senate should stand up and support the suspension of standing orders and the motion Senator Patrick has brought in today.

Senator WATERS (Queensland—Leader of the Australian Greens in the Senate) (09:47): The Greens will of course support this suspension of standing orders. We've been trying to get a corruption watchdog federally for 13 years now. We don't care whose name is on the bill; we just want this done. It's no surprise that this government once again wants to shut down debate on setting up an effective corruption watchdog, because half of their cabinet have been implicated in integrity scandals—half! It has been 1,154 days since the Prime Minister made a promise that he would introduce an integrity commission. It was long overdue even then, but it was a welcome commitment.

Since that time we've seen a draft outline that was rubbished by every expert who reviewed it. Nearly 18 months after that there was a much-maligned draft bill that failed to address any of the earlier criticisms by experts. There was some more obfuscation in there. We then had multiple estimates hearings where we were told that more consultation was happening and amendments were being drafted. But then the Prime Minister said there'd be no changes from the earlier draft and that if Labor and the crossbench wanted an integrity commission then we'd just have to take the pathetic version on offer—and then nothing happened. Then, this week, the Attorney-General said an integrity commission was not a priority before the election—they're so busy discriminating against gay kids that they just can't get on with their actual job. Then the Prime Minister said, 'Oh no, we'll see.' But he continues to prioritise legislation that promotes bigotry in our community. So, one really has to wonder: can you trust a single word this Prime Minister and this government says? I think we all know the answer to that question.

There are few things that the Australian community is more unified on than the need for a strong corruption watchdog. Nearly 90 per cent of Australians want this, and it's an absolute disgrace that this government is using every trick in the book to try and delay doing it. Public confidence in the integrity of Australian politicians is plummeting, and rightly so. The latest Transparency International corruption perceptions index gives Australia its lowest ever ranking. Lack of progress on the Integrity Commission was a key factor in that lowest ever score. We need a strong, independent and powerful corruption watchdog with powers to root out the corruption that runs rife in this place and continues to undermine our democracy.

We have been pushing for this for 13 years, and two years ago this Senate passed the Greens bill for a strong independent corruption watchdog with teeth. Now, that was two years ago, and the government's refused to bring that on for a vote in the House. It's running scared of integrity. We support Senator Patrick's bill, which is a replica of Dr Haines's bill in the other place. We don't care whose name is on the bill; we just want it done.

Without a federal ICAC, Australians have to rely on a patchwork of other bodies to try and find out about the dodgy dealings of this government. We've got the ANAO, Senate inquiries, OPDs, FOI challenges, state and territory corruption bodies, AEC disclosures and investigative journalism. Even with that schema, which the government contends is adequate—it's clearly not—we've revealed a litany of scandals. The list is long and unedifying: sports rorts, 'pork and ride', the Urban Congestion Fund, the Leppington Triangle, 'watergate' and 'grassgate'. There are millions of dollars being handed to polluting gas companies headed up by Liberal donors. Last week's AEC disclosures revealed that Empire Energy made some sizeable donations before they got a government grant of public money to frack the Beetaloo basin, against the wishes of First Nations communities. Every single one of the grant programs that the ANAO has audited since 2009, to the tune of $10 billion—every single one of them—was found to be flawed, with problems identified ranging from minor improvements to serious maladministration.

This patchwork of integrity measures is clearly not enough, because corruption is rife. It's allowing far too many things to slip through the cracks, and the Australian public can't understand the full scale of corruption, fraud and dishonesty without a strong, independent corruption watchdog. Nor can we deter such behaviour without a strong watchdog.

As Australians head back to the polls—and that can't come soon enough—voters need to have confidence that a new government will be overseen by a corruption watchdog with broad powers. They need to have confidence that there will be consequences when corrupt conduct is identified and that there won't be a protection racket for politicians, which is the short version of what this government is proposing. We support bringing this bill on and giving Australians what they need to start rebuilding that confidence in our democracy and that confidence that the people they elect will work in the public interest. But it's no surprise that a government without integrity doesn't want to bring on a bill to set up an integrity commission.

Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (09:52): One Nation has always supported an integrity commission being established for the federal parliament—once we realised the parliament could not look after itself. We do, though, oppose Senator Patrick's motion to suspend standing orders, and I'll explain why.

Corruption of federal taxpayer money to the tune of billions of dollars was a subject that we moved a motion to have a Senate inquiry into. The Liberal Party opposed it, after initially supporting it. The Labor Party opposed it. The Greens opposed it. Senator Patrick opposed it. That was billions of dollars at stake.

Secondly—water trading. It's a breach of the Water Act, and the Liberals and Nationals have allowed it to continue. We moved a motion in this parliament to get it fixed. It went to the lower house, where the Labor Party opposed it, the Liberal Party opposed it and the National Party opposed it—billions of dollars, again, there, and unfairness destroying regional communities.

We also have a list of 28 people, which is supposed to be a watch list or a list with regard to paedophilia. I contacted the person who raised that in an earlier parliament. A barrister, on my behalf, read that list. That list has no complainant—no identification as to who put forward that list. It also has no formal complaint and no evidence. But, in the process of that, the barrister I used found extensive need for cleaning up parliament, with regard to supporting paedophiles and other criminals. We need to extend it properly, from parliamentarians to judges, to police and to bureaucrats. We need to do a good job. The government's bill for an integrity commission is hopeless. It is not sincere, in my view.

Helen Haines's bill, the Australian Federal Integrity Commission Bill 2021, which is what Senator Patrick is supporting, has much to commend it. We support it in principle. However, it leaves a lot to be desired in terms of some details, because it leaves people vulnerable and open to being besmirched—as we've seen happen in New South Wales—without evidence. That we cannot support. Such a bill must be debated extensively and not rushed through parliament. We cannot do that in a morning.

Senator Patrick himself said that we are now at the end of the 46th Parliament—exactly. Let the people judge in an election within the next three months. Let the people judge, because the Liberal-National coalition has not delivered on its promise. The Prime Minister has told furphies about vaccine mandates not existing in this country. Tell that to the 25 million people in this country. That is a lie. Yet we now have the breaching of his promise. The people can judge him in three months. Each party should have a policy on this, and let the people judge each party on it. It seems to me that we need to assess people by their actions, their deeds, not by their words.

I think this is a stunt—trying to get media attention before a flagging election campaign. Regardless of my opinion, one thing is for sure: this parliament serves the major parties and their donors and vested interests, some of whom are outside this country. We need to end that. We need to regain the people's confidence in the parliament. We need to do that by making sure that the parliament returns to serving the people. We need the parliament to serve the people. That's its job. We need to change the parliament, and to do that we need to change the way Australians vote. We, as voters, as Australians, need to change the way we vote. Put the majors last; remember that in the coming election. Put the majors last.

Senator HENDERSON (Victoria) (09:57): This motion to suspend standing orders should be absolutely rejected. One Nation is right about one thing: this is a stunt. We saw one yesterday and we're going to see rolling stunts in this parliament, rather than allowing the parliament to get on with the business of governing in the interests of the Australian people.

I'm going to start my contribution by reminding those opposite of the dangers of implementing the model that they are advocating for. Amanda Stapledon committed suicide, tragically, after facing allegations by IBAC in Victoria. This has been reported in the Australian:

A parliamentary committee has called urgent talks to consider complaints about the conduct of Victorian anti-corruption agencies after the suicide of a former mayor.

Parliament's integrity and oversight committee has ordered a special meeting on Wednesday to discuss complaints from witnesses involved in the marathon investigation into allegedly corrupt land deals involving Casey councillors and a property developer.

In formal complaints to the committee, several witnesses have accused the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission and the Victorian Inspectorate — the body charged with monitoring IBAC — of having blood on their hands over the death of Amanda Stapledon.

This is because of the fact that the model in Victoria, like in New South Wales, is akin to a star chamber. There is not adequate natural justice. The model we put forward provides proper justice. Shame on those opposite for not recognising that natural justice in an integrity commission is important. These are the consequences of the star chamber that we see in Victoria. This woman had a disabled son, who's now been left on his own. You think about the consequences of—

The PRESIDENT: Order!

Senator HENDERSON: You think about the consequences of putting someone into a star chamber under the most extraordinary pressure, arguably false allegations—driving this woman to the brink. Shame on you. So what we have put forward, which is not supported by Labor, not supported by you, Senator Patrick, not supported by the Greens or the crossbench, is a model which provides natural justice. It will hold the entire public sector, including parliamentarians and their officers, to account. The Commonwealth Integrity Commission is to investigate corruption; it is not some tool used to air vexatious and politically motivated claims.

I just consider what I have gone through in the last few months from the likes of Fairfax and TheNew Daily. I have been accused of corruption because I delivered an election commitment to support the Torquay Bowls Club. Honestly, this is out of control. Politics in this country, courtesy of the crossbench and Greens and Labor, have become so toxic that you can't even deliver a community supported grant without being accused of corruption. It is no wonder that this government is taking this issue responsibly, and I say, as a tribute to Amanda Stapleton and all those other victims of anticorruption commissions who have been subjected to false allegations, whose lives have been destroyed, we are not going to follow that model. We are not going to have blood on our hands. We are not going to embrace your model.

The PRESIDENT: Senator Gallagher on a point of order.

Senator Gallagher: The senator should be making a contribution through the chair and not directly at other senators.

The PRESIDENT: Senator Henderson, I'm sorry but this is actually a time-limited debate.

Senator HENDERSON: I still have 58 seconds left.

The PRESIDENT: No, the time of the debate is limited to half an hour, and sometimes a speaker is still on their feet when half an hour ends, so I'm afraid we are actually at the end of the debate. The question is on the motion to suspend standing orders.

Senator BRAGG (New South Wales) (12:15): I rise to make a statement about the forthcoming election and the attempts by some to try and heavily influence, if not buy, their way into some sort of power arrangement here in Canberra. There has been a long tradition in Australia, like in many other countries, of wealthy people seeking to influence elections for their own benefit or for vested interests. This was a key theme in the establishment of the United States and their constitution, and it has been a feature and a problem in our society. When I think about the predecessor party of the Liberal Party, the United Australia Party, which I think, bizarrely, has re-emerged in some form in recent times, the people who were associated with that particular party made the point at the time that the UAP was deeply flawed because the people that were writing its policies were its key donors. Of course, the constitutional obligation of all the members and senators in this place is to perform their duties in respect of their constituents, not in respect of their donors or their key supporters.

Sadly, the emerging so-called 'Voices of' groups—and one of the key groups, the Climate 200 fund, is proposing to spend $20 million to try and buy a few seats in this place—have started to channel this UAP from yesteryear. The reason I say that is that they are proposing to fund candidates and they are proposing to engage in this election without providing, in many cases, the true disclosure of who their donors are; and, given their very threadbare policy agenda, we will have to assume that, beyond the very legitimate issue of climate change, it is pretty much a blank canvas to be populated by their donors after the election if they are successful.

Climate 200 and their associates are focusing only on a few people, predominantly classical Liberals in inner-city areas. They are proposing to tell people in these areas that there are only one or two issues that face the federal government and the nation. One of those, of course, is climate change, which is a very legitimate and important issue and something that we should do more on and we are doing more on. But the point is whether the 'Voices of' groups will be like the Labor Party, in that the Labor Party is principally funded by the unions and by the super funds and, as a result of that funding, they get to write the policies of the Labor Party. The Labor Party's policies on industrial relations and superannuation are not written by people in this place; they're written by the vested interests down at Trades Hall or down at the super funds billionaires' building down in Melbourne. That is a reality, and you only need to look at the evidence of their advocacy on super in the last few years to see that the Labor Party would rather deny workers of Australia a pay increase in order to give them a higher super contribution, which is rather remarkable. That is where I think we are heading with this Climate 200; we're going to find that these invisible people are going to be pulling the strings.

If you want to come into public life, you've got to be prepared to take a few hits. That's how it goes. We are all prepared to take the hits when we stand up in this place. There are people, like Mr Holmes a Court, who want to fund candidates and want to get involved in all sorts of murky court cases, and that's not how the system can work. These people—Mr Holmes a Court, Mr Staindl, Mr Poulton, Mr Yates—have been involved in a disgraceful attempt, which I first addressed in this place back in September 2019, to bring about a citizenship challenge against the Treasurer. It's probably one of the most disgraceful things that's happened in public life in my lifetime—to suggest that a family that had their citizenship cancelled by Nazi Germany should be dragged through the courts, effectively, to prove that their citizenship wasn't cancelled by Nazi Germany. Mr Holmes a Court and Mr Poulton and Mr Staindl and Mr Yates—a number of whom are actually Holocaust deniers—have been involved in this disgraceful performance, which we've recently seen conclude.

Mr Staindl has been asked to cough up 400 grand, and he says he doesn't want to pay it. He said:

I undertook this dual citizenship challenge because I felt betrayed by my representative.

He felt betrayed by his representative whose family escaped from Nazi Germany! He goes on to say that he would like to see the government look upon this—and, I assume, pay for it—just like any other dual citizenship challenge. As if this was just any other dual citizenship challenge! This was about an anti-Semitic case brought forward against a family that escaped Nazi Germany and went on to produce Australia's first Jewish Treasurer. It's an absolute outrage.

This is not just my assessment. The ruling of the full bench of the Federal Court, sitting as the Court of Disputed Returns, was unanimous. They made pointed reference to the backdrop of 'catastrophe and anti-Jewish violence and terror' and noted:

The niceties of proof of the production or issue of documents … can be put aside when one recognises the realities of 1949 …

The big risk for all of us is that we forget things like the Holocaust. That is why the work that has been done to ensure that these things aren't forgotten is some of the most important work.

I think it is very regrettable that someone who wants to pull the strings in the next parliament at some level, Mr Holmes a Court, has been involved with this outrage. As was said in the Financial Review back on 20 February 2020: who was sitting in the Court of Disputed Returns when this disgraceful challenge by Mr Staindl was brought against the Treasurer's eligibility to sit in the parliament? It was Mr Simon Holmes a Court, the founder of Climate 200. You've got to ask yourself: why would he be doing that? Why would he be playing games with Holocaust deniers and weirdos? If he's prepared to do that then what sort of weird and disgraceful behaviour might we see in the next parliament? What might we see if people like this are allowed to purchase, or endeavour to purchase, seats in the next parliament with threadbare agendas and wads of cash?

It is part of the game. If you want to be in public life and you want to try and influence the direction of the country, then people will, rightly, look at your record. This person's record is disgraceful. The people who have been involved with this challenge, which is based on anti-Semitism, are not run-of-the-mill average citizens. They have been engaged in holocaust denial; they've been writing books about it. These are disgraceful people, and Mr Holmes a Court wants to associate with them. I hope that fair-minded people consider all these facts and consider the people who are standing behind these murky bodies when they cast their ballot later this year in the election.

Senator MARIELLE SMITH (South Australia) (12:25): South Australians are emerging from what has been a really tough summer. For many, the change in the environment in South Australia when borders opened and COVID entered our state either has been personally catastrophic or has caused tremendous challenges for them, for their work, for their families and for their businesses. It has been a really difficult summer, and it's been made worse by a prime minister who, once again, has failed South Australians in the way he's responded to the pandemic and in the way he's responded to the changes before us, such as the changes in this variant—whether it's been his failure to secure enough rapid antigen tests for Australian workers so they can get back to work for their families; his failure to get jabs in the arms of kids returning to the classroom and into the arms of teachers, who weren't yet eligible for boosters but needed them to get back to work in order to do their work safely; or his government's shocking failure to respond adequately to the crisis in our aged-care homes across the country.

South Australians, on all of these fronts, feel deeply let down by the Prime Minister. They feel deeply let down by his government, and I don't blame them. It's been a really tough few years compounded by a really tough summer, and every time they're looking to their Prime Minister to lead, he's not there. He's not holding a hose; he's not getting on with the job of the vaccine rollout; he's not building quarantine facilities; he's not securing the RATs; he's not supporting the early childhood workforce, who are on the front line of this pandemic but who have been seemingly invisible to the government for so long; and he's not taking the steps required to fix a crisis in aged care. In fact, his government is getting caught up in word games whilst people are dying.

South Australians feel failed. They feel let down by this Prime Minister. They're questioning his character. They're questioning his ability to stand up for them when they need him. They're questioning his relationship with the truth. They're questioning whether, when they need their government to step in, the government will be there, because, on every measure this summer and in the years before, they haven't been there. But, beyond these acute issues, which are issues of urgency, there are further failures that are less seen, less talked about and less spoken of, and I want to use my time today to talk about the impact of the Morrison government's failures on the higher education and further education sector in my home state of South Australia—a sector which feels abandoned by the Morrison government.

My state is home to three world-class universities and eight TAFE campuses. There are hundreds of thousands of South Australian men and women, young and old, who have talent and potential to develop but who are being let down by a government which is meant to stand for them and for their opportunities and aspirations. Our universities in South Australia educate around 90,000 students. When it comes to TAFE, more than one million students have learned valuable skills and experience at TAFEs in South Australia since these facilities were established in 1971.

We in South Australia know that higher education is vital to our economic future. We know this because it has been crucial to our success economically as a state, and we know that, according to Universities Australia, university research has added $10 billion to Australia's GDP each year for the last 30 years. We're not just talking about big universities in our cities; it's about our regional economies too. We know universities contribute $2 billion a year to these economies. They support over 14,000 regional jobs and, before COVID, 120,000 direct full-time jobs nationwide, while supporting a broader 40,000 jobs in the wider economy. Before COVID, our higher education institutions in South Australia brought in an estimated 10,000 international students each year with an economic value of $2 billion in 2019. These students were fundamentally and horrifically let down by the government when the pandemic struck. Students had to line up for food and rely on our charity sector to support them.

Of course, we also have university research to thank for the speedy development of what we know are truly life-saving vaccines that we have come to rely on during this this pandemic. And we have universities to thank for crucial social and cultural ties that bind international students with local students, building relationships and connections which have meaning not just to the individuals involved but to whole communities, whole cities and to our nation.

Of course, higher education is more than university. I've spoken about that in this chamber several times before. As important as universities are, they are not the be-all and end-all aspiration for all South Australians. Further education like TAFE and vocational training present incredible opportunities. But, on these fronts, the government have let down young South Australians, too. TAFE has a critical role to play in advancing the aspirations of many young people in my state—and, indeed, many older people in my state—who are looking to retrain, reskill and be ready to adapt flexibly to the jobs of the future as opportunities in the labour market change.

The government have allowed the pandemic to wreak havoc on our education sector. Rather than supporting it throughout this pandemic, they have been systematically trashing it, as they have done for years. They let their ideology about higher education drive their policy response. It's an ideology they should have left at the door many years ago, but especially during this pandemic when this sector has been crying out for help and when our economy in South Australia—which has so much to gain from a strong higher education sector—has been crying out for help.

The Prime Minister has turned his back on higher education. When you turn your back on higher education, you don't just turn your back on the researchers within it and on the breakthroughs they could make, or on the staff working within it; you also turn your back on the future aspirations of a generation of people, for whom higher education is their ticket to something different and to something they aspire to. How many breakthroughs and how many careers are lost when you stop our young people from furthering their dreams and education, be that at a university or a TAFE?

The government have trashed this sector. They left it high and dry when it came to wage subsidies. Indeed, in my time in this place, they introduced legislation which had the effect of increasing the cost of university for students, taking away that opportunity. The government's failure to support the university sector and the people who seek opportunities and the expansion of their own potential comes at a time when, for young Australians particularly, opportunities are looking pretty bleak. Young people have been disproportionately hit by this pandemic compared to other groups in our community. They have been forced to drain their super to get by. Their disproportionate involvement in casual and insecure work has left them incredibly vulnerable during this pandemic. Other aspects of their dreams have been affected in terms of their coming of age and their year 12 studies, denying them the opportunities that we had. That has been compounded by an ideological attack on the institutions which offer them that next step in delivering on their aspirations. What an incredible failure by the government of a whole generation of people!

The government have failed all those people in our community who want to be ready for a changing economy and be ready for the opportunities created by a renewable energy revolution. They have failed all those who are seeking opportunities in terms of microcredentialing of the skill sets they need to upgrade or adapt. There are nurses who want to change their qualifications so they can get on the front line of this pandemic and who want to upskill in order to re-enter the workforce or to come back from retirement. These are the institutions that help deliver it, that help deliver the research which keeps us safe from things like global pandemics. They provide an incredible economic opportunity, especially in my state. They forge these cultural ties. They are the ticket to better aspiration for so many people. This Prime Minister has failed them, and in doing so he has failed my state and failed our opportunities in South Australia.

Senator THORPE (Victoria) (12:35): The Morrison government fails at everything it does. Protecting the human rights of imprisoned or detained people is another thing to add to its long list of failures. This country is not complying with its international obligations with the optional protocol to the convention against torture, or OPCAT for short.

On 21 December 2017 the Liberal government ratified OPCAT because of the royal commission into the Don Dale children's prison in the Northern Territory. By ratifying OPCAT we gave a commitment to the world that we would be bound by the treaty to prevent torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. The deadline for this country to fully implement its OPCAT commitments and incorporate the terms of the treaty into the laws, policies and practice of this country was 20 January 2022. Of course, again, the Morrison government failed. They had four years to act, and they failed.

The core obligation this country has in ratifying OPCAT is to establish what's called a national preventive mechanism, or NPM. The NPM is a system of regular visits to places of detention by an independent body that investigates any breaches of the human rights of imprisoned people. Ratification also requires this country to allow the United Nations Committee Against Torture to also visit places of detention and inspect them, to prevent abuses.

When we ratified OPCAT this government invoked article 24 of the convention, which allowed them to postpone their obligations to establish an NPM until January 2022. They argued that postponing the implementation of OPCAT to January 2022 was needed to negotiate with the states and territories. This government never gave a clear public indication of how they were going to meet the January 2022 deadline, and it wasn't because we didn't try to get answers; I raised these issues in estimates, the Australia OPCAT Network was also on the case, and the Victorian Aboriginal Legal Service and a number of academics had been trying to get an answer from this government about how OPCAT was going to be implemented, and all we got was slogans and nonsense.

The Australian Human Rights Commission, the United Nations subcommittee on prevention of torture and particularly Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander legal services have made it clear that the Commonwealth government needs to fully implement OPCAT through federal legislation and more public funding. Every state and territory have the responsibility to enact an NPM to oversee police and prison cells, police cars and other closed institutions within their state and territory. To do this, they need national leadership and public funding; it's as simple as that. But, of course, this government has done nothing.

Both Victoria and New South Wales have said the reason they haven't acted faster on OPCAT is that the Commonwealth hasn't provided any leadership or any money. The Attorney-General's own department has acknowledged publicly that the full, culturally safe implementation of OPCAT would achieve justice targets 10 and 11 of the Closing the Gap agreement. Remember Closing the Gap? You wave the Closing the Gap flag but forget about getting rid of any torturous behaviours within Closing the Gap targets. We wouldn't want to stop the torture! These targets in Closing the Gap are meant to reduce how many First Nations people are held in adult and children's jails. But, of course, the government have done nothing. They know there have been over 500 Aboriginal deaths in custody since the royal commission, and we still have no answers from the government. We still have no-one being held accountable and we still don't have a system to prevent torture and abuse in prison. We allow it.

In 2017, both the National Children's Commissioner and the Attorney-General acknowledged that, if a fully implemented OPCAT system had been in place, the horrific treatment uncovered at Don Dale would likely not have ever happened. In 2018, the Prime Minister announced the aged-care royal commission. He reflected on the closing of the Oakden facility in South Australia as the catalyst for the inquiry. He added that chief psychiatrist Dr Aaron Groves said OPCAT inspections could have prevented Oakden mistreatment. What do you know? We all know how much this government prioritises aged care!

It is absolutely unbelievable that I am standing here today asking—in fact, I'm begging—for this government to do the right thing and end torture. Just end torture in this country. End the mistreatment that goes on in these prisons and other places of detention. How is it that we have to beg the government to stamp out torture? Please stop torturing people in this country. Please!

This government doesn't care about us. It does not care about you. That's why it has to go. Implementing OPCAT is about protecting all people. OPCAT is about protecting people whose equal worth, rights and dignity are being challenged or denied. Implementing OPCAT is also about giving people who see these injustices the tools to get together and fight them. The full implementation of OPCAT would provide all of us—young and old, rich and poor—the tools to demand we are treated as equals in our society, particularly in closed settings like prisons, where abuse and torture flourish when there is no oversight.

While this country signed on to the international agreement to prevent torture in 2009, it wasn't until the disgrace of Don Dale that this country ratified it in December 2017. Fast forward to 2022 and this government is still denying imprisoned and detained people their full dignity, respect and justice. That is why they have to go.

The Greens, in a balance of power, would make sure that a future Labor government would live up to our international obligations under OPCAT. The Greens would make sure that public funding is secured for the full, culturally safe implementation of OPCAT. We would also establish a countrywide police ombudsman system. The police ombudsman would be a fully independent and impartial body to handle complaints about the conduct of police officers and take appropriate action. Is that too much to ask? Please end torture! Please!

Senator HUGHES (New South Wales) (12:45): Over the past year there's been a lot of significant discussion and debate around women: how women are treated, how they're paid, how they're educated, how we better equip them when it comes to consent—accepting what's appropriate behaviour and rejecting what's not. There have been recent discussions about love bombing and the dangers that come with it—how to see red flags, how to be confident in dealing with them and how to walk away from destructive and dangerous situations. However, when you think about all the work that's been done and the discussion, you see that for far too long the discussion has been accompanied by an intellectually bereft and insulting discussion: Labor good, Liberal bad. Liberal women are somehow just here to make up the numbers. As I've recently been told, I'm 'just making the sandwiches for the Morrison boys'. My conservative colleagues, in particular Senator Hume and Senator Henderson, and I are nothing but 'crumb maidens', a term I actually had to look up. It is deeply misogynistic, and it is used by the Left, both men and women, to attack conservative women.

So I thought today would be an important day to set the record straight. I'm going to let you know who has actually invested in women's health, safety and security and who talks a big game but has never ever walked the walk. I urge those of you interested in facts—not smears, political pointscoring or self-promotion—to watch this speech today, not those that are soaked in personal animosity. I'll start by acknowledging that Labor did put in place the first action plan of the current national plan, with an investment of $86 million. Whilst those on the Left will cheer this investment and claim that Labor is committed to this issue, in reality this paltry amount pales in comparison to the $3.4 billion in the Women's Budget Statement 2021-22. That's right: $86 million from Labor to $3.4 billion from the coalition.

But the Morrison government is not only putting real money where its mouth is. For the first time in parliamentary history, the government is demonstrating leadership and action in its commitment to improving the lives of Australian women, with four ministers now in this space. We acknowledge that a Minister for Women is simply not enough, so the Prime Minister has appointed additional ministers: a Minister for Women's Safety, a Minister for Women's Economic Security and an Assistant Minister for Women.

We acknowledge that too many people in this country, particularly women, experience domestic violence. We lose too many women each and every week at the hands of their partner. Whilst those opposite like to talk a big game, what we do know is that they have absolutely no policy ideas and have committed no funding whatsoever to prevention in this area. We on this side of the chamber know the importance of providing support to women and children who experience domestic violence, and I'm going to go through some of those things later on, but we know that what's more important is changing the culture, changing the conversation, so violence against women, including domestic violence, doesn't occur in the first place. The success of our Stop it at the Start campaign is changing not only attitudes but lives. More than $50 million has been spent on changing attitudes around respect. It's a campaign encouraging more respectful relationships that is recognised by three in five adults. These campaigns are working. In anyone's mind, three out of five adults—60 per cent recognition of a campaign—is success.

We know that by changing attitudes we change lives and address the violence towards women before it even begins. But we know that there's lots more to do. That's why we're determined to continue to deliver for Australian women and their families. So I want to go through a couple of programs; I may have to come back for the adjournment debate, because I think that, once you start to go through them, you'll see how many programs we have actually put together, funded and initiated to support women across a vast range of areas.

We have the next national plan to end violence against women—as I said, $3.4 billion in the last budget statement. We have a new National Partnership Agreement, which is up to $260 million, to bolster frontline family, domestic and sexual violence services. We have an escaping violence payment, with a budget of almost $165 million, to help women who need to leave a violent relationship. We have funded a 24/7 hotline, in 1800RESPECT. We've provided 780 safe places for women and children to seek safety when they're leaving a domestic violence situation. We have frontline services, with $130 million, to provide urgent assistance to states and territories when they need assistance in stepping up. We have over $400 million allocated to legal services to help women get out of these relationships. There's the Roadmap for Respect, obviously, and Stop it at the Start, but there is more than 64 million additional dollars going into the government's road map, which is about preventing sexual harassment in Australian workplaces. We want the Respect@Work report and the recommendations in there to guide how we create safer workplaces for everybody.

We have another action plan, with $340 million, that will help to reduce violence against women and children, but we're also focused on their economic security. We know a lot of women can't leave because of the economic constraints that are put on them by a partner in that form of abuse. That statement around economic security is $1.9 billion. This is real money. Again, $86 million was what the Labor Party put in. We've put in $1.9 billion for economic security, something that no-one opposite has ever considered to be an issue. But I guess that, when you're just getting paid by the unions, you don't have to think about how real women need funding and support to get out of destructive relationships. We have childcare subsidies that we've boosted to ensure women can look after their children when they have to get out of these relationships.

We have the Boosting Female Founders Initiative, which ensures that women who have an entrepreneurial spirit are able to access that and get support. We have the National Careers Institute Partnership Grants program, with over $12 million. We have an Early Stage Social Enterprise Foundation—$13.9 million. We have the Career Revive program, because we know that women take career breaks when they have children, and sometimes they need assistance to re-enter the workforce. We've also assisted with mediation, so that they can get help when it comes to distributing property between divorcing or separating partners.

We have a superannuation guarantee threshold. We've removed the $400-per-month threshold so that employees don't have to pay the superannuation guarantee. We have a family home guarantee—and this is one of my favourite initiatives—that allows single mothers to purchase a home with just a two per cent deposit. The government will guarantee the rest. We know that homeownership is one of the safest ways to ensure that this increasing rate of homelessness in women over 50 doesn't continue, so we are committed to ensuring that as many women as possible—in particular, single mothers—get that support to get back into the housing market.

We have economic security statements and reporting frameworks all based around supporting women. We have leadership and development programs, the Academy for Enterprising Girls and National Women's Alliances, to help create policy that supports women into the future. There are also Indigenous girls academies. And we're boosting the next generation of women by supporting them into STEM. Girls are continuing to exceed and excel in the environment of STEM, and we are providing up to 500 industry-based co-funded university scholarships—not only for girls that are finishing school but also for women who are looking to retrain and to re-enter the workforce. We've got women in sport; we've put $12 million into Football Australia.

We're significantly working on lowering the gender pay gap. We've addressed gender balance on Australian boards. As for the coalition and women in parliament, we have eight women, who hold 33 per cent of cabinet positions. This is actually the highest number of women in cabinet ever.

So, with all of this that we hear about the Morrison government somehow being bad for women, you guys just don't get it. I'm a little bit over it, because, on top of that, we are investing so much in health.

Again, I'm probably going to have to come back at adjournment because I cannot possibly go through every initiative that Minister Hunt has funded, but I do want to give him a particular shoutout for the $2 million that went to ovarian cancer today, as we acknowledge Ovarian Cancer Month. It's a cancer that is insidious, that takes far too many women and that is almost impossible to detect until it's too late. This is real money, real investment, real support for women.

Senator O'NEILL (New South Wales) (12:55): It's stating the obvious to note that COVID-19 has up-ended our lives in ways that we never, ever dreamed possible. The wearing of masks, lockdowns and border closures have ensured that lives have been saved, but they have fundamentally changed the way we act, and we struggle with that. It's a containment of the way we've come to know how we live. But, when we think of the struggles we have as adults here with considerable agency, senators in a parliament, no-one has been more impacted, if you think about the comparison, than school-age children.

The Secretary-General of the United Nations observed that around 1.6 billion students have had their studies interrupted by the pandemic and that over 100 million additional children will fall below the minimum proficiency level in reading. We could have a conference to discuss what the social and economic impacts of that will be. We could be here for days talking about that and planning a response to it. But let's just for a moment allow the scale of that interruption to 100 million children and 1.6 billion who've been interrupted in their learning to sink in. It's an enormous number of young people, with a profound and compounding impact on the future for those individuals and on our shared socioeconomic future on this planet we call home.

The World Economic Forum has warned that today's students risk losing $17 trillion in earnings because of these disruptions. Inequalities in access to remote learning and at-home support are driving the diminishing outcomes. The continuing onslaught of new variants of COVID-19 are disrupting the forward-planning capacity of schools, local governments and parents, who are desperate for some stability to plan ahead for their children. UNESCO figures show that countries such as Brazil, India, Bolivia and here in the Asia-Pacific region with our neighbour Indonesia, with the way they are existing and managing COVID, have been forced to close schools for over 75 weeks since the pandemic began. Learning poverty, the World Bank reports, has risen 20 per cent in low- to middle-income countries to a staggering 70 per cent. That means over two-thirds of 10-year-olds in these countries are unable to read a basic test. These stark figures are only getting worse as the COVID crisis continues.

COVID is also exacerbating already existing fault lines in global education. Girls, those from low socioeconomic backgrounds and those in rural and remote areas are falling further and further behind, erasing hard-fought success that took decades. In just a few years we've lost so much. Fears exist—and, sadly, they are being realised—that those who have fallen out of school will not return. They have left school, never to return, not by choice, not to their advantage but because of COVID and the crisis that it has engendered. Remote learning is an option for some. Zoom is impossible though for millions of children who live without access to internet or electricity. Many parents would be reluctant to send their children into crowded schools in some countries, where vaccination rates remain below 15 per cent. The figures we are talking about here are truly alarming.

To that end, Australia must take its place as an international citizen and participant. We need to support health efforts to ensure that students are able to access education in a safe and accessible manner. Greater support for remote learning must be provided. Rapid antigen tests, masks, vaccinations—all these things will help children access the education that they so desperately need. Not having them poses considerable risk to children's lives. Governments, especially those with more wealth and more resources and less of a COVID burden, must do more than attend to their own nations. As an Australian, I know that we have a vital role to play in our region to support the health, wellbeing and education of young people in schools in this part of the world.

Certainly, we have our own concerns about our families, our businesses, our jobs, the way we are perceived and considered, our community and our health. Sometimes these everyday and immediate concerns that sit with us can overwhelm us. It's essential to address these challenges, but it's not enough. Governments must not stop there. We have international responsibilities. Australia can step up to help other countries. We do and we have done, and we will continue to do so under governments of every colour. Most recently, the Global Partnership for Education replenishment is one important way that Australia has stepped up to the plate, but other multilateral aid efforts must also be undertaken to ensure that the global divides are not widened by the pandemic.

My fellow senators and members of the parliament who, with me, have become members of the Australian chapter of the International Parliamentary Network for Education have already done fantastic work lobbying Marise Payne, our foreign minister, to make a commitment to the global education fund on behalf of the Australian nation. With the efforts of senators from the Liberal and National parties—those who are in government—my fellow Labor senators, senators of the Greens party—which you represent, Acting Deputy President Faruqi—and Independents, we have helped make the government firm in its commitment. But the problem is of such a scale that we cannot look away, and we cannot resile from further action. Preparation for the future and the strengthening of existing health education infrastructure has to be put in place.

Vaccine discrimination must end, and we must start sharing the technology that works with our neighbours and friends across the world so that no child is left behind. Wave after wave of the COVID virus threat is likely if we do not acknowledge the simple reality that the virus knows no sovereign boundaries. We've got to sort this out together at a global level. Every country has a stake in this, and all adults are responsible for the lives of the young. The United Nations' Sustainable Development Goal 4 is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. Despite disruptions, despite waves of disease and disenchantment, we must always be focused on the future embodied by our children—all of our children, everywhere. It takes political will to give kids a chance so that we might all benefit.

The International Day of Education was on 24 January. It was a chance at that time—and that's why I'm taking this opportunity today to put it on the record—for the examination of our own policies and how our aid and investment in other countries in our region might have the best possible impact. There's currently a clash of ideas globally regarding whether liberty or freedom of expression is the best model for human development and whether we need to go down a path of more repression, less expression and more autocracy. But, if we don't allow all those young boys and girls who need education to reach their full potential, to enable them to open their minds through the wonder of learning and explore the universe on their own terms, humanity will never enter a new, better age.

It does take the right teacher, the right classroom and the right tools. Teachers transform lives. That's why we invest in public education. It is a national asset, and it is a right for children. I thank my colleagues in the International Parliamentary Network for Education here and around the world. Everywhere, we must work together to get closer to SDG 4 to improve the life of the— (Time expired)

Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (13:05): I speak as a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia. It's now seven months since I delivered a speech reminding senators and people listening at home of the significance of our flag, a flag that flies proudly above our parliament on a strong support that stands equally above the Senate and the House of Representatives, reminding all of us, in both chambers, that we serve the people. We do not serve large, globalist banking corporations; we do not serve trade union bosses, who are often a business of their own these days, devoid of relevance to union members; and we certainly do not serve large foreign multinational pharmaceutical companies. For seven months, I have been ending my speeches with the reminder that we have one flag, we are one community and we are one nation. In this time of great division in our beautiful country, it is becoming harder and harder to live up to the principle that we are one nation. We must put aside division and accept competing viewpoints.

On Monday, I went outside to address a group of everyday Australians who have come to Canberra to protest the policies of this parliament. They quite rightly expected to be able to speak to their elected representatives to share their concerns, and so I did my job and I spoke with them. The results were, to be honest, mixed. I heard many different opinions and I saw many different flags. It's obvious to me that there are some—a very, very small minority—who are misleading and inflaming opinion to gain power for themselves. One Nation will continue to take positions that are based on facts and data, not fabricated, false internet myths. If those of us who oppose tyranny are unable to unite among ourselves, how can we win public opinion? And win we must.

It has been said that 200 years ago a judge by the name of Lord Woodhouselee made an astute observation: 'A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largesse out of the public treasury. After that, the majority votes for the candidate promising the most benefits, with the result that democracy collapses, because loose fiscal policy is always followed by dictatorship.' For many years, I considered that human nature acts out of self-interest, not just for oneself but for those we love—our family and community, our species. Willingly imposing a dictatorship on those we love seemed contrary to human nature. Surely, I thought, there would be a point where the public would realise, 'We are on a path to dictatorship,' and change direction. Well, we're already being controlled. To change our direction, we must be unified. We must be tolerant and forgiving. Our future is not one of retribution, anger and hate. Our future must be unity, forgiveness—and I mean true forgiveness—love and strength. These are the qualities that create a community.

Those assembled outside today have reached their point of awareness. The millions who've attended freedom rallies around Australia have reached their point of awareness. Sadly, this parliament has not. I have never been more nervous for the future of this beautiful country than I am right now. It's clear that we may be approaching the end days of democracy, as predicted 200 years ago—not from the peaceful, respectful, loving protesters but from this parliament and from state parliaments. We're witnessing the controlled demolition of not just our treasury and our democracy but our community. We're on a path to a soft dictatorship 'for our own good'. Nothing about this is for our own good.

Our grandparents enjoyed abundance, freedom and personal sovereignty. These things do not feature in the conversation being advanced by this parliament. Husband has been turned against wife, parent against child and one sibling against another. Our young are being seduced into a world of selfish hedonism that begets apathy towards family and community. Women are being erased, replaced with offensive language such as 'uterus owner' and 'birthing parent', forced to compete against biological men to make clear the new debased status afforded them by the brave new world of globalist groupthink. This is evil. Government dependence is treated as a right, as though it were somehow noble to live off the hard work of others. We're being led into a world where the middle class no longer exists, only a financial elite and their nomenclatura, a pampered and privileged administrative class tasked with carrying out the instructions of the globalists, the elites. High-paid corporate and diplomatic 'thankyou jobs' are clearly on offer to politicians who've expended their political capital to implement globalism.

Meanwhile, everyday Australians have no such escape. Life for so many, including those I met on Monday out front, means working harder and going backwards. During COVID, the world's richest billionaires have seen their wealth increase by $3 trillion while the wealth of citizens has gone backwards by the same amount—stolen; it was robbery. COVID has represented the largest transfer of wealth in human history—nakedly. Everyday Australians have less while billionaires have plenty more.

This parliament is responsible for destroying the Australian economy, destroying small business, destroying lives and destroying hope. The media, major global pharmaceutical companies, globalist banks, political donors and health bureaucrats have the same owners—BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street Corporation, amongst others. These funds invest the wealth of the world's richest crony capitalists and now control wealth equal to one-third of the world's gross domestic product, US$25 trillion. In Australia, this wealth has been invested to create controlling interests in Australia's largest companies—retailers, banks, media and pharmaceutical companies. As a result, crony capitalists now control our country. And parliament and government serve their interests; they don't serve the people. Under this parliament, awaiting everyday Australians is a future that's nothing more than 18th-century feudalism with a public relations budget.

What never gets mentioned is that democracy is not part of the so-called great reset. What awaits is something the UN calls stakeholder governance. Unelected, unrepresentative corporations and their nomenclatura will decide how we live our lives. Parliament will be reduced to debating and passing resolutions that have no legal standing, and this is exactly how the European Parliament works right now. The EU parliament is analogous to putting a plastic steering wheel on the back of the driver's seat of the family car so your children think they're driving. This is our future under the globalist philosophy that now dictates the actions of the Liberals, the Nationals, the Greens and Labor. We the people are not in control. We are deluded into feeling we're in control.

When it comes to COVID, there's no sitting this one out. Recent events have made it clear everyday Australians do not have to be interested in politics for politics to be interested in them. During COVID, small businesses who carried on running their business the way they always have—serving their communities, not discriminating on the basis of race, religion or medical status—are under COVID restrictions, COVID measures. They're being sent broke, their owners fined or, worse, arrested. Politics came for them.

Shortly, Australians must decide. Do you remain prisoners in your cities, states and, now, quarantine camps? Do you remain prisoners of media driven fear, or do we forge a path of freedom born of personal responsibility and inclusion? Inclusion—it's ironic how that word has been reinvented to mean the majority accepting the viewpoint of a small and noisy minority as a device to move society further and further towards a single world view. Senator Chisholm from the Labor Party moved a motion in support of doing exactly that only yesterday. With his matter of urgency, Senator Chisholm was kind enough to show us where Labor, the once proud ALP, would take Australia. For public order, the senator said, dissent must be suppressed. The world view which our parliament now advances has the fundamental assumption that people cannot be trusted to behave in the best interests of their community and so must be treated as convicts—not as citizens—robbed of free choice and, implicit in that, robbed of freedom itself. Freedom is written in inverted commas by our media, who are promoting an agenda of hatred and division on behalf of their billionaire owners. The ABC are compliant because totalitarianism excites the political Left. Tyranny and socialism go together like the words 'rare' and 'side effects'—inseparable, relentless, evil. Christmas, Easter, Australia Day and Anzac Day—and let's not forget Father's Day—had to be extinguished because they offer a chance to renew the bonds that unite us as a family, as a community and as a nation.

The time for people to trust the government is over. It's now time for the government to trust the people. This, the people's house of parliament, must stand in defence of the values that forged this country. The war on family, on community and on Christianity must end in this sitting, for we will be convicts no more. We have one flag, we are one community and we are one nation.

Senator VAN (Victoria) (13:15): I rise to speak on a matter that is of urgent geopolitical concern to Australia and should be to all Australians. The current build-up of over 100,000 troops along the Ukrainian border is the biggest concentration of firepower in eastern Europe since the Cold War. This inherently threatens to destabilise not only the regional security of that part of the world but also the global geostrategic balance. This is of utmost concern to Australia.

Australian commentary in recent weeks about the increased risk of war between Russia and Ukraine misses the simple fact that the two countries are already at war. Understanding just how big Russia's appetite is to endure any cost of further invasion is a key priority for right now, yet there are substantial divergences amongst NATO members as to what that cost should be. This matters enormously.

Since Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, Moscow has consistently undermined Ukrainian sovereignty. Russian actions in the Donbass region, including backing separatist rebels, have created immense instability. Likewise, a multitude of cyberattacks can be linked to Russia, from a cyberstrike against Ukraine's electrical grid in 2015 which disrupted power for millions of people through to a cyberattack earlier this year which brought down multiple government websites. These are just two such examples. The current build-up of Russian troops along the Ukrainian border is just another act of aggression unleashed by Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Europe can no longer pass the buck when it comes to assisting Ukraine. They must stand together. Russian actions and designs for Ukraine are clearly an attempt to intimidate Europe into acquiescing to Moscow's desired regional security environment. A security environment where might is right and the weak suffer is not in Europe's or Australia's interests. The United States should not be doing all the heavy lifting when it comes to standing up to Russia. All allies and partners who have an interest in global peace and stability must be prepared to do what is necessary to ensure conflict is averted. However, this means that NATO states, particularly the European members, must materially step up to the threats facing Ukraine. The United Kingdom is leading the European pack in laying down red lines for Russia, and its leadership should be commended. Spain, Denmark, the Netherlands and the Baltic States have sent Ukraine weapons. France and Germany, however—arguably the two European nations who should be taking a lead on the Ukraine crisis—are unfortunately letting Europe down.

While France has been doing some of the diplomatic heavy lifting, Germany's stance is increasingly looking much more like appeasement. While the ideal solution is a diplomatic one, the reality is that deterrence must be demonstrably credible. Germany's insistence on not providing lethal weapons, sending instead 5,000 helmets and medical equipment, exposes an evident weakness in European unity on Ukraine. Of course, we know Berlin is constrained by its weakness and reliance on Russian gas, and I applaud recent Australian announcements that we are ready to fill that gap should that occur. I also acknowledge that we are hearing via the White House that Germany is prepared to look at wide-ranging sanctions. It would be better to be hearing that from Berlin. However, if Germany won't stand up for its neighbours and the ideals of liberal democracy, sovereignty and regional security, Australia should think twice about rewarding it with future defence contracts.

If Europe lets Putin get away with further aggression against Ukraine, a precedent will be set for other authoritarian leaders around the globe. This precedent should worry Australians, especially those standing in this house today. A United States that is bogged down in Europe will have serious implications for our own backyard, the Indo-Pacific, in what is already a dangerous and highly contested security environment. It means the United States will have less bandwidth in capability to operate and deter malicious actors in the Indo-Pacific. This opportunity could very much allow China's Xi Jinping to place further pressure on the region's shared vision of being free, open and stable. However, this should come as no surprise. Over the past decade we have watched China become increasingly more assertive and increasingly more willing to use its weight against states who dare to disagree.

If Europe does not stand up to Russia and Ukraine, a clear message will be delivered to China on the question of strategic ambiguity over Taiwan, the message being that the West does not have the strength or the will to defend smaller liberal democracies and that if you push hard enough the West will capitulate. This is a message that we simply cannot endorse. President Xi has made it clear that in his lifetime Taiwan will be incorporated into mainland China. He will therefore be watching with a close eye as to how the West responds to Putin's latest acts of aggression.

If European states do not step up in the Ukrainian crisis and the United States becomes drawn into protracted conflict in Ukraine, those nations with national interest in the Indo-Pacific must be ready to step up with an increased physical presence in the region —this includes our allies and partners such as Japan, the UK, Korea, India and others—to ensure our region and backyard remain stable, regardless of the situation in Europe. In fact, if France and Germany are not going to defend Ukraine, they should at least be prepared to defend their interests in this region, which they talk so much about.

Russia has watched China apply a dangerous strategy of incrementalism, with accumulated gains in the region over the last decade, particularly in the South China Sea. As an international community we must recognise that this strategy will not just disappear. The question isn't if Russia will make a further move on Ukraine, but when. All countries who believe in peace must be prepared to back Ukraine in any way they can, but Europe ought to step up most. If not, European countries need to be prepared to answer to their children and grandchildren as to why not.

Here in Australia we have experienced firsthand the pressures of an overbearing, authoritarian government that has attempted to coerce us and force its will upon our people. This government has rightly stood up to these coercive acts in the name of protecting the ideals we value most. All countries who believe in peace must be prepared to back Ukraine in any way they can, particularly through economic sanctions. However, all NATO countries must show the greatest resolve and provide military support. If they don't, they need to be prepared to answer to history as to why they appeased Putin.

As chair of the parliamentary friends of Ukraine group, I have a deep appreciation for the Ukrainian people and I admire the strength and resolve they have displayed as a nation in recent times. This is not the first time that liberal democracies have been challenged to stand up for their values and it will not be the last. But how we act today and how we respond to the threat we currently face can and will have repercussions for the future.

Russia must immediately de-escalate. However, if Putin proves unwilling to do so, the free world's support for Ukraine's sovereign integrity must be unwavering. Now is the time for all nations who profess a love for the democratic institutions we hold so dearly to our hearts to stand with Ukraine for what is not only a just cause but also a cause that can and will shape our geostrategic environment.

Senator SHELDON (New South Wales) (13:24): Two years ago the Prime Minister said slavery never happened in Australia. Apparently, he's never heard of blackbirding in the 19th century. The truth is that blackbirding did happen, and it is still happening today. Last week, five courageous men from Vanuatu and Samoa, who were working on Australian farms on temporary visas, gave evidence to the Senate job security inquiry. The conditions of work they described are barely any better than in the 19th century.

Sergio came to Mildura from Vanuatu to pick grapes under the government's Pacific Labour Scheme. He was told he would be paid $2.50 for each box of grapes he picked. Sergio picks about 110 boxes on a good day, so $275 per day should have been the payment. But, at the end of the week, Sergio looks at his pay slip, and he has been paid $100 for a week of backbreaking labour—$100.

Aleki came to Warburton from Samoa under the government's Pacific Labour Scheme. He came here to earn enough money to support his parents, his wife and his eight children back in Samoa. He was told he would earn $25.41 an hour and work from Monday to Friday, so he could attend church on Sunday. Aleki and his colleagues worked just one day for that $25.41-per-hour rate, and then their employer told them that the contract was changing: instead Aleki would be getting paid $7 per tray of berries. Then that rate was reduced again and again and again. There was just nothing he could do about it. Aleki told us: 'We are being threatened. We're being told not to speak up.'

Talipope also came to Warburton from Samoa. He is in the same situation as Aleki. He and three others share one small, hot room. This is the only place they can go after work. Last year, some of them tested positive for COVID-19. They had to isolate in their room for 10 days together, in a small, cramped space. All they were given to survive on was four packets of instant noodles, six potatoes, one loaf of bread, one bottle of juice and a few bits of fruit. This is what four grown men with COVID-19 were told to survive on for 10 days.

I've also seen Talipope's pay slips and time sheets. They show that, in some weeks, Talipope worked 64 hours over seven days, with no days off—not even for Sunday church. For those 64 hours, he was paid just $100, because Talipope, like the other workers we heard from, is having hundreds of dollars of deductions taken from his pay every week. Workers have been charged hundreds of dollars to stay in slum accommodation, with four to six people to a room. They are being overcharged to ride in their employer's van to get to the farm. The labour hire company skims 80 per cent of their pay slip for all sorts of expenses—80 per cent. Thousands of people like Sergio, Aleki and Talipope are left with almost nothing. They can barely support themselves financially, let alone send any money home for their families.

It is a national disgrace. The government knows about it. We've had enough inquiries, task forces and reports. The company I've spoken about today is an approved employer, and it has a big tick from DFAT. All of this is happening in plain sight. Rather than fix it, the government has introduced a new ag visa that Minister Littleproud has said will be even less regulated than the Pacific Labour Scheme, which I've talked about today. The message from the government is that anything goes on Australian farms. Here's what Sergio told us: 'I came here to work for money. I did not come here as a slave.' The government has to act. It has a responsibility to act, and it's about time it acted.

Senator McCARTHY (Northern Territory—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (13:30): The Mayor of Alice Springs recently wrote an impassioned letter to me and others in this place asking for assistance dealing with high levels of crime and antisocial behaviour. At the same time, youth services in the region are calling for a clear plan and proper funding to address high levels of youth incarceration and crime. The two issues are clearly and directly linked.

On 1 February, a group of youth services providers wrote to the Minister for Indigenous Australians, highlighting their concerns about the lack of support and investment in remote community youth services in the southern part of the Territory. It's not the first time they've tried to get this government to listen and act. Since the introduction of the Indigenous Advancement Strategy in 2015, when Commonwealth government cost savings measures cancelled indexation of funding, the remote NT youth programs delivered by their agencies have, effectively, taken an annual cut in funding. They estimate this cut at more than $8 million. That's a huge amount of money ripped out of a remote region.

As anyone in remote communities will tell you, kids need access to reliable, safe and appropriate activities to keep them occupied and engaged. Yet facilities like recreation halls, sporting facilities and staff housing are crumbling. Many youth centres and town halls are not air-conditioned and don't have working toilets, hand washing facilities or basic food preparation facilities. Many of the mostly uncovered outdoor basketball courts have not been resurfaced in decades. We've seen interventions, royal commissions and regional deals come and go, with tens of millions of dollars spent in the name of fixing things for remote kids, yet this government continues to pass the buck. It should not be easier to jail a child than to give them a basketball court to play on.

Senator HENDERSON (Victoria) (13:32): I rise to raise serious concerns about the so-called 'Voices of' independent movement, funded by the big end of town, including Simon Holmes a Court's Climate 200 group, which is nothing more than a front for Labor and the Greens. When I dared to challenge Mr Holmes a Court over his disgraceful and offensive support of the failed section 44 challenge against the Treasurer founded on anti-Semitism, suggesting he may wish to pay the legal costs in Michael Staindl's failed court challenge, I was met with claims that I was some sort of 'crumb maiden'—that I was only here to pick up the crumbs of power, which apparently is what that means. This is sexist, denigrating and a clear case of misogyny.

Climate 200's website says it wants to raise at least $15 million to $20 million for its 'independent' candidates. The website also refers to community groups which have formed to support pro climate, pro integrity and pro gender equality independents. There's nothing 'pro'—particularly nothing pro gender equality—about Mr Holmes a Court. He has a history of making offensive and disrespectful comments towards conservative women. He spoke of Senator Hume, accusing her of bitchiness and of not having a soul.

I wrote to a number of independent candidates in Kooyong, Wentworth, Mackellar, Goldstein, Curtin and North Sydney, asking whether, in light of these offensive comments, they would condemn Mr Holmes a Court, confirm that they support the respectful treatment of all women and confirm whether they would take any money from Mr Holmes a Court's Climate 200 group. Regrettably, there was absolutely no response from any of these so-called independent candidates, which says everything that electors need to know about their commitment to respect for all women.

Senator WHISH-WILSON (Tasmania) (13:34): Something significant happened in this nation on 16 December last year. Prime Minister Scott Morrison visited Newcastle and formally declared opposition to a fossil fuel project called petroleum exploration permit 11, or PEP-11, which was going to explore for oil and gas off the coast of Newcastle all the way down to the northern Sydney beaches. Of course, the community were absolutely stoked about this. They have been campaigning against this madness for years. But it is unclear whether this is actually the case. I just want to put on the record that we've received some advice. While the Prime Minister came out and made this statement that this project would no longer proceed and that he would be directing this, we have confirmed that NOPTA, the regulator, did in fact let Asset Energy, the company that was exploring for oil and gas, know that it would not be renewing their permit but that Asset Energy is now appealing this decision. The decision is on the desk of the resources minister, Keith Pitt. Our advice is that it's unclear when that new advice will be provided to Asset Energy or when the decision on its appeal will be made. I would also like to put on record today the community's concern that the Prime Minister has come out and made such a big a statement but there's no clarity on whether we actually have a final decision and whether PEP-11, petroleum exploration permit 11, is dead in the water.

I will say this while I am here today: while it's great for a number of marginal seats on the New South Wales coast that we've banned the insanity of exploring for oil and gas off that coast, let's do it for the Otway Basin off the Twelve Apostles. Let's do it off King Island, a valuable fishing community. Let's do it around the entire country.

Senator BILYK (Tasmania) (13:36): I understand that ministers are busy and they have to juggle competing pressures. It's part of the job. It's what they're paid for, in fact. But many Australian workers have faced the pressures of a busy and demanding job, particularly those in the aged-care sector and especially during the COVID-19 outbreak. Thank you to all of them. When the Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services, Senator Colbeck, was asked to appear before the 14 January hearing of the Senate COVID committee he declined, citing 'urgent and critical work combating omicron'. I was horrified to learn that Minister Colbeck declared that he received 'sponsored travel and hospitality to attend three days of the cricket in Hobart'. I'm sure he was fed and probably watered—to be polite—which is a lot more than some of our aged-care residents have been able to be recently. It's completely inacceptable that a minister in this government who is overseeing an ongoing crisis in aged care, where people are dying, chose to go to the cricket for three days instead of fronting up to do his job, especially when the committee had only asked for him for two hours and 45 minutes. He could have participated remotely.

Our aged-care workers are doing phenomenal work under extremely trying conditions. We need to remember the aged-care sector was in crisis before COVID even hit. There has been almost nine years of disgraceful neglect of some of our most vulnerable people, but Mr Morrison and Senator Colbeck have not learned from the terrible mistakes that happened in aged care because of their own incompetence and funding cuts. When Minister Colbeck finally fronted the committee, he still denied there was a crisis. We've had 22 reports concluding the sector is in crisis as well as a two-year royal commission which found that the average— (Time expired)

Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (13:38): The Greens, Labor, the Liberals and their sell-out sidekicks the Nationals, the uniparty, as I call them, like to talk about sustainability, as though it's the environment that needs to be sustained instead of human beings. The real lesson in applying sustainability can be found, though, in Australian family farms. Providing food to feed the hungry and clothing to warm the cold, Australian farmers are heroes for the positive effect they've had on the sustainability of our entire human race. Their farms have been productive for, in many cases, 150 years. Their soil is most likely healthier now than ever before. Our farmers care about their land. It's their livelihood and their future. The role of family farming became clear during the recent drought, which, mercifully, has now ended in most places.

Irrigation canals lose water to seepage, which recharges groundwater. Native trees get roots down into that groundwater and survive the drought. Rural Australia is resplendent with ribbons of native habitat along thousands of kilometres of irrigation canals, home to a wonderful cornucopia of native flora and fauna which would have perished without that irrigation water.

The average Australian dairy farm supports 40 species of native creatures. Where there is as little as one hectare of native bush on a farm, this increases to over 100 species. Yet, where farms are being denied water, their families are being driven off their land and the farms turn into wasteland—a breeding ground for pests and imported weeds, devoid of the ecosystem that happy-clappy environmentalists pretend will return.

When the government pokes its bureaucratic bloated nose where it does not belong, in the name of so-called sustainability, it's a disaster. Family farms cease to exist. Diversity in the rural economy shrinks. The environment is worse, not better. Still, Labor, the Greens, the Liberal Party and the National Party push ahead. This is not sustainability of the environment; it's sustainability of rank stupidity and callous indifference towards the masses of everyday Australians. This madness must end. (Time expired)

Senator SCARR (Queensland) (13:40): [by video link] On Australia Day I was honoured to attend a citizenship ceremony hosted by Archerfield Rotary Club. It was followed by a wonderful Australia Day family funfair. At the ceremony I said to the conferees that, if they were looking for examples of contributing to our beautiful country, they need look no further than members of the Archerfield Rotary Club. I have previously spoken in this place about the work of the club, including drought relief and assisting our Pacific family in times of need.

This week, one of the club's members, Mark Ledwidge, passed away. Mark had become an Australian citizen at the first citizenship ceremony convened by Archerfield Rotary Club, in 2006. For 26 years and 10 months he had been an outstanding contributor to the club, serving as president, secretary and treasurer. Mark Ledwidge was a Paul Harris Fellow—a great honour amongst Rotarians. He was involved in all of the projects undertaken by Archerfield Rotary Club—not just in Australia but in Fiji, PNG, India and Africa. Members of the club described him thus:

Mark was such a kind, gentle soul. He did many things to improve the lives of those less fortunate.

Such a dedicated man, the man with a smile and sense of humour always.

…the kindest soul who never spoke ill of anyone.

I wish to provide my sincere condolences to Mark's wife, Brenda, his three sons and other family and friends. I have no doubt that Archerfield Rotary Club will continue its great community work. That is the best tribute which can be paid to Mark Ledwidge, whose life of service provides an inspiring example to all Australians.

Senator GRIFF (South Australia) (13:42): The Prime Minister recently announced more funding for industry linked research, including hundreds of new industry PhDs and fellowships. This is a welcome commitment. Australia is blessed with world-class universities. Their research is the great enabler of economic growth. It yields new ideas and technologies that improve our lives and offer the prospect of safer, higher-paying and more-satisfying jobs. It has been frustrating, through the term of this government, to see research underrated and very much underfunded and to see the government's constant interference in research grants.

I accept that our funding processes are not perfect. For instance, we waste too much public money. But, while the government sees waste in projects it thinks are pointless, I see waste in how much time our researchers, our best and brightest, spend on grant applications. Some studies have found that up to 40 per cent of a researcher's time goes into doing applications instead of doing the research we have trained them to do. That's two days a week wasted. The government could significantly increase our research capacity by reforming the application process and progress or by even introducing a lottery.

Another problem is that, while public money is increasingly channelled into commercial and industry research, too little is spent on basic research and knowledge diffusion. Without basic research, there is nothing for industry research to draw on; and without making research outputs freely available, allowing new ideas to spread, the benefits are captured by one or two big corporates and don't flow through to workers and the broader economy. I welcome the government's announcement but it is a piecemeal, stopgap solution instead of the broader reforms that are urgently needed.

Senator DODSON (Western Australia) (13:44): I wish to draw attention to an excellent paper by the Nulungu Research Institute based at the Broome campus of Notre Dame university. It shows that First Nations people in the Kimberley coped magnificently during the first wave of COVID. Thousands were mobilised, leaving places they deemed to be unsafe. But the researchers had trouble finding good population and infrastructure data, which clearly hampered pandemic planning. I wrote in the foreword to the paper that a government which doesn't know its own backyard is a government that doesn't care. What's clear from the paper is that, while the first wave of COVID didn't infect the Aboriginal communities in the Kimberley, it was a matter of good luck rather than good management. The paper concludes, unsurprisingly, that remote community infrastructure is in disrepair; that communications with government and service agencies are inadequate; and that many families live below the poverty line.

These conditions, ripe for COVID, are as bad today as they were two years ago when COVID first arrived. But, knowing all this, governments have done not enough to work with these communities and agencies to prepare for the next wave, which we know will come. I'm gravely concerned that even our mainstream services in the north are under-resourced. Finally, the concept of living with the virus is a poor option when our communities have serious health problems and known shortfalls in housing and service delivery.

Senator LAMBIE (Tasmania) (13:46): There's a motion coming up that I'm proposing to amend, and this is the only chance I'll get to explain why. It's a motion to set up a select committee inquiry into Australia's sovereign capability. It's a good issue to look at. I'm proposing to amend it anyway, not to kill it dead, but to make it work. At the moment it doesn't work. It's being asked to run a mile in 10 seconds—that's impossible and it will fail.

I am in favour of an inquiry into our sovereign capability. I like the idea so much that I think we should do it properly! We don't need a select committee for this; most of the time those are a stitch-up. Whoever sets it up, sets it up—that's because whoever sets it up makes the rules. Look who Senator Rennick wants on this committee. There are six spots for senators up for grabs, and he wants the government to get half the spots and One Nation to get the fourth spot. And why wouldn't he? One Nation vote with the Liberals 75 per cent of the time and, right now, One Nation are more likely to vote with the Liberals than half the Liberal Party themselves. That's where we're at. Senator Rennick wants to give government senators and government mates the lion's share of spots for an inquiry into what the government is doing. And he wants to do it in six weeks. He reckons that's all the time it will take. What a rip-off for the nation! When it comes to talking about sovereign capability, you can do it quickly or you can do it right.

We have a standing committee called the FADT—foreign affairs, defence and trade. I'm one of the people on it. We look into things like this all the time. That is our job. That's why I don't support this inquiry. It's not because I don't think it's such an important issue—I think it's damn critical and that we need it. I think it's up there with the most important issues, and we could be looking at it right now. That's why I want a real inquiry, not a stitch-up done at minutes to midnight and stacked to the gills with government cronies and conspiracy theorists. That's what I'm looking at, and that's what the nation deserves.

Senator COX (Western Australia) (13:48): We can all agree that we need a safe future for our children and for our grandchildren and their children. As a mother and a proud First Nations woman, my birthright gives me the responsibility to protect and nurture country with love and care—our Mother Earth.

First Nations people have cared for country since time immemorial. Yet in just over a couple of hundred years—in fact, in the blink of an eye—the legacy of colonisation has pushed us further into a climate emergency. Right now our country is hurting, crying out in pain. The science is clear: every tonne of coal and gas burnt increases the intensity and speed of change in our climate. That means more floods, more intense droughts and heatwaves, and more frequent bushfires, like we're seeing in my home state of Western Australia. Yet Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals continue to vote in favour of planet-destroying fossil fuel projects that we don't need. That's because every year they take millions of dollars in donations from the coal and gas corporations responsible for this destruction. Every day that passes, we fall further behind and the opportunities to make change are made harder.

But it actually does haven't to be this way. It is the responsibility of every single person in this place to provide a safe future for our children and the generations to come. The answers to the climate crisis are here, right in front of us, and we can protect country. We can and we must push the next government to go further and faster on climate action and to create hundreds of thousands of jobs to pivot to a cleaner and greener resources economy. We can turn this country into a renewable energy superpower that exports clean, cheap, renewable energy instead of coal.

Senator PATRICK (South Australia) (13:50): During World War II, 60,000 Timorese died assisting Australian soldiers who were fighting in Timor. After they voted for independence in 1999 and after the great job done by INTERFET in supporting the transition, it was reasonable for them to think that we were their friends, but we weren't. The government of the day and those in DFAT at the time were busy in the background trying to steal Timor's oil and gas—Timor's only real source of money to bring their population out of poverty. Here are some of the things we did.

The Australian government withdrew itself from the maritime boundary jurisdictions of the International Court of Justice and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, forcing the issue to be resolved without an independent umpire. During purportedly good-faith negotiations, Australia spied on Timor-Leste to gain advantage in the negotiations. When Timor-Leste found out about the spying, they sought to have the treaty declared invalid on the basis of fraud. The Australian government responded by raiding the offices of Timor-Leste's lawyer, Bernard Collaery. After Timor launched compulsory conciliation under article 289 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, Australia lodged six objections, with the Conciliation Commission dismissing all of them. When a replacement treaty was finally agreed to by government, they immediately sought to prosecute whistleblowers Witness K and Bernard Collaery, the heroes that had called out Australia's abhorrent conduct. This morning it was revealed, because of proceedings I initiated in the AAT, that we started the spying on the Timorese, to steal their resources, before they were even independent.

We need to come clean. We need to be open and transparent to restore Timor's trust and international confidence in Australia. We need to stop the prosecutions. With that, I seek leave to table a translation of a vote of confidence in Mr Collaery conducted recently in the Timor-Leste parliament, to show the Senate and the Australian people that Mr Collaery's continued prosecution is a hindrance to the relationship-healing process.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator O'Nei ll ): Is leave granted?

Senator Dean Smith: We accept the translation in good faith and have no objection to accepting that the document be tabled.

Senator PATRICK: I table the document.

Senator GROGAN (South Australia) (13:53): In late January, many parts of remote and regional South Australia received unprecedented and record rainfall, causing widespread flooding across the Eyre Peninsula and throughout the outback. Some areas received up to 200 millimetres of rain, which is the total annual rainfall in that region. It caused severe problems, closing roads, washing away topsoil and damaging infrastructure. A 250-kilometre stretch of the Stuart Highway, between Glendambo and Coober Pedy, was severely damaged, and the rail link from Adelaide to Darwin and to Western Australia was also severed. Homes on the Eyre Peninsula were damaged and destroyed, and motorists had to be rescued from the area between Iron Knob and Kimba.

I would like to take this opportunity to thank the South Australian Police, the CFS, the SES and other first responders for being there when the community needed them most. Thanks also to the men and women of the Australian Defence Force for the key role that they played in keeping our remote and regional communities safe and supplied while they were cut off.

Unfortunately, climate science tells us that we're likely to experience more intense floods and fires over the coming years. The government's own Productivity Commission has found that funding for reconstruction and recovery consumes 97 per cent of the disaster funding in Australia. That leaves just three per cent for mitigation and community resilience measures. That's why an Albanese Labor government will invest up to $200 million each year in disaster prevention and resilience. We need to plan and protect our communities, not just mop up after disasters that we can plan for and predict.

Senator THORPE (Victoria) (13:55): We all saw that powerful photo of sisters Cathy Freeman, Evonne Goolagong and Ash Barty together. This country's greatest athletes and the definition of black excellence are such a great inspiration to all young women and girls. However, we can't just celebrate our elite women and gender diverse athletes—we need to pay them. It's a great time for sport in this country. The AFL women's season is underway, and it is unbelievable that there is such a huge gap between the pay that AFLM players and AFLW players take home. How can the league call their elite athletes professional players if a whole lot of them don't even get paid properly?

This season most AFLW player will earn just over $20,000. Because AFLW players are paid so little, most have to juggle other work just to stay afloat—not to mention that they are also far more likely than their male counterparts to develop ACL injuries. AFLW is quickly becoming the No. 1 female sport in this country. These incredible athletes must be paid at the highest rate and must be supported into becoming full-time professional athletes with the pay that they deserve. Go AFLW!

Senator DEAN SMITH (Western Australia—Government Whip in the Senate) (13:57): On 1 February last year Burma's pathway to democracy was abruptly interrupted by a military coup. Australia has always maintained, publicly and privately, its very serious concerns about the coup. We've done this directly to the regime, in ministerial meetings and embassy statements, at the East Asia Summit and at the United Nations Human Rights Council. By the end of last year there were 65 calls from our foreign minister to international leaders. We've suspended Australia's limited bilateral defence cooperation arrangements and redirected our development assistance away from regime entities. We've contributed $25 million to the ASEAN Coordinating Centre for Humanitarian Assistance on disaster management. We've provided COVID-19 support to the tune of $6 million and a further $4½ million to support other infection-control initiatives. Australia's funded humanitarian partners are working diligently to ease the pain that now is afflicting many Burmese people.

If the Economist magazine is to be believed, there's room for optimism. In its most recent edition, it said the National Unity Government has:

… taken pains to show that it is listening to its critics. It is stuffed with young people and ethnic minorities, and says it makes decisions by consensus. It has symbolically repealed the constitution, which was enacted by a previous junta in 2008, and promised to forge a federal state and to grant Rohingyas citizenship …

as well as to approach these future matters in a conciliatory and inclusive tone. There is much to be optimistic about with regard to Burma, but thus far the ASEAN process has not lived up to expectations. My strong view, having spoken to many Burmese people across our country, is that Australia must maintain its vigilance. Australia must maintain a strong voice in making sure that everything is done to free Burma of this military regime. (Time expired)

Senator GALLAGHER (Australian Capital Territory—Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) (13:59): I'll just give you a few budget facts from this government. They doubled the debt prior to the pandemic. They racked up $1 trillion of debt without enough to show for it. They're the second-highest-taxing government in the last 30 years and are now collecting $4½ thousand more per person than Labor in 2013. They have no credibility on budget management.

The PRESIDENT: It being 2pm, the Senate will now move to questions.

Senator WHISH-WILSON (Tasmania) (15:03): I ask the Minister representing the Minister for Health and Aged Care for an explanation as to why an answer has not been provided to question on notice No. 86, asked during the 2021-22 supplementary budget estimates hearings of the Community Affairs Legislation Committee. The question related to health based guidance for PFAS chemicals.

Senator COLBECK (Tasmania—Minister for Sport and Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services) (15:03): I don't have any specific advice in relation to that, but I do commit to coming back to you as quickly as possible in relation to that answer. I was aware that you were going to ask for this information and I had sought advice from the minister's office. I'll go back and see what I can resolve for you as quickly as possible.

Senator WHISH-WILSON (Tasmania) (15:03): I move:

That the Senate take note of the explanation.

I thank you for that, Senator Colbeck. Yes, we did contact your office to give you a heads-up that this was coming, and we have tried to do so multiple times. This issue is very important. PFAS chemicals are getting increasing focus around the world for their impact on health, on agriculture and on soil contamination right across airports and other sites in the country. Sadly, they're making their way into our rivers and into our waterways. The PFAS group of chemicals represent over 4,000 chemicals. We've been using them historically in a wide range of applications, but unfortunately they have many harmful effects and their use in products such as firefighting foam has led them to enter the water supply and our food stream. They're a major environmental problem that's been recognised all around the world. They don't break down naturally, and they can be potentially highly toxic to a range of animals, habitat and ecosystems. I know many countries have discontinued their use.

What interests me is that while Commonwealth advice states that PFAS has not been proven to cause specific illnesses in humans, other nations are now increasingly disagreeing. Notably, the United States EPA has stated that there is evidence that exposure to PFAS can lead to adverse health outcomes in humans, and the US EPA only last month started a water monitoring program testing for PFAS around the nation. They've also released an epidemiological study of 69,000 people related to PFAS contamination that has shown kidney disease and testicular cancer. In Michigan PFAS was found in beef after cattle were fed crops grown with fertiliser made from contaminated wastewater biosolids. Farms in Maine and New Mexico, including dairy operations, were forced to close after high levels of PFAS were found.

We're not immune to this kind of contamination. Just in my home state, in Launceston—and this is particularly why I am actually pursuing this line of questioning with the minister—we have publicly acknowledged PFAS contamination from Launceston Airport in farmlands and in rivers, including rivers that go through the town that are used for fishing, that are used for recreation, and we still haven't got any answers from the minister.

We've also seen Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden signal their intention to ban the manufacture of PFAS, and they have provided guidance for PFAS in drinking water which is very different to the Australian guidance—hence my questions to the minister. I note that there was one thing that the Greens asked the minister to provide—a new epidemiological study—and that has just been released by ANU, which is a positive.

Just very briefly, the questions that we put to the minister: How often are the health based guidance values for PFAS fact sheets, as available on the pfas.gov.au website, updated? And when was the last time it was updated? No answer. The last update about PFAS in the Australian Drinking Water Guidelines was in 2018—four years ago—yet we see continued evidence growing about the health impacts of PFAS—not good enough. When is the next update on PFAS envisaged? No answer. Why has there been no update since 2018? No answer. What priority areas have been identified for PFAS health research by the Australian government since 2018? No answer. How much money has the Australian government invested in PFAS health research since 2018? No answer. How has the Australian government adapted its health advice considering the recent changes to guidance in the EU and the US? No answer. Of course, we have asked these questions previously at estimates—no answer on the night. So we put questions on notice, and still, way beyond the due date, we've received no answers from the minister.

May I say, to conclude, that I understand Senator Colbeck has been under a lot of pressure lately. Yes, it's a very serious thing when this chamber, when the opposition, calls for the resignation of a minister. It's something I've only seen less than a handful of times in my 10 years in this place, and I remember a day when it was actually an extremely serious thing for all of us to call for the resignation of a minister. But we have seen repeated failures by Senator Colbeck in his department. I was gobsmacked when I learnt that he didn't appear before the Senate committee to provide not only information to the committee at a crucial time but information that could have been of comfort to senior Australians who were really doing it tough during COVID, many of them alone, many of them anxious, many of them suffering and, sadly, too many of them dying from this virus. And the minister goes to the cricket! Perhaps that's why he hasn't been able to put a rocket under the department to get answers for us today, even after we have repeatedly reached out and asked for those answers. It's simply not acceptable. I hope the minister can get a hurry on, because, as is plainly obvious, we have very limited parliamentary time this year to get the answers to these critical questions.

Question agreed to.

Senator GALLAGHER (Australian Capital Territory—Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) (15:10): Under standing order 74(5)(a), I seek an explanation from the Minister representing the Prime Minister, Senator Birmingham, as to why 2020-21 additional estimates questions on notice Nos 1, 3, 5, 6, 501, and 519 to 531 inclusive, placed on the Notice Paper through the Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee—in the PM&C portfolio—remain unanswered.

Senator BIRMI NGHAM (South Australia—Minister for Finance, Leader of the Government in the Senate and Vice-President of the Executive Council) (15:10): I thank Senator Gallagher for her question. As I've observed a few times in the life of this parliament, over the last year there've been not dozens, not hundreds, not thousands but tens of thousands of questions that have filtered through the parliamentary proceedings of this chamber, the other chamber, estimates committees and different select and standing committees that the government has received and, overwhelmingly, worked through responses to. I acknowledge that, with what is a flow of not just more questions than were received in the last parliament but, as I understand it, more questions than were received in the previous couple of parliaments combined, there are challenges in working through all of them. Some questions come with additional sensitivities—including, in some cases, legal sensitivities—to be worked through, and sometimes that adds time to the responses there. Whilst I am sure, as is relatively predictable in these debates, a raft of criticisms about the timeliness of responses to questions and so on will follow, I would note and contend that, in terms of the government's responsiveness to the sheer volume of questions and accountability in responding to such a large number of questions, we've demonstrated a very strong and significant effort in our accountability through the term of this parliament. We'll of course continue to make best endeavours in relation to the many questions that we continue to receive on a regular basis.

Senator GALLAGHER (Australian Capital Territory—Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) (15:12): Under standing order 74(5)(b), I move:

That the Senate take note of the explanation from the minister.

The minister is absolutely right that there will be criticism of the government's failure to answer these questions. These are important questions. It seems that the defence from the Minister for Finance is the same defence that he used in December when I followed up the failure to answer these questions. It is essentially that a lot of questions have been asked and that's why a lot of questions remain unanswered. That is essentially the government's defence. On this of all days, when Ms Brittany Higgins has addressed the nation again, has spoken about her experience here, these questions relate to that. They date back to that. They are questions I asked that are now 278 days overdue.

It's not like I've been harassing the government to answer these questions. It was expected that they would be answered by, I think, 7 May 2021. That was the due date. They're now 278 days overdue. We have had two estimates rounds in the intervening period. I wrote to the Secretary of Prime Minister and Cabinet on 13 October last year asking where the answers to these questions were and, indeed, giving him the opportunity to say whether there were specific reasons why these questions couldn't be answered—if that is an additional defence by the government. Secretary Gaetjens hasn't even bothered to answer. Who would have thought that the head of the Prime Minister's department, the central agency, would refuse to even acknowledge, let alone reply to, a polite letter asking where the answers to these questions might be? But that's the level of accountability and transparency that exists in this government. I would argue it's the lowest level of accountability and transparency. They may have answered questions and they may have been asked lots of questions, but if they were a little more open and transparent, if they provided a little bit more information and didn't fight and if they didn't withhold so much information, maybe there would be fewer questions asked. Maybe if they answered questions and didn't use the opportunity to answer as merely a way to fob people off—I have so many questions where the answers provided by this government don't even bother to answer the question. If you ask, 'Can you provide A?' the answer will be: 'Here's an orange.' That is the quality that we get, and that is the disrespect that is shown to this Senate.

When I look back, these are the questions that were asked. I didn't get the opportunity to go to the Press Club today, for which I'm deeply sorry. I would have liked to have been there. I caught a little bit on the TV, and I heard Ms Higgins say that she was still confronted by the fact that—and it's linked to the text message that we all know exists, where the Deputy Prime Minister messaged Ms Higgins, through a third party, basically to say that he thought the Prime Minister was a liar and a hypocrite, and she alluded to that being about his state of knowledge of what had happened to her and how that had been brushed over in the hoo-ha over the text message. The substance of what was being not acknowledged was that the Deputy Prime Minister seems to be agreeing that the Prime Minister knew more than he was letting on. My questions, which are now 278 days overdue, go to that point.

Do you remember the Gaetjens inquiry that got started up when the Prime Minister couldn't go and ask his staff who knew what and when? He had to create a specific inquiry. Then, after the heat moved on, do you remember that that inquiry just got suspended and then nobody talked about it anymore? Nobody's heard anything back from that. I had questions around what the Prime Minister knew about Brittany Higgins's alleged rape in this building and when. I had questions about the relocation of Ms Higgins to a different office after her disclosure. I had questions about the Gaetjens inquiry into who knew what and when in the Prime Minister's office—whether, for example, Mr Gaetjens could tell us how many interviews he's done and how they were conducted. I had questions about media inquiries leading up to the breaking of Ms Higgins's story, about who was involved with handling them and what they were told. I had questions about whether or not the Prime Minister's staff backgrounded journalists against Ms Higgins's partner. I had questions about the contact between the Prime Minister's principal private secretary and Ms Higgins following the airing of the Four Corners 'Inside the Canberra bubble' story, and there were also questions about correspondence with the Federal Police commissioner, contact between Minister Dutton and the Prime Minister's office, the departure of the alleged perpetrator and slurs made by Minister Reynolds about Ms Higgins.

I can see why the government doesn't want to answer these questions—I get that—but to just not provide any answer or any explanation is just not acceptable. It treats the Senate with contempt, it makes a mockery of the conventions of this place and the powers of the Senate to hold governments to account and to scrutinise the workings of government, and there is no consequence for this. It's easier for the government to not answer at all. It's easier for Secretary Gaetjens to ignore a letter from a senator pursuing his department about their failure to answer questions asked at estimates about a year ago now. It is easier and more beneficial to the government to act in this way than it is to answer the questions. That's the sorry state of how this government treats this chamber. The minister says there are plenty of avenues available for accountability and transparency. Yes, but that does require the government to play their part, which is to provide information or, if they refuse to answer, to provide an explanation.

The issues that are raised in my questions go straight to the fundamentals of the standard of this government and the standard that the Prime Minister sets in leading it, because I presume he's okay with these questions not being answered. I presume Secretary Gaetjens isn't going to get a call from the PMO today saying: 'I've just been listening into the chamber that deals with accountability and transparency, and they're saying that we haven't answered something for nearly a year now. You'd better get onto that.' I doubt that's going to happen. This is the culture of this government: to hide things, to sweep things under the carpet, to delay, to distract, to pretend and, at times, to not tell the truth. That's the reality. We've all been learning that over the past few months. The Prime Minister's closest colleagues and world leaders have belled the cat and told us all what he's really like, and here is just another example of it.

I get that governments are busy; I completely accept that. I accept they have a lot on their plate at times. At the moment they've got more than they probably need, much of it self-inflicted, but that doesn't take away the responsibility a government has to protect and uphold the conventions of the parliament. That is what has been let go here. The Senate hasn't really shown its capability or capacity to stand up and push back against that. I think that's deeply regrettable, but that's a subject for another day.

These questions are important. They're important for us to understand what happened in this place. We're all talking about how we want to make this place a better place. In fact, yesterday the Prime Minister said:

I want this building to be a place where young Australians and young women in particular can follow their dreams and can live out their beliefs and not have them crushed by brutality and the misuse of power.

That's the quote from yesterday. Part of living up to that, surely, is to fess up to what happened in this building when the alleged rape of Ms Higgins occurred, and the period after that and this time last year when the government was on the back foot trying to deal with the fallout of Ms Higgins going public. That is what these questions are about—these 18 questions that, day after day, week after week, month after month, and soon to be a year, the government ignores and fails to answer.

As I said, we understand completely why it's the government's preference to do that, but it is disrespectful to Ms Higgins, and it flies in the face of the work that we're all trying to do around the Jenkins inquiry. What it says is that it's easier not to answer, it's easier not to front up to what happened and it's easier not to be honest about who knew what when and about what was done or whether nothing was done. Ms Higgins certainly feels that, following her disclosures to Minister Reynolds and others, she was treated poorly. The government has the opportunity to answer these questions and put up their side of the story.

Today, as the Minister for Finance stood up to give his explanation—and I know Minister Birmingham; he's a fundamentally decent person—there was a part of me that thought it shouldn't be you, Minister Birmingham, doing this; it should be the Prime Minister answering for this. But it's insincere and disrespectful to say, 'Well, there are a lot of questions and therefore we've answered some and not others,' and that for us to presume that the 18 questions asked about Ms Higgins, her experience here and what happened here at the heart of the government can just be ignored—hopefully, for the duration of this term and then they'll lapse. That's the sorry state that we're in.

The government has failed to provide an adequate explanation. I hope that Secretary Gaetjens is listening. Perhaps he could be bothered, considering the big bucks that are going on over there in PM&C, to actually respond to my letter of October and explain why those questions aren't being answered. Perhaps he has a resource issue—I don't know. He could tell me. Or, if the questions are going to be answered he could answer them prior to PM&C appearing at estimates next Monday, where we will be pursuing this matter. I think that, at a minimum, Secretary Gaetjens could be bothered doing that. It would be appreciated, and any push that Minister Birmingham could provide to that department to do the job that they are resourced to do would be appreciated as well.

But this is a really sorry state, I have to say: we stand here, using the precious time of the Senate to explain why questions that were asked 258 days ago still need to be followed up. This place should be afforded more decency and respect by the government.

Question agreed to.

Senator BILYK (Tasmania) (15:26): I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services (Senator Colbeck) to questions asked by Senator Keneally and Senator Gallagher earlier today.

We know that the aged-care sector is in crisis. It's a word that we can't get the minister to say. In fact, in question time today he said it was in 'severe stress'. It's worse than 'severe stress'; it is in crisis, and I despair of the minister and his ability to deal with the ongoing issues. He has completely mismanaged it and shown his incompetence by his actions in regard to the crisis that the aged-care sector is facing. In fact, he has completely stuffed it, to be honest.

There are four key areas that concern this side of the chamber. Obviously, there are boosters, the lack of PPE and people being sent the wrong PPE when they've asked for it. And there are the RATs—we know they couldn't give a rats, so that is not news to anybody—and the surge workforce. We have aged-care workers who are so overworked and underpaid that, as we heard earlier today in question time, they're working 80 hours a week—a lot of them are working 80 hours a week. That's not sustainable.

Although I haven't worked in aged care, I know from my friends who do actually work in it that this industry is a very physical industry. It's also emotionally challenging for the workforce. They're not just dealing with people who might pop along to a surgery and who have a little sniffle. They have to lift people, they have to turn people and they have to deal with people who have mental health issues—dementia and all sorts of issues. Some of those people have been, basically, locked up for weeks and weeks on end and not been able to see their families. People have had to die without their families present. And what do we have? We've had lip service from a government that really, as I said—humour aside—could not give a rats. They could not give a rats.

These workers deserve our respect. And what else they deserve is decent pay for what they do. A lot of them are only earning $22 an hour. You can earn more being a gardener or a cleaner in someone's home. It's atrocious that we are treating people who are looking after some of the most vulnerable people in our society in this way. They're underpaid. They're being treated like rubbish by this government, with no care whatsoever. Then we wonder—well, we don't on this side; we know why—why it's hard to retain workers in the industry, as I said, even before you consider the pressures brought about by the industry.

Our aged-care workers—I want to say this upfront—have been doing amazing work under such difficult conditions, and they are the heroes of this pandemic. The villain is Minister Colbeck, who decided that it was better to go to three days at the cricket than to deal with the aged-care crisis or attend a Senate committee inquiry into COVID. This is despite the fact that the committee had said to him, 'We will meet at a day and time of your convenience.' You know what? They only wanted two hours and 45 minutes of his time. But no. Minister Colbeck could not give that two hours and 45 minutes. Why? Because Minister Colbeck was at the cricket, enjoying hospitality. Seriously, they could have found him a room over there. I know what the cricket ground is like. I live in Hobart. I've been over there. They could have found him a nice, quiet little room where he could have set things up and done it. But he didn't want to, and that's because he's embarrassed, as he should be. He should be hanging his head in shame about the treatment of the aged-care sector all through COVID. I'll tell you: I'm surprised he even turns up, because truly it would take more front than Myer to turn up and say, 'The sector is under severe stress.' It's worse than severe stress; it's in crisis. (Time expired)

Senator O'SULLIVAN (Western Australia) (15:31): These questions go to aged care, and I think it's quite fair for me to say that Labor's record on this issue of aged care is patchy at best. Their record on health overall is, in fact, very poor. We only need to look back at their history when they were in government to see that. So far be it from them to come into this place and lecture this government, which has done a remarkable job, in collaboration with the states, over the last two years to weather and deal with the issues of health related to the pandemic. Of course, I could go on about the way the economy is tracking in Australia right now compared to the rest of the world. But on health we are arguably in the most enviable position of anywhere on the planet.

A lot of senior Australians were impacted by the failures of Labor to continue support for the PBS, the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme. In government, we have listed a record number of drugs on the PBS, supporting all Australians, particularly older Australians. Older Australians have a greater need for drugs that are listed on the PBS. It's our management of the economy—keeping the economy strong, with a budget that's able to support the listing of these medicines on there—that has meant that older Australians in particular have been very well supported. Since 2013, the coalition has approved nearly 3,000 new or amended listings on the PBS. This represents an average of around 30 listings or amendments per month, or one each day—an overall investment of $14 billion by the government.

We do acknowledge that there are issues in the aged-care sector. That's why, right now, we have provided 80,000 shifts of surge workforce around Australia. We have not spared any expense to support the sector. That's why we have recognised the sector with special $800 bonus payments. I just want to pay tribute to those who are working in the aged-care sector. I have been surrounded by family who have worked in this space. My grandmother, who is now retired, is one of the most special people in my life and she worked in the aged-care sector for pretty much her entire career. My sister works in the aged-care sector. She's a registered nurse in a wonderful facility in the south of Perth. I know that aged-care workers are some of the most dedicated people. They do the job because they love the job. We acknowledge that they aren't the highest paid occupations. They turn up every day because they care about their jobs, they care about the people that they are serving and they really do make a difference. I know they are rewarded by the fact that they are doing wonderful, wonderful work. But we recognise that they have been challenged over this period. The government recognises that and, more importantly, is helping those employers and service providers to retain staff. Having gone through the fatigue of dealing with particularly the pandemic, it's important that they are able to retain as many staff members as they can. This $800 bonus, spread across a couple of payments, is aimed at really helping them to address that.

It's interesting that there were questions that went to wages. The Labor Party, at least here in the Senate, probably need to check their notes on what has been said in the other place, because Mr Albanese actually said that he supports the process of going through the Fair Work Commission. That's the commission Labor set up. They set up some of that framework that we now have. It's an independent process. Anthony Albanese, the Leader of the Opposition, has not provided any amount that he will go to if he becomes the leader of the government. He hasn't said what it would cost. He hasn't said what impact he would make. Why is that? It's because he is all about politics. He's just about presenting a political narrative rather than actually addressing the issue. If he named a price, he would have to cost it. He doesn't want to do that ahead of an election because his costings are always unfunded— (Time expired)

Senator MARIELLE SMITH (South Australia) (15:37): The aged-care sector is in crisis. It is. That is clear for everyone to see. It's clear when you talk to aged-care workers, as I have, and as I know all my colleagues have. But, even if you haven't been bothered to go talk to the workforce and understand what's happening on the ground in their workplaces at the moment, a quick scan of the news headlines will show you the state the sector's in. The number of people dying will show you that the sector is in crisis. There are reports of workers under stress and under strain because of the choices they are being forced to make every single day, when they go into their workplaces, about which of the residents in their care who need their urgent attention they tend to. These reports are not hard to find. In fact, you've heard about them today in question time. You can look at the rollout of boosters and see the significant and critical shortages of jabs in arms to keep people safe. It is not hard to see that this is a sector in crisis. It is not hard.

Indeed, if you are willing to spend time playing word games to prove that it is not in crisis, may I suggest you spend that time talking to a nurse or talking to a worker in aged care. They are at breaking point. They go into work every day trying to care for the residents who have served our country, who have been part of our community and who deserve to spend this time in their lives living in dignity. These workers who want to provide that to those in their care do not have the support from the minister and the government they need to do their jobs. These are jobs which they are paid a pittance for—$22 an hour. And then the government won't even stand up and make a submission on their behalf. We have a government who doesn't care and a minister who goes to the cricket and then comes in here and argues and plays word games around whether or not the sector is in crisis.

This sector is in crisis. People are dying. Workers are struggling. This is a crisis, and it deserves the full attention of the minister. It deserves a minister who shows up to work, who shows up to the committee which is there to hold him accountable and who shows up to this parliament and doesn't go into the ridiculous politics and word games which distract people and run down the clock on his answers in question time. These workers deserve so much more from this government. They deserve more than thanks. They deserve to be paid properly for the work that they do. They deserve to be supported by a broader workforce amongst them—by shifts being filled. They deserve to be supported by having the boosters that will protect them when they go into their workplace each day. They shouldn't have to make the kinds of choices that they have to make every single day. They shouldn't have to make choices about which resident in pain or in distress or in need to go to, but they have to make these choices because there aren't enough staff in this workforce and there isn't enough support from the government.

Denying that this sector is in crisis is an absurd thing to come in here and do. This sector has been struggling since long before this pandemic. The royal commission report was entitled Neglect. That was before the pandemic. You overlay these issues on top of a sector which was struggling that much, and then you take a minister and a government more interested in the politics than in supporting the workers caring for our elderly, caring for our aged, and making devastating choices every single day. Those workers deserve so much better, as does every single Australian in aged care.

Senator CANAVAN (Queensland—Deputy Leader of the Nationals in the Senate) (15:42): There's some truth there at the end of Senator Smith's contribution that I'd like to agree with. There is no doubt that the aged-care sector has been under a lot of stress since before the pandemic. There is no doubt that there needs to be more funding for aged care in this country, and, of course, a pandemic, which no-one could have predicted the timing of, was always going to put much stress on that system.

This government, though, has responded to the long years of neglect Senator Smith mentioned. The years of neglect go back through previous governments on both sides of politics, but it was this government that commissioned a royal commission to look at the state of the aged-care sector, warts and all, and it is this government that is responding to that commission with record amounts of additional funding over the years to come. Of course, not every problem or issue can be solved overnight. The problems have emerged over many decades and therefore cannot be solved in a year or two.

That extra funding will have an impact over time, and I'll come to that later. But before I get to that detail I want to acknowledge the commitment, the hard work and the stress that aged-care workers must have gone through over the past two years. It was already a strained and stressful environment for workers in that sector, but to have the extra obligations of being COVID-safe and the extra staff pressures of isolation rules and COVID cases has of course put those people who are on the front lines under great strain. I pay tribute to the work they have done. I believe that, in tough times, that sector as a whole has done the best it could to handle this once-in-a-century pandemic.

There does need to be more funding to improve aged-care centres in this country. There does need to be more money available to attract staff, potentially increasing wages over time to do that, to keep up with the offers that exist now. The NDIS is another care sector that's been well-funded by this government and that is competing for these types of staff in aged-care centres. We have to respond by offering attractive employment options to those who love the aged-care sector and want to continue to work in it.

That's why the government is putting forward $18 billion in funding in response to the royal commission. That is going to make a difference over time. It's not going to happen overnight. We have, through the pandemic, put an additional $600 million into bonuses for staff in the sector, to provide an immediate top-up. But what we need to do over the longer term is to grow incrementally the funding that exists in the aged-care pool such that providers, both public and private, can offer a reasonable and competitive wage to those who work in the sector.

There have been suggestions from the other side in this debate that somehow the government or Canberra bureaucrats here should impose these wages, that they should just unilaterally increase wages across the sector. That's not how our industrial relations system works, nor should it be how it works, because almost invariably we'll get it wrong here in Canberra. We'll stuff it up. If we try to centrally plan every aged-care sector in the country there'll be enormous perverse outcomes. We'll have wage rates inapplicable to some types of work or some centres in regional areas and there'll be devastation across the land. What we need to do is to respect the industrial relations framework we have through the Fair Work Commission and have viable, well-funded aged-care centres that can respond to that process.

We heard during question time that the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Albanese, knows how the system works. That's what he said in response to it—that we need to let the Fair Work Commission work. But the opposition didn't want to hear. They tried to silence their own leader, the Leader of the Opposition, in question time. Every time the minister tried to say, 'This is what Mr Albanese, the Leader of the Opposition, thinks about how the system thinks, this is what he believes,' the Labor Party would get up and say, 'A point of order: they are quoting our leader. He doesn't know anything. He doesn't know what he's talking about. Why are you quoting Mr Albanese?' They tried to shut it down. I do agree with Mr Albanese's point that we need to have a flexible approach to this industry that provides good funding but allows individual aged-care centres to work with their workforces, customers and aged members of the Australian community to get the best outcomes they can during this pandemic and beyond.

Senator GROGAN (South Australia) (15:47): Minister Colbeck told us today, in this chamber, that he will hold others to account. He will hold to account the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission, he will hold to account aged-care providers and he will hold to account the opposition. But what he didn't do, what he refused to do, was to acknowledge his responsibilities and to acknowledge the failures—the government's lack of care and support over the pandemic.

The pandemic is not a surprise. We've been at this since early 2019, yet we are seeing the crisis continue—because, yes, aged care is in crisis. This government is incapable of planning. It has been incapable, since 2019, of seeing what devastation can occur with vulnerable people. It is incapable of protecting our vulnerable people. Where were the vaccines to minimise the impact? Where was the PPE to stop the spread? Where was the plan to protect our vulnerable older people?

The aged-care sector is in crisis, and the most crucial issue over time has been that of the workforce, of having a sufficient number of trained people to look after our vulnerable older people. The current crisis and chronic shortages are as a result of almost nine long years of neglect. This government, in 2013, killed off a workforce compact that had been negotiated by Labor to improve the wages of aged-care staff. The work done by Labor while in government included a revamp of aged care. There were significant changes to protect older people, provide choices for older people and improve the wages of staff doing vitally important work in the aged-care sector. When this government came in, in 2013, it scrapped some of the most critical aspects of that reform, and we are seeing the result of that right now.

There are chronic staff shortages. We have older people in residential aged-care facilities right now living in unbearable conditions. Why? Because the pandemic and staff shortages make situations where we have staff looking after up to 60 people. We heard earlier: where do they go? Someone has fallen over, somebody has soiled, somebody needs to be fed or somebody is having a medical situation. How do they appropriate their time when they're looking after 60 people at a time? It is an unconscionable situation. It is a situation that could have been planned for. It is a situation that, as Australians, we should all be embarrassed about.

The standard of care for residents has plunged to alarming new lows, partly because there are staff shortages and partly because we are not looking appropriately at the running of the aged-care sector. More than 500 people in aged care have died during COVID. This is a completely unacceptable situation, and all we have is Minister Colbeck standing in front of us today and not taking any responsibility, defending the fact that he spent three days at the cricket and defending the fact that he hasn't met with various people to deal with this crisis—he has consistently not taken responsibility. The aged-care minister says that the sector is not in crisis, but just about everyone living in it, working in it or looking at it says that it is.

People deserve better; our older people deserve better. When the AMA advised in September 2021 that there was trouble coming, that there were going to be greater challenges with the new variant—and omicron particularly came to bear on that—the government did nothing. They didn't plan and they didn't think about how they were going to protect vulnerable people in this country. They just went about their business, went to the cricket and paid no attention. This situation is a disgrace and we should all be ashamed of the situation we find ourselves in.

Question agreed to.

Senator THORPE (Victoria) (15:52): I move:

That the Senate take note of the responses by the Minister representing the Minister for Home Affairs to my questions today.

I asked about innocent people seeking refuge who are locked up at the Park Hotel prison. Let me make this very clear: they came not in contravention of border protection rules, as the minister made out. May I remind the Senate that our international obligation is to grant protection to people seeking asylum who have been granted refugee status.

The only disrespect that has occurred in question time today is this government's inhumane treatment of people seeking refuge in this country. How can this government claim that this is not locking people up? Locked in one room for up to nine years! A young fellow has been in there since he was 15. It's heartbreaking. He's locked up; he's still there. He has spent his adult life, his whole adult life, in a hotel room against his will, being tortured by the Australian government—tortured! He peeks out the window with a sign, saying: 'Help me, please, let me out. I need fresh air. I want to talk to people. I want to see people. I need food, fresh food, not stale bread.' And we've even heard about maggots in food.

I just can't believe we live in a country that continues to deny people's human rights and continues to terrorise innocent young people and take away their dignity and their human rights. What kind of people are we as a country if we can do that to a 15-year-old who's still in a room in which he's been locked away for nine years by the Australian government?

I'm sure everyone knows how lockdown has been for us in our homes, with our families, with fresh food. You can go to the park with your dog sometimes. Just think for one moment about these people—these innocent people who came here seeking our help. Think about them for one moment when you're in lockdown, because they don't have the freedoms that you have. They certainly don't have the privilege that you have. Imagine you're in your room for nine years—as privileged as that might be, it is still nine years in there—and you're holding a sign to the window that says, 'Please, let me out.'

This government has no empathy. I don't know what empathy training was done, but maybe we need to improve the training, because there's certainly no regard for human rights. There's certainly no regard for the decent treatment of innocent human beings. I stood outside the Park Hotel as what you would call an activist or a protester. I stood outside that hotel with non-Aboriginal elders who were crying. They were in pain, seeing the pain in these innocent people's eyes as they looked down on them from their window, begging to be free. This is not about activists. This is about freedom for innocent people. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.

Senator DUNIAM (Tasmania—Assistant Minister for Forestry and Fisheries and Assistant Minister for Industry Development) (15:58): I give notice that, on the next day of sitting, I shall move:

That the provisions of paragraphs (5) to (8) of standing order 111 not apply to various bills, allowing them to be considered during this period of sittings.

I also table statements of reasons justifying the need for these bills to be considered during these sittings and seek leave to have those statements incorporated in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The statements read as follows—

STATEMENT OF REASONS FOR INTRODUCTION AND PASSAGE IN THE 2022 AUTUMN SITTINGS

APPROPRIATION (CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE) BILL (NO. 1) 2021-2022

APPROPRIATION (CORONAVIRUS RESPONSE) BILL (NO. 2) 2021-2022

Purpose of the B ills

The bills will provide legislative authority for appropriations to fund expenditure to be incurred in 2021-2022.

Reasons for Urgency

Passage of these bills by 10 February 2022 will ensure timely support for the Government's COVID-19 response programs and ensure the Commonwealth's ability to meet its obligations in relation to COVID-19 variants through February and March 2022. Should passage not be granted by 10 February 2022 the activities within the response programs to be funded by the bills may be deferred or significantly delayed.

STATEMENT OF REASONS FOR INTRODUCTION AND PASSAGE IN THE 2022 AUTUMN SITTINGS

CORPORATE COLLECTIVE INVESTMENT VEHICLE FRAMEWORK AND OTHER MEASURES BILL 2021

Purpose of the Bill

The purpose of the Bill is to:

• establish the Corporate Collective Investment Vehicle (CCIV) regime;

• extend the existing temporary loss carry-back measure by 12 months, allowing eligible companies to claim a loss carry back tax offset in the 2022-23 income year;

• include the following organisations on the list of deductible gift recipients (DGRs): the Greek Orthodox Community of New South Wales Ltd, Australian Associated Press Ltd, Virtual War Memorial Limited, and SU Australia Ministries Limited, and extend the specific listings of Cambridge Australia Scholarships Limited and Foundation 1901 Limited; and remove The East African Fund Limited from the current list of DGRs;

• make minor and technical amendments to various laws in the Treasury portfolio to ensure those laws operate in accordance with the policy intent, improve administrative outcomes, remedy unintended consequences and correct technical or drafting defects;

• require trustees of superannuation funds to develop a strategy which outlines how they will assist members to balance key retirement income objectives; and

• remove the cessation of employment taxing point for the tax deferred employee share schemes that are available to all companies.

Reasons for Urgency

Introduction and passage in the Autumn sittings is required to provide certainty to taxpayers, trustees of superannuation funds, and employees, before measures take effect on 1 July 2022. In respect to the CCIV regime in particular, passage in the 2022 Autumn sittings will provide the necessary lead up for the funds management sector to prepare for the establishment and operation of CCIVs from the commencement date of 1 July 2022, as announced in the 2021-22 Budget.

STATEMENT OF REASONS FOR INTRODUCTION AND PASSAGE IN THE 2022 AUTUMN SITTINGS

ELECTORAL LEGISLATION AMENDMENT (FOREIGN INFLUENCES AND OFFENCES) BILL 2022

Purpose of the Bill

The objective of the proposed amendments to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 is to strengthen the integrity of the electoral communication confidence in Australia's electoral processes by prohibiting foreign persons and entities from authorising electoral matter and either fundraising or directly incurring electoral expenditure, and increasing the penalty for the offence of misleading or deceptive publications.

Reasons for Urgency

The Bill is urgent with the next federal election to be held on or before 21 May 2022. In order for relevant legislative changes to take effect and be implemented by the Australian Electoral Commission before the election, passage will be needed during this sitting period.

STATEMENT OF REASONS FOR INTRODUCTION AND PASSAGE IN THE 2022 AUTUMN SITTINGS

ELECTORAL LEGISLATION AMENDMENT (AUTHORISATIONS) BILL 2022

Purpose of the Bill

The objective of the proposed amendments to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 is to reduce the potential for voter confusion by streamlining the notifying particulars in electoral authorisations.

Reasons for Urgency

The Bill is urgent with the next federal election to be held on or before 21 May 2022. In order for relevant legislative changes to take effect and be implemented by the Australian Electoral Commission before the election, passage will be needed during this sitting period.

STATEMENT OF REASONS FOR INTRODUCTION AND PASSAGE IN THE 2022 AUTUMN SITTINGS

ELECTORAL LEGISLATION AMENDMENT (COVID ENFRANCHISEMENT) BILL 2022

Purpose of the Bill

The objective of the proposed amendments to the Commonwealth Electoral Act 1918 is to ensure all voters are able to exercise their franchise by allowing the option to expand the availability of secure telephone voting (a version of which is currently used for blind and low vision voters and voters in the Antarctic) to voters who are unable to attend a polling place in the final 72 hours prior to the close of polls, and after the cut-off for postal vote applications, because they have tested positive to COVID-19, are a close/household contact of a positive case, or have otherwise been directed to self-isolate or quarantine under a public health order. This amendment is temporary and will be automatically repealed on 31 December 2022.

Reasons for Urgency

The Bill is urgent with the next federal election to be held on or before 21 May 2022. In order for relevant legislative changes to take effect and be implemented by the Australian Electoral Commission before the election, passage will be needed during this sitting period.

STATEMENT OF REASONS FOR INTRODUCTION AND PASSAGE IN THE 2021 SPRING SITTINGS

NATIONAL DISABILITY INSURANCE SCHEME AMENDMENT (PARTICIPANT SERVICE GUARANTEE AND OTHER MEASURES) BILL

Purpo se of the Bill

The bill gives effect to the Government's election commitment to legislate the Participant Service Guarantee following the practical completion of the NDIS rollout in 2020. The Bill also implements other recommendations of the 2019 Review of the National Disability Insurance Scheme Act 2013 (the NDIS Act) (the Tune Review) to improve participant experiences in the NDIS, increase flexibility and reduce administrative red tape.

Reasons for Urgency

Passage of the bill in the 2022 Autumn sittings will give effect to the Government's commitment to legislate the Participant Service Guarantee and improve the NDIS.

The measures in the Bill will implement recommendations of the Tune Review, which was an independent review of the NDIS Act informed by extensive stakeholder consultation. The Bill was also subject to a period of consultation and was updated following concerns raised during consultation.

Urgent passage of the Bill in the 2022 Autumn sittings will allow for these essential improvements that will benefit current and future participants, their carers and families to be implemented as soon as possible.

STATEMENT OF REASONS FOR INTRODUCTION AND PASSAGE IN THE 2022 AUTUMN SITTINGS

PARLIAMENTARY WORKPLACE REFORM (SET THE STANDARD MEASURES NO.1) BILL 2022

Purpose of the Bill

To respond to recommendations 17 and 24 in the Set the Standard: Report on the Independent Review into Commonwealth Parliamentary Workplaces (Jenkins Report).

The reforms in the legislative package will ensure Commonwealth Parliamentary Workplaces are safe and respectful and that the nation's Parliament reflects best practice in the prevention and handling of bullying, sexual harassment and sexual assault.

The Bill will:

amend the Members of Parliament (Staff) Act 1984 (MoP(S) Act) to clarify the law concerning the termination of employment of MoP(S) staff (recommendation 17)

amend the Work Health and Safety Act 2011 (WHS Act) to clarify the duties owed by parliamentarians by specifying that parliamentarians are 'officers' for the purposes of the WHS Act (recommendation 17)

amend the Age Discrimination Act 2004 and the Disability Discrimination Act 1992 to clarify that those laws apply to staff employed under the MoP(S) Act (recommendation 24).

Reasons for Urgency

The Report was tabled on 30 November 2021 and recommended commencing progress on the reforms in this legislative package within three months of tabling.

The Bill will progress important reforms to help ensure that Commonwealth Parliamentary Workplaces are workplaces where expected standards of behaviour are modelled, championed and enforced, and where diversity is respected and encouraged.

STATEMENT OF REASONS FOR INTRODUCTION AND PASSAGE IN THE 2022 AUTUMN

RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION BILL 2021

RELIGIOUS DISCRIMINATION (CONSEQUENTIAL AMENDMENTS) BILL 2021

HUMAN RIGHTS LEGISLATION AMENDMENT BILL 2021

Purpose of the Bills

Religious Discrimination Bill 2021

This Bill introduces a new piece of federal anti-discrimination legislation to make it unlawful to discriminate against a person on the basis of that person's religious belief or activity (including lack of belief). In addition, the Bill establishes the statutory position of the Freedom of Religion Commissioner in the Australian Human Rights Commission.

Religious Discrimination (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2021

This Bill makes amendments to a range of existing Acts consequential to the Religious Discrimination Bill 2021.

Human Rights Legislation Amendment Bill 2021

The Human Rights Legislation Amendment Bill amends existing Commonwealth legislation to implement recommendations of the Religious Freedom Review, including to better protect the right to freedom of religion. Amended acts include:

Age Discrimination Act 2004

Charities Act 2013

Disability Discrimination Act 1984

Sex Discrimination Act 1984

Marriage Act 1961

Racial Discrimination Act 1975

Reasons for Urgency

In 2019 the Australian Government made an election promise to pass religious discrimination legislative protections, in response to the recommendations of the Report of the Religious Freedom Review. The Religious Discrimination legislation will address a gap in the Commonwealth anti-discrimination framework and render it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of a person's religious belief or activity. The Religious Discrimination Bill will ensure that religious belief and activity is protected in the same manner as other existing attributes covered by anti-discrimination law, including race, age, disability and sex. The passage of the religious discrimination legislative package is a key priority for this term of government.

Senator DEAN S MITH (Western Australia—Government Whip in the Senate) (15:59): At the request of Senator Rennick, I withdraw general business notice of motion No. 1261 standing in his name for today proposing the establishment of a Senate committee.

The PRESIDENT (16:00): I remind senators that the question may be put on any proposal at the request of any Senator.

Senator WATERS (Queensland—Leader of the Australian Greens in the Senate) (16:00): I gave notice yesterday of my intention to withdraw one of the business of the Senate notices of motion. I withdraw business of the Senate notice of motion No. 5 on today's Notice Paper.

The PRESIDENT (16:00): It is with deep regret that I inform the Senate of the death on 1 January 2022 of the Hon. Sir Ransley Victor 'Vic' Garland KBE, a former minister and member of the House of Representatives for the division of Curtin, Western Australia, from 1969 to 1981.

Senator BIRMINGHAM (South Australia—Minister for Finance, Leader of the Government in the Senate and Vice-President of the Executive Council) (16:01): by leave—I move:

That the Senate expresses its sadness at the death, on 1 January 2022, of the Honourable Sir Victor Garland KBE, former Minister for Supply, Minister for Post and Telecommunications, Minister for Veterans' Affairs and Minister for Special Trade Representations, and former member for Curtin, places on record its gratitude for his service to the Parliament and the nation, and tenders its sympathy to his family in their bereavement.

We take the opportunity here today to remember the life of the former member for Curtin Sir Ransley Victor Garland KBE, a man who served as a minister in the McMahon and Fraser governments and who would go on to become the Australian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom. Sir Victor Garland was first elected to the parliament in 1969 as the member for Curtin, a seat he would represent until his resignation from the House of Representatives in 1981. During this time he was re-elected at five different elections by the people of Curtin, a vote of confidence in his ability to effectively represent the beachside Perth electorate.

Victor was a Western Australian through and through. Born in 1934, he grew up in Perth, gaining his education at Hale School before completing a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Western Australia, majoring in economics. Following in his father's footsteps, Victor practised as a chartered accountant from 1958 until his election to parliament in 1969. During his professional life, Victor maintained an active involvement in the community he grew up in, serving in a number of charities and on the Claremont town council from 1963 until 1970. During this time, he also maintained an active involvement in the Liberal and Country League of Western Australia—later, of course, known as the WA Division of the Liberal Party of Australia—where he held the position of senior vice-president.

Following his election to the parliament in 1969, in his first speech to the House of Representatives, Victor paid tribute to the sacrifices of his parents and the opportunities that he was fortunate enough to have by virtue of their hard work. He acknowledged former Prime Minister John Curtin, after whom his electorate was named, and his predecessor as the member for Curtin, Sir Paul Hasluck, the 17th Governor-General of Australia. Sir Victor strongly admired the contributions these two sons of Western Australia made, perhaps foreshadowing, in a way, his own immense contributions to come.

Sir Victor was a man who knew what he had come to parliament to fight for, highlighting in his maiden speech that he believed his electors wanted him 'to have an eye to the interests not only of Curtin but of Western Australia when those interests are rightly involved in the national interest'. He added:

… I think my electors want me to act in the interests of Australia, in which each State is an integral part of the Federation, an Australian nation with rising strength, importance and responsibilities.

Sir Victor Garland understood at core the meaningful impact of our shared liberal values in the economic and social prosperity of Australia—those basic tenets of individual freedom and free enterprise, that businesses and individuals are the true creators of wealth and employment. He highlighted this in his maiden speech, stating:

It is as important to the growth of the country that initiative, inventiveness and resourcefulness should be encouraged as it is to have a fair sharing of the nation's wealth, for history shows that the best societies, the richest, the most efficient and the most satisfying in which to live, are those in which individual initiative is allowed a wide scope of expression and where innovation, striving and ambition are not stifled.

Sir Victor had a quick rise in his political journey, becoming the Minister for Supply in the McMahon government at the age of just 37, a position he would hold from 1971 until the 1972 election. In 1975, after the coalition's historic victory, Victor Garland was again appointed as a minister, this time as Minister for Post and Telecommunications, and as Assistant Treasurer. The latter position provided him with a primary role in forming economic policy at a critical time for the newly elected Fraser government. Under Malcolm Fraser's leadership, Victor would also serve as Minister for Veterans' Affairs, Minister for Special Trade Representations and Minister for Business and Consumer Affairs.

As Minister for Special Trade Representations, Victor Garland undertook significant negotiations with the European Community—something to which I can relate; I equally understand the challenges that can be involved. He continued this work post-politics upon his appointment as Australia's High Commissioner to the United Kingdom, a position he held from 1981 to 1983. Testament to his contribution and service at the highest level of public office, Victor Garland was knighted in 1982.

Sir Victor Garland is remembered for the liberal values he not just believed in but lived out in his approach to public policy. In the same way that Sir Victor honoured those who came before him, the sacrifices of the men and women who built Australia, we honour Sir Victor for his contributions to our nation. He was a proud Western Australian, proud of where he came from, who believed in the infinite potential of Australia. This was emphasised by his powerful words: 'No-one will now dare say that any objective is not possible for Australia.' Indeed, that is true; any objective is possible for our nation, a nation with ambition and so much pride in all that we seek to achieve.

On behalf of the Australian government and the Australian Senate, I extend our sincerest condolences to Sir Victor Garland's family and our thanks for his service to our party and to the nation.

Senator McALLISTER (New South Wales) (16:07): I rise on behalf of the opposition to express our condolences following the passing of the Hon. Sir Ransley Victor Garland KBE, a former minister. I note that he passed at the age of 87. As I begin, I wish to convey the opposition's condolences to his family and friends.

Sir Victor Garland, who I understand was widely known as Vic, lived a life that combined contributions to the private sector with public service. He went from local government to federal government, serving as a minister under prime ministers William McMahon and Malcolm Fraser. From this platform he would go on to represent the nation as its high commissioner in London, before contributing extensively as a member of private company boards in the United Kingdom and returning to Perth 15 years ago. He was not easily characterised as either a progressive or a conservative within his party. He instead took a pragmatic and constructive approach to politics and policy, and he routinely sought to make the best of whatever opportunity he had.

Sir Victor was born in 1934 and grew up in Perth. An alumnus of a state primary school, the prestigious Hale School, and the University of Western Australia, from which he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts, majoring in economics, he entered the accounting profession. In doing so he followed in the footsteps of his father, practising as a chartered accountant from 1958 until he entered federal parliament. At the same time he was also an active member of his community, particularly through his service in local government, eventually becoming deputy mayor of the town of Claremont. At the same time, he had been active in the Western Australian division of the Liberal Party, holding offices, including that of senior vice-president, as well as being a member of the Federal Council of the Liberal Party.

When Paul Hasluck resigned from the House of Representatives in 1969 to become Governor-General of Australia, Sir Victor Garland succeeded him as the member for Curtin. I note that in his first speech he was quite generous in acknowledging the significance of both Sir John Curtin, his namesake in the seat, and his predecessor, Mr Hasluck. The seat is named for the great Labor Prime Minister. It is situated in Perth's affluent beachside suburbs and has been a comfortably Liberal seat over many decades. When he made his first speech, Sir Victor acknowledged John Curtin, as I said. He said:

John Curtin was a man who, in times of great difficulty, drew credit to himself and, indeed, to his associates by his straightforwardness and fine qualities which caused him to tread the highest path of duty.

It was a magnanimous contribution about another person from the other side of politics.

Sir Victor said he felt the awe and honour of being elected a member of the House of Representatives and, unusually for the time, he specifically acknowledged the women who were active in his electorate, working, as he said, 'for the principles in which they believe'. He was preoccupied by the international affairs of the time, remembering that Australia was fully engaged in the Vietnam War. He spoke of his concerns about the increase in nuclear and non-nuclear aggression, as well as the role of China, which echoes some sentiments more recently expressed. Understandably for someone of his political persuasion, he emphasised the need for the support of the growth and development of non-Communist Asian states. He also praised the creation of regional institutions such as the Asian Development Bank and the Asia and Pacific Council. He noted that the economic growth of South-East Asian countries was dependent on their ability to provide social justice, recognising that this was something to which Australia could contribute, and he praised budget commitments for aid and assistance for education in the region.

He supported increases in defence funding, but he believed they must also be accompanied by increases in the aid budget. He called for Australia's growing wealth to be shared with neighbours in our region, noting we needed to accept our responsibility but also that increasing Australia's participation and leadership would come with the benefit of stronger relationships with South-East Asian countries. These were prescient comments, and indeed they are still relevant today. As Sir Victor said, security and economic development are two sides of the same coin.

Perhaps fittingly for someone elected to a seat of such significance, Sir Victor Garland spent very little time on the back bench before he was called upon to serve as a minister. He first entered the ministry in the McMahon government in 1971 as Minister for Supply, a portfolio that encompassed a wide range of responsibilities that we would now largely associate with the industry and resources minister. He added Minister Assisting the Treasurer to his duties before the defeat of that government at the end of 1972, when Gough Whitlam led Labor into power for the first time since 1949. That took Sir Victor into opposition. In the ensuing three years he held shadow portfolios, including spokesperson on the Public Service and the Australian Capital Territory as well as being chief opposition whip in the House of Representatives. This latter role was not one he especially sought, but it seemed it did enable him to make use of his number-counting skills behind the scenes. I was intrigued to read in the Adelaide Advertiser that this involved something of a personal metamorphosis. It reported: 'Mr Garland developed a reputation for a certain aloofness when he became supply minister during the final 12 months of the McMahon government because of the fairly formal way that he ran his portfolio. The image changed quite dramatically during the three years of the Labor government. Mr Garland made a point of getting to know press men and Parliament House workers and often attended the late-night round of parties that made Parliament House swing during the sitting weeks.' It was an intriguing metamorphosis.

He was a conspicuous supporter of Malcolm Fraser when Fraser successfully seized the leadership of the Liberal Party and the opposition from Billy Snedden. This led to a return to the front bench for Sir Victor when Mr Fraser became Prime Minister at the end of 1975. This was a personally challenging period. He resigned his new ministry early in 1976 after being the subject of electoral bribery charges which were dismissed by a magistrate. His exile lasted 19 months. Between 1977 and 1980, he went on to hold portfolios including veterans' affairs, special travel representations, business and consumer affairs, and assisting with industry and commerce. With his accounting background and previous experience in the treasury portfolio, he was particularly well suited to these economic portfolios. In these roles, he represented Australia overseas on numerous occasions and pursued policy reforms ranging from tariff implementation to increased customs vigilance, competition regulation and consumer education.

His tenure as a minister came to an end when he accepted an appointment as Australia's high commissioner to the United Kingdom in London at the end of 1980. He began his new role in 1981 and served until 1983. His previous experience, particularly in the trade portfolio, meant he was well placed to take up the diplomatic position. In 1982, he was made Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. At the conclusion of his term, he remained in the United Kingdom for an extended period of time. He took up positions on a number of corporate boards, making a substantial contribution in a range of areas. He returned to Perth in 2007.

Sir Victor Garland was one of the last surviving ministers of the McMahon government. With his passing, Tom Hughes is the only remaining Liberal member of that ministry. As we mark Sir Victor's death, we again pause to reflect, as we did yesterday in expressing our condolences following the death of Donald Grimes, on the diminishing number of living members of the governments that led Australia through the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, we consider the impact of those governments in shaping the nation we are today.

Through his roles in both the McMahon and Fraser governments, Sir Victor made a contribution to building modern Australia. He would go on to represent our nation overseas, capping his Public Service career in this country first with service to Australia in the United Kingdom and then with service to that country as well. The opposition expresses our condolences following the passing of Sir Victor Garland, and we again convey our sympathies to his family and friends.

Senator DEAN SMITH (Western Australia—Government Whip in the Senate) (16:16): On behalf of my Western Australian Senate colleagues, I would like to associate myself with the remarks of the Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senator Birmingham, and those of Senator McAllister. Unfortunately, I never met Vic Garland—as he was affectionately known across the Western Australian Liberal Party—but he is testament to the strength of the Western Australian Liberal Party. Over many years, we have sent people from the comfortable suburbs of Curtin to our national parliament and they have served us with distinction—Allan Rocher, who was a member of the Senate for a short time; Julie Bishop; and Sir Paul Hasluck. And Celia Hammond follows in those esteemed footsteps.

What is often overlooked is that, for a brief period, Vic Garland worked closely with another famous Western Australian, Sir Billy Snedden, whom we don't often think of as a Western Australian. Sir Billy was born in West Perth, educated at the University of Western Australia and was the inaugural chairman of the Young Liberal Movement of Australia. In listening to the contributions from Senator Birmingham and Senator McAllister, those of us from Western Australia have been reminded of the strength of the WA division and the very strong role we have played in sending very credible, competent people to our national parliament—and, indeed, to the prize of all prizes, the high commissioner post in London. On behalf of the Western Australian senators, and all members of the Western Australian Liberal Party, I associate myself with those remarks and send our condolences.

Question agreed to, honourable senators standing in their places.

Senator URQUHART (Tasmania—Opposition Whip in the Senate) (16:44): At the request of Senator Watt, I move:

That—

(a) the Senate requires the Minister representing the Prime Minister to attend the Senate at 9.30 am on Thursday, 10 February 2022 to provide a detailed explanation as to why the Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services remains the Minister for Senior Australians and Aged Care Services;

(b) any senator may move to take note of the explanation required by paragraph (a); and

(c) any motion under paragraph (b) may be debated for no longer than 30 minutes, shall have precedence over all business until determined, and senators may speak to the motion for not more than 5 minutes each.

Senator DUNIAM (Tasmania—Assistant Minister for Forestry and Fisheries and Assistant Minister for Industry Development) (16:44): I seek leave to make a short statement.

The PRESIDENT: Leave is granted for one minute.

Senator DUNIAM: Minister Colbeck has supported and always will support the important work of the aged-care sector. Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Australian government has provided more than $2.5 billion to support senior Australians in aged care. More than $1.5 billion of this investment has been made available to support the aged-care workforce. The Australian government is determined to ensure a safe environment exists in aged-care facilities and is continuing to work with aged-care providers and state and territory public health authorities to support arrangements to manage infection control and COVID-19 outbreaks in aged care.

The PRESIDENT: The question is that motion 1310 be agreed to.

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Chandler ) (16:51): I inform the Senate that, at 8.30 am today, 25 proposals were received in accordance with standing order 75. The question of which proposal would be submitted to the Senate was determined by lot. As a result, I inform the Senate that the following letter has been received from Senator Brown:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I propose that the following matter of public importance be submitted to the Senate for discussion:

Mr Morrison's disastrous COVID summer resulting from his failure to listen to the warnings and take responsibility for ordering rapid antigen tests, his failure to learn from past mistakes, with Australians paying the price: spending hours in testing queues, days looking for rapid tests that were unavailable or overpriced, looking for basic supplies but finding only empty supermarket shelves, and mourning the loss of loved ones as hundreds of aged care residents died as providers grappled with staff shortages.

Is the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT: I understand that informal arrangements have been made to allocate specific times to each of the speakers in today's debate. With the concurrence of the Senate, I shall ask the clerks to set the clock accordingly.

Se nator McCARTHY (Northern Territory—Deputy Opposition Whip in the Senate) (16:52): I rise to speak on this matter of utmost importance to Australians. We're all very privileged to be here in this place holding positions of leadership, and our communities have vested their trust in us to display the qualities of leadership they expect, especially in a time that is one of the most testing we face as Australians. But at a time when we most needed leadership, to be guided with a sure hand through the many trials this pandemic has thrown at us, we have had an utter failure by this Prime Minister and his government to lead us, and nowhere is that failure of leadership being felt more than in remote Australia.

The federal government has failed and ignored remote communities during the pandemic. The vaccination rollout, booster shots, aged care and supply of RATs are federal responsibilities that have been bungled and mismanaged by Prime Minister Scott Morrison. Some territory communities still have double dose rates below 50 per cent, and we have seen concerning outbreaks at aged-care centres. Aged care is in crisis. Remote communities are running out of RATs and the health and aged-care workforce out bush and in large centres is strained. In Alice Springs there are cases being reported of elderly people being left without services under their home-care packages, elderly and vulnerable people left alone without a change of bed linen, assistance in home cleaning and personal care for weeks. I suspect this is the tip of a dreadful iceberg. How many vulnerable Territorians are there waiting in vain for their home-care package services to be delivered who have no-one to advocate for them, who have no family close by?

I'm informed the services aren't being delivered because of a drastic workforce shortage, and there are no plans in place from the federal government to assist. These cases of elderly people being left without services under their home-care packages is a direct result of this government's failure to implement the findings of the royal commission into aged care. These are the consequences of not properly remunerating our aged-care workforce—issues that were being felt long before COVID and have been exacerbated by this pandemic. It's our elders who are paying the price.

If these are the failures we know about in the urban centres where there is some scrutiny, what is the case in remote bush communities? Out of sight is so often out of mind at the best of times out there. In speaking with aged-care service providers in some remote territory communities, I'm told that the federal government has not supplied one single RAT to these providers—not one. Any that they have been able to get their hands on have been paid for from their own existing funding, putting pressures on other areas of service delivery with these centres. The RATs they have been able to get are prioritised for the vulnerable elderly. There is a shortage of RATs and PPE for the aged-care service workforce, adding extra strain to underpaid and under-resourced workers.

While the service provider workforce is out there on the ground caring for the elderly, Commonwealth agencies have been instructed to work from home. The federal government has completely abandoned the field in remote communities. Imagine how this leaves an exhausted and underpaid workforce feeling? They're out there doing the hard yards with zero support from the federal agencies. There is no sign of the National Indigenous Australians Agency in the bush. What a disgrace.

The failure by the government to manage the omicron outbreak is being felt disproportionately by women and children in remote Australia. Family and domestic violence services have been forced to expend their emergency relief funds on RATs because, again, zero have been forthcoming from the federal government. So many have absolutely nothing left, with five months to go until the end of financial year. There is a drastic shortage of alternative emergency accommodation, and women and children are being left in dangerous, life-threatening situations because of this.

We held a teams meeting with a lot of these organisations, who spoke to us—to me; to our candidate for Lingiari, Marion Scrymgour; and to Warren Snowdon, the current member for Lingiari—expressing directly these concerns about how domestic and family violence has increased during the COVID pandemic. They gave examples of their inability to get women out of some of our communities. Again, they've had to rely on their own funds. The Alice Springs Women's Shelter has had to pay an extraordinary amount of money out of its own funds for rapid antigen tests to be available. This should not be happening.

There has been no response from the federal government to the crisis. There are now 26,612 active coronavirus cases, with the virus infiltrating every region and many remote Aboriginal communities. There are over 6,000 active cases in the Northern Territory. As of this morning, 174 people with COVID were in Territory hospitals, and on Sunday, tragically, the NT recorded its fifth COVID related death. Three people in the NT have died with coronavirus in the past week. There are real worries about the impacts this is having on our health system right across the Northern Territory.

The PRESIDENT: Thank you. It being almost 5 pm, I think we will move on.

The PRESIDENT (16:59): Pursuant to order, I now call Senator Mirabella to give his first speech and ask senators that the usual courtesies be extended to him.

Senator MIRABELLA (Victoria) (16:59): Thank you, Mr President. I begin by acknowledging my predecessor and yours, the Hon. Scott Ryan. There is broad acknowledgement on all sides that both the former Presiding Officers—Senator Ryan and his colleague, the Hon. Tony Smith—deserve plaudits for their service—exemplary presiding officers both and fine Victorians both. Senator Ryan was only the second Victorian to hold your office, after Sir Magnus Cormack from 1971 to 1974.

I am honoured to have been chosen by the Victorian Division of the Liberal Party to represent Victoria in the Senate. I am privileged to stand here today preparing to do my small part, as we all seek to, in shaping a better future for our country and future generations. The perspective I bring to the task of shaping Australia's future is a consequence of the journey that I have taken to reach this chamber today. That journey has been a little longer and more circuitous than most. On the way, I've been a business manager, a teacher, a soldier, an engineer and a farmer. I have worked in offices, on fishing boats and in classrooms, and early in my life I experienced the struggles and challenges of small business. I've been fortunate to have firsthand experience in a broad range of areas that underpin how the world works: food production, infrastructure, technology and defence of the nation. I've also come to know and believe in certain values which I believe are critical both to an individual's pursuit of happiness and to the flourishing of our nation: a love of family, a commitment to service, self-reliance, endeavour and enterprise. I am imbued with these things, and they are fundamental to the perspective I bring to the parliament.

But on this journey no-one comes into this parliament alone. Each of us had a lot of help to get here. So I have a few acknowledgements. Although I can't name you all, I'm grateful to all the Liberal volunteers who give their time and effort and passion; to our rural membership, who do the miles; and to those special people who select and serve on the party's decision-making bodies. Thank you for your trust. I will name a small, dedicated team who played a critical role in getting me here today: Mike Pountney, Sean Armistead, Jack Cook, Ben Zerbe, Amanda and Rohan Millar and James Radford, and, from further afield, John Polack, Andrew Schuller and the best federal director the Liberal Party never had, Gerry Wheeler.

My four children—Emily, Maddy, Alexandra and Kitty—and my mother, Mary, are here today. Sadly, my father, Tim, passed away two weeks before my selection for this position, and he would be most annoyed with himself for not being here today. Of course, I want to acknowledge and praise my wife, Sophie. She was a member of the House of Representatives for 12 years. Her maiden speech was almost 20 years ago to the day. We are the fourth couple to have both served in the federal parliament, but I am the first husband to follow in the footsteps of his wife, and I am beyond proud to be doing so.

Sophie was an extraordinary representative of the electorate of Indi—energetic, passionate and incomparably hardworking. The fruits of her efforts are still fully evident today, although perhaps not sufficiently recognised. The residents of the Albury-Wodonga region drive on the roads and the freeway that she fought to get built. The people of north-east Victoria attend medical facilities that she fought to get funded, and they use sporting and community facilities that she was instrumental in building. Even before she entered parliament, she was able to work with then Prime Minister John Howard to secure hundreds of defence industry jobs in Benalla and across the river, in Mulwala. After she left the parliament, she was instrumental in securing entitlements to hundreds of workers from Bruck Textiles. In office and out of office, she helped a lot of people. She still has my total admiration for both her work ethic and her commitment to the people of Indi.

For Sophie, the 2013 election was bittersweet, with the coalition's return to power coinciding with the loss of her seat. As shadow industry minister prior to that election, Sophie did much to set the direction for the incoming government's approach to industry policy. There has been much written and said about the challenges that women face here in Canberra. Like many strong and vocal women in public life, Sophie has had to endure an unfair share of prejudice and discrimination that men do not. Her political opponents confected public vilification and then exploited it without shame, and some of these were other women.

Sophie never got to deliver a valedictory, and I'm sure these remarks are hardly a good substitute, but the circumstance of her departure from the parliament was absolutely the catalyst for my decision to step into an active role in politics. If in my time here I can achieve a fraction of what she materially achieved, particularly for the people of regional Victoria, I will have done well.

I've said that I've had a few careers. Looking back now on all the things I've been and done, I was most shaped as a soldier—an army engineer, to be precise; a sapper. I can tell you very specifically how I came to be a sapper. When I joined the Army Reserve during university, I trained as an infantryman, but it was during that time that I was fortunate enough to attend a few lectures by our honorary colonel commandant at that time, Sir Edward Dunlop. During these lectures, Weary would talk about his time as a prisoner of war in Singapore and Thailand. He painted a vivid picture of how he and others struggled to run makeshift hospitals to save the lives of their starving and diseased fellow prisoners. He showed us pencil drawings and watercolours made by prisoners at the time, and I recall them clearly. He showed us some of the expedient surgical instruments they devised from bamboo and bone in the jungle in Thailand. During that particular presentation an officer cadet asked him how many lives he thought he'd saved with those instruments, and I remember a portion of his response very well. He said: 'Our medical staff didn't save anywhere near as many lives as the engineers. The engineers did the most amazing things to keep us supplied with fresh water and deal with our waste and build roofs and beds for us. Without the engineers we'd probably all have died of disease and privation.' I was the officer cadet who asked that question, and so he was answering me. These were evocative words, and they made me want to do something useful with my time in the military, so I decided to become an army engineer.

I wasn't studying engineering at the time, but I applied to join the Royal Australian Engineers and so started on a parallel career path. I studied and served, part time and full time, for two decades as a sapper officer. One of the mottos of the engineers is 'Facimus et frangimus'—'We make and we break'. I was fortunate that most of my time as an active sapper was making rather than breaking. I learned how to build structures, roads and bridges. I learned how to purify water, how to prevent disease—the very same things Weary Dunlop talked about. In other words, I learned about all the basic things that a community of people need to live and survive—clean water, shelter and roads—and I've enjoyed my time helping to build that infrastructure for communities here and abroad.

But I'm not just a soldier; I think of myself as a citizen soldier. For more than half my working life, I've worn the flag of my country on my sleeve, but the other half has been spent in civilian clothes. More recently, I've been a farmer. I am a senator for Victoria. I've given myself the additional task of being a champion for regional Victoria. There are more than 21,000 farm businesses in the state, and Victoria has the largest agricultural output of all the states and territories. When I became part of the farming community I discovered that generally farmers are just too busy to advocate for themselves. I know from experience how hard it is to get farmers to stand up in front of a committee or an inquiry or to write a submission. Yet farmers in Victoria are subject to endless new regulations developed by an army of well-paid public servants who assume farmers have plenty of capacity to devote their unpaid time to reviewing and arguing against more and more regulation and to spend more and more time on compliance. It is for this reason that I intend to focus my time in the Senate on championing their issues by working to continue to increase access to health services in rural areas, especially mental health; by fighting for increased investment in rural infrastructure, both road and rail; and through unceasing vigilance on water management.

We are coming to the end of this, the 46th Parliament, which is an odd time to be delivering a first speech to this chamber, but it's also a historic moment to be delivering a first speech, as we approach the end of a difficult but defining two years in the history of our nation. The COVID pandemic has tested many of our institutions, not least the federation itself. It has forced us to consider the extent of our resilience and, some say, even our very sovereignty.

Recent events have reminded us that Australia's strategic situation hasn't changed for 200 years. We are an island nation at the end of a very long maritime supply line. This has critical implications for self-sufficiency, especially in manufacturing, and, of course, security. During these last two years, we've faced shortages of imported goods. This has put our local manufacturing capabilities under the microscope, although empty supermarket shelves are not as critical as shortages of machine or electronic components. To a farmer waiting for a crucial part for a tractor, toilet paper shortages are a mild inconvenience. Our exports, too, have been challenged. China punished our beef and wine trade because of a diplomatic slight. Well, with some difficulty, we've lived with that and found new markets. It remains unclear whether our mutual trade interests with China will prevail over the long term. These imposed interruptions to our trade, incoming and outbound, have exposed the fragility of our supply chains.

I'd like to tell a parable which illustrates the vulnerabilities we must address. We've just had the AdBlue crisis, which threatened to put our trucking fleets off the road. AdBlue is a simple commodity. Most people have never heard of it. It helps reduce harmful emissions from diesel engine exhausts. But what is it? It's just a urea-and-water solution. Urea is not hard to make, but it's one of the many thousands of things that we used to produce but for which there is almost no business case to manufacture locally anymore—until we can't import it, of course. Fortunately, there's a plant in Brisbane that's been able to ramp up its operations to produce urea, but I note that that plant was due to close this year.

The AdBlue incident throws up a number of issues we need to address at a national level. Firstly, the capabilities of our domestic petrochemical industry, both production and storage, are a matter of concern. But we need to look more broadly than that. We need to examine what disruption to globalised supply chains really means for us, whatever the cause.

Urea is made from coal or gas, commodities which were in short supply during this Northern Hemisphere winter—a situation probably exacerbated by all those ships full of Australian coal sitting at anchor in Chinese ports for months. This incident demonstrates the world's reliance on hydrocarbons and coal and how shortages of these commodities still affect most nations at a national level. Consider the European winter energy markets right now. Energy generation is struggling, and the price of Russian gas coming into western Europe has tripled. And, by the way, it is hardly worth asking whether Russia is likely to separate its strategic leverage of military force and supply of gas to Germany.

To start drawing some threads together, here in Australia we need to be examining our national self-reliance. What's the balance between allowing global markets to deliver cheap goods versus critical shortages when supply chains are disrupted? I'd love to see more manufacturing in this country—smart manufacturing. To be able to achieve that we need smart people, great education and training, and capital applied where it's best used. But manufacturing also needs energy—electric energy, cheap and clean energy. It used to be one of our national competitive advantages. Electricity is the single greatest enabler of our modern civilisation to our standard of living. For more than a century we have been burning fossil fuels to generate that energy, and we know we can't keep doing that. Globally we are grappling with a conundrum—a social demand for an accelerated shutdown of coal power and a lack of viable alternatives.

With my farmer's hat on and my engineer's prism, I look at the energy issues, the manufacturing issues and the sovereignty issues, and it's easy to conflate them. Everything connects to everything else. As an engineer, what I've focused on in recent years is how we improve the fundamentals of how we make the world work and how we improve the management of our resources and ecosystems efficiently and cleanly. I'm a farmer. I care for the land and my environment. I look at all the problematic issues: water; clean water; water for agriculture—by the way, even water is becoming a strategic commodity in and between some countries; waste, which is a critical problem everywhere; agriculture; green waste; livestock methane emissions; fertilisers for agriculture; and emissions from industrial processes such as steel production. All these issues are connected. They are connected by the king of elements: carbon. Organic biomass—it's basic chemistry. Reducing atmospheric CO2 is what we want to achieve, but the term 'decarbonising' doesn't actually make sense to a chemist.

The solutions to all our challenges start with energy. The first consideration is that there is a limit to how much intermittent energy we should be putting into our grid. Germany is a salutatory lesson here—a high level of intermittent generation and the most unstable grid with the most expensive electricity in Europe, mainly because of expensive Russian gas from peaking plants. It's worth pointing out, by the way, that households only consume about 20 per cent of all the electricity we generate. The rest goes to commercial and industrial use. For all the rooftop solar we've installed, we still need a lot of spinning base load.

The Prime Minister has said that the path to cleaner energy is in technology, not taxes. I agree. I am a proponent of hydrogen and ammonia as the fuels of the future. We need to be able to produce hydrogen in large quantities cleanly. To make ammonia, you've actually got to make hydrogen first. I believe we will still be relying on biomass, including coal, for some time. But I also believe the future is not burning it; we will be chemically reforming biomass and methane into hydrogen and into ammonia, as already happens. When we work out how to do it while capturing the CO2, we'll be producing clean hydrogen at such a scale that we can put it straight into turbines and make electricity—lots of it—cheaply. It will be a new gas industry, and it will use only a fraction of the biomass we currently burn and will solve a lot of our waste problems at the same time. Is this a fantasy? I don't believe so. Current waste to energy systems are already evolving down this path. Time does not permit me to say as much as I'd like here, particularly to the sceptics, but I will say this: whichever country wins the race to large-scale, clean hydrogen production will win an economic bonanza and will lead the world to a better future. I intend it to be Australia.

I want to make a comment about the 'Voices of' candidates set to contest the federal election. Why do I mention this here? Because these Voices candidates cite lack of action on climate change as their major platform. They say they're independents who aren't really a political party. Really? They look and sound like one. They even have a senate candidate preaching the need for transparency in politics, while denying scrutiny of themselves. I share the concern of many about a hung federal election result. These Voices candidates are very well schooled in avoiding answering the question as to who they would support to form government, but there is, of course, no doubt. They are all contesting only against coalition members. The notion that any of them would support the coalition is absurd. They are, therefore, the voices for Labor.

I am gravely concerned at how a Labor-Greens-Voices coalition would accelerate climate action, ban coal and shut down more base-load generation. This country is already at the point where we do not need more intermittent generation. I've already referred to Germany. Is that the nirvana where these Voices people might take us: to a fragile grid, unaffordable energy and blackouts? Australians most definitely don't want that.

Australia has the resources to become a leader in hydrogen energy, and in so doing we will at once be enabling cheaper energy, more manufacturing and greater self-reliance. If we can reap this harvest, we will improve our ability to better fund education, health and aged care. But to achieve this we really need to knock down a few silos and recast some of the business of government. Trade, energy, industry and security are interdependent in this context. It is a first-order challenge for the future: better applying policy and public funds to address our sovereign self-sufficiency in ways which actually contribute to prosperity.

On my final theme of security, defence and foreign policy, I will confine my comments. First, in regard to the manner in which we equip the ADF, I know firsthand how lengthy and convoluted our acquisition processes are. We must improve them. Changes in technology are occurring at 21st century speed, but our decision processes still seem stuck in the last century. Several months ago, the government announced the choice of new artillery equipment. That's great, but I recollect that project, Land 17, was entered into the defence capability program during my time working in force development in 2005—that was nearly 17 years ago.

The defence minister is rightly taking a more rigorous approach to this problem, and I applaud him. He was right to recognise a bad decision on our new submarines. He is also right to project an increased defence budget for coming years. We cannot provide credible protection to our maritime supply lines and our region if we don't.

As an additional note about the role of the ADF, in recent times we've seen the ADF employed on civil defence tasks with the recent horror summer bushfires and support to COVID operations being cases in point. As a citizen soldier, I support this. There's been discussion in recent days about whether the ADF is a standby workforce. No, it isn't. The mission of the ADF is to protect Australia and its interests and, to me personally, that mission absolutely includes civil defence operations.

As a soldier, I've commanded army support to bushfire operations under the defence aid to the civil community system. I once watched people in a town not far from where I live now who had been surrounded by fires for weeks come out into the street and cheer and cry when the big green trucks rolled through, towing bulldozers and carrying 100 sappers with chainsaws. I have never felt so proud of wearing my uniform as I did that day when these people told me that they knew that now everything was going to be alright. The Prime Minister knew of their plight and he sent them. We weren't a backup workforce; we were soldiers. We were there to protect them and their homes, and we did. I support any measures to equip and prepare elements of the ADF to provide this kind of support for the future as a matter of course. On a final note on defence matters, and certainly not of least importance, I intend to do what I can to better support veterans. We need to do a lot better than we've done in recent years.

To draw to a conclusion, I've already laboured the point that events of the last two years have shone the spotlight on a range of issues that go to the heart of Australia's wellbeing. I've drawn the thread: self-reliance, energy, manufacturing, security. One of the most important lessons that I have learned in my various careers is that lessons are too often not well learned, especially at a bureaucratic and political level. The bushfire inquiries are an outstanding example. Defence equipment acquisitions are another. Pandemic lessons need to be not just learned but embedded and protected—the health lessons and the economic and social lessons.

This is a time when we need to be striving to make sure that we do not forget the lessons of today. This is a time when we need to be making considered and informed decisions about Australia's ability to prosper as a free and self-determining nation. I want my four beautiful daughters to inherit a nation and a world which is in better shape than my generation found it. I hope to bring my particular perspectives to bear on policy and public debate to help achieve this. It's the farmer's job to feed the nation, it's the engineer's job to build all that makes it work and it's the soldier's job to protect the people. It does not occur to me for a moment that these do not remain my tasks, even as I serve from this place. Thank you, Mr President.

Senator RUSTON (South Australia—Minister for Families and Social Services, Minister for Women's Safety and Manager of Government Business in the Senate) (17:32): by leave—I move:

That today—

the hours of meeting be 9.30 am till adjournment;

the routine of business from 7.20 pm be consideration of the Mitochondrial Donation Law Reform (Maeve's Law) Bill 2021 only;

divisions may take place for the purposes of the bill only; and

the question for the adjournment be proposed after consideration of the bill concludes, or at 9 pm, whichever is earlier.

Question agreed to.

Senator ABETZ (Tasmania) (17:33): What a stark contrast it was to hear the excellent first speech of Senator Mirabella, full of positivity. It was uplifting, it was sincere, it was about service to the nation, from the sort of senator and public servant we actually want and need in this place. That speech was such a contrast to that which we had heard earlier from the Labor Party in this so-called MPI. They want to blame Mr Morrison for everything. In fact, the motion starts: 'Mr Morrison's disastrous summer'. Well, I suppose they blame him that it was a bit of colder summer than usual, that the barbeque gas ran out or that the kids got sunburnt—really?

What are the Labor Party on about when they come into this place, day after day, with their relentless negativity and their commentary on everything that is wrong without pausing to consider they might actually be presenting themselves as an alternative government. There's not a whisper as to what they would be doing differently. What we hear is just this tirade of negativity, including, might I add—because I find it amazing, and we heard it in question time today and again in the contribution from the Labor speaker just before the first speech by Senator Mirabella—about the underpaid workers in aged care. There is no doubt that aged-care workers do a fantastic job. There is no doubt that they are low-paid workers. But who sets their wage rates? It is not the government. It is not the Prime Minister. It is an independent tribunal known as Fair Work Australia. I wonder who set that up and then stacked it with their people? It was the Australian Labor Party. It is the Australian Labor Party's mechanism for wage fixation in this country. So, when the Labor Party come into this place, day after day, complaining about the low wages for aged-care workers, it is a double-whammy criticism of the trade union movement that is allegedly looking after these people and also of the independent umpire who determines the wages.

The Australian Labor Party, like with so many other things, seek to have it both ways. They say, day after day, that the Liberal and National parties cannot change the fair work legislation, and we haven't in this regard. It is the legislation as put down by Ms Gillard, Prime Minister Rudd—remember him?—and Mr Shorten. That mechanism remains in place. So each and every day when the Labor Party complain about somebody's wages and/or conditions they are complaining about the decision-making process of the organisation that they themselves established.

It therefore begs the question: what would Labor do if they were in government? Would they sack the Fair Work Commission for not providing sufficient wages to aged-care people or would they somehow legislate wages and start having this parliament determining who gets paid what and when, how and why? Surely not! So this is a vacuous criticism that they offer, day after day, in a vain attempt to con the Australian people into believing that somehow they might be able to do a better job.

We know that the Labor Party are devoid of any future policy positioning. If they had good future policies, instead of putting up these motions as they do, day after day, full of relentless negativity, they'd be saying, 'We call on the government to adopt Labor policy in this particular area,' and they would set out the Labor policy seriatim—(a), (b), (c), (d) et cetera—and tell the Australian people exactly what they want and what their aspiration is for the Australian people. But they have no aspiration for the Australian people. They only have an aspiration for themselves to somehow cheat their way into government by offering continual criticism of a government that has been, in exceptionally difficult circumstances, delivering for the people of Australia.

Let's be clear: in the three years of this government, we've seen 1.1 million jobs created since the pandemic hit. Do you know what? The Labor shadow Treasurer said that the one test the Morrison government has to pass is the unemployment rate—will it hit a certain level or not? Well, the unemployment rate is well below expectations. So by Labor's standard, the standard, the one standard by which Labor said the Liberal-National government should be judged—namely, the employment level—the Morrison government has passed with flying colours. It is not me, a Liberal senator, asserting this; it is, by implication, the Australian Labor Party asserting this. They set the test, and the test the Labor Party set for the Liberal-National government has been passed with flying colours whether the Labor Party likes it or not.

So, having set us a benchmark, which we as a government have surpassed, what else is Labor to offer than to pick up any little rock that is available and throw it at us. There is no positivity here, there is no vision for the future, there is no policy platform on which to see the nation come out of this COVID pandemic. We as a nation are doing relatively well. Can we do better? Of course we can do better, and that is what the government continually strives for day after day. But what this nation does not need is a group of individuals who have only one vision, and that is for them to be elected to government.

For Labor to be elected to government, the Australian people need the full policy platform—what they would actually do, what they would do differently, and how. It's no use saying, 'We would have done better in this area or that area.' Tell us how that would have been achieved with all the constrictions and restraints that COVID has placed upon us. There have been 1.1 million jobs created, surpassing Labor's test. And I'm sure that the hapless Labor shadow Treasurer, in setting us this task on unemployment, thought we would fail it. He put that benchmark up in lights for everybody to see—only to see us not only match it but overwhelmingly surpass it. So, humiliated, the Labor Party retreats to what it is exceptionally good at, and that is throwing rocks and offering criticism. But they are incapable of providing a positive agenda—and the record of the Prime Minister and the Treasurer speaks for itself.

I have concentrated on that which the Labor Party set us a benchmark, but let's have a look at 1,400 additional nurse placement for the regions; $1 billion to help with Closing the Gap; and 93 per cent of Indigenous children enrolled in preschool, which is up from 77 per cent in 2016. You can go through policy parameter after policy parameter and see achievement by this government in the most difficult of circumstances. The ministry has performed exceptionally well, and the benchmarks set by the Australian Labor Party have been met and achieved—indeed, overachieved. So all Labor does is come in here and provide their relentless negativity and no real alternative for the people of Australia. That is why motions such as this, which are put forward by the Labor Party day after day, should be rejected. If I were in the opposition, I would be putting forward a positive platform; but, devoid of that, all they do is throw rocks.

Senator ROBERTS (Queensland) (17:43): As a servant to the people of Queensland and Australia, I note that the federal and state governments have had a disastrous two years of COVID mismanagement—not just one summer. Go out the front of this building and have a listen. Go anywhere in Australia and have a listen. Australia has seen a repeated failure to learn and do better from one year to the next—and it's now counting in years. The failure of this government to modify the COVID response as more information has emerged about the science of this virus is criminal incompetence.

Our competitive federalism model has been mocked and abused and buried, in some perverse game of pass the parcel, so that everyday Australians can have no clear idea of who is to blame for this mess. I know who's to blame: it's all of you. All of you have waved through ill-prescribed and illogical measures for more than two years. One after the other, from one state to another, the same science and data on COVID has been translated into wildly different responses, depending upon the ideology and personality flaws of the premiers and chief ministers of the day and the federal ministers. Yet on each occasion, with each different policy, the phrase was the same: trust the science, but don't show us the science.

The last two years have seen a litany of nonsense and lies—lie after lie, dressed up as medicine and science. Here are just some of them: the unresolved definition of 'a hotspot'; the inability to agree on sensible measures for border communities; the seemingly arbitrary closing of borders and the locking down of communities for minor outbreaks, while then being allowed to open up during major outbreaks, which was just incredible to see; marginalising the unvaccinated in some states but not in others; the changing definition of 'fully vaccinated'; and making commitments to people and then contradicting them.

As a nation we have been held captive to measures that have divided our communities; coerced us into a medical procedure in order to keep our jobs; and denied us freedom of choice over our bodies, over when we can open our businesses, over where we can travel, over whether we can see our family or friends and over whether we can attend a funeral or a wedding. Any dissent has been kept suppressed by media accomplices. The media have crafted the narrative into a singular, government sanctioned message—essentially, propaganda and lies.

Disasters and calamities can have a powerful galvanising effect for communities, as we see during bushfires and floods. Yet during COVID, our governments have successfully eroded our cohesiveness as an Australian nation. They've fractured it. This is the first time I've seen a national emergency responded to by dividing Australians instead of uniting against the common threat. Instead of helping one another, we find ourselves treating others like lepers and retreating from anyone who coughs or sniffles. We've been brainwashed into division, disrespect, telling lies and telling tales on anyone we believe isn't being compliant.

The federal government have squandered the opportunity to bring Australia together as a nation, by letting the states and territories run wild with stupidity and deceit: Liberal, Labor, Nationals and Greens—governments all. Historically, our ADF are brought in to help domestically in catastrophic and emergency situations, so it says a lot about how the state and federal governments have mishandled the response to COVID, when, after two years of COVID experience, we need 1,700 ADF personnel to go into our aged-care sector because the staff have left; they've had to because they've been threatened with a forced vaccination. Debacle after debacle have left our aged-care sector completely under-resourced. Staffing has been ravaged by vaccine mandates and unreasonable close-contact rules.

It makes no sense to me that Labor would try to pin this on the Morrison-Joyce government alone, when the Labor Party—when this parliament, both state and federal parliaments—waved these measures through for two years. To steal a line from Driving Miss Daisy: 'Senator Brown, you took that turn with the government.' It's too late now to dodge the blame. You're all to blame. The unnecessary deaths within aged care from government incompetence are heartbreaking, shameful, immoral and inhuman. So too are the continual lockdowns of elderly residents, which have prevented the elderly from seeing their families, leading some to believe they've been abandoned. It is not their families who have abandoned them; it's this parliament. It's all of you. The disrespect shown to our elderly is breathtaking.

While there are ethical questions about the balance between opening up and our most vulnerable being exposed to COVID, there's absolutely no acceptable excuse for the state and federal governments' logistical failures during this entire atrocious mess. How can we do this to our families and communities? We're still stumbling as a nation two years later! The federal and state leaders have gutted the dignity and rights of everyday Australians through their ineptness and unprecedented thirst for power and control, at a time when Australians needed hope, reassurance, leadership and confidence in their leaders. Is it any wonder that this incompetence, arrogance and hubris have brought protesters onto the streets in their millions? (Time expired)

Senator SHELDON (New South Wales) (17:49): I rise to make a contribution on this matter of public importance. According to the minister for aged care, the aged-care system has been coping with the omicron variant extremely well. That is a direct quote: 'extremely well'. That is an opinion that the minister might have formed from his VIP seats at the fifth Ashes test. Of course, if the minister had done his job and fronted up to the Senate committee on COVID-19 instead of fobbing us off to go to the cricket, then the minister would know that the aged-care system is not actually coping extremely well. Usually, if a system is coping extremely well, you don't have to call the military in to provide emergency support! If the minister, instead of going to the cricket, had done his job and talked to aged-care residents and families—or just simply read the paper—he would have known things are not going extremely well. He would know that more than 500 Australians in aged care died from COVID-19 in January alone. But the government says, 'Don't worry about that.' The minister for health said 60 per cent of those who died in aged care 'were in the absolute last days of their lives'. How is that for a message from the Morrison government? 'In the absolute last days of their lives'—that's how it described those people who lost their lives due to COVID. What a reassurance from the government to those people who lost loved ones and those who fear losing their loved ones! I doubt that that provides any support to the families of those who have tragically passed away. Is this really the point we've gotten to in the government's handling of the pandemic, that we are now just brushing away hundreds of preventable deaths as being insignificant?

What's going on in our aged-care sector is unprecedented in Australian history. The fact is that the vaccine rollout had started months and months behind. If the booster rollout had not started months behind, we might have been in a better position. Then we would not have seen hundreds of unboostered aged-care residents tragically passing away in January. But that is the aged-care system the government insists is performing extremely well. If the minister had spoken to aged-care providers instead of going to the cricket, he would have known that this isn't the case. Mike Baird, a former Liberal premier of New South Wales and current CEO of aged-care provider HammondCare, has been calling for the Australian Defence Force to be called into the aged-care sector since mid-January. It took more than three weeks for the government to heed that call—and, as always with this government, it's too little too late.

If the minister had spoken to aged-care workers instead of going to the cricket, he would know things are not going extremely well. Aged-care workers are under unbelievable stress. They can't access rapid antigen tests. They can't access enough PPE. They can't access enough N95 masks. It has been a year since the aged-care royal commission handed down its final report. Let's remind ourselves of what the report said:

Australia's aged care system is understaffed and the workforce underpaid and undertrained.

…   …   …

The bulk of the aged care workforce does not receive wages and enjoy terms and conditions of employment that adequately reflect the important caring role they play.

…   …   …

Inadequate staffing levels, skill mix and training are principal causes of substandard care in the current system.

That's what the aged-care commission made very clear—and it couldn't have been clearer to anyone reading those words. There's a link between the conditions of the aged-care workforce and the quality of care. A year on, the government hasn't learnt a single thing.

Unlike the minister, aged-care workers aren't blowing off work for VIP tickets to the Ashes. Aged-care workers, most of whom are in insecure and precarious jobs, are being pushed to the limit. Nine in 10 aged-care workers are either casual or part time. They are in danger of their shifts being swapped, or cut, at the drop of a hat. Many are expected to remain on call all day, every day. Last year Sherree Clarke, a casual aged-care nurse, told the job security committee:

You can't plan anything because you don't know what your roster is going to be from one fortnight to the next. When my mother went through cancer, I couldn't tell her that I would support her for her cancer appointments, because if you're not available to pick up a shift, they don't offer you that shift the next time.

For all of this, they are woefully underpaid. These are people tasked with looking after our parents and our grandparents. These workers are sometimes responsible for every facet of senior Australians' day-to-day lives, and they're receiving barely above the minimum wage.

Another casual aged-care worker, Anu Singh, told the job security committee last year that at her workplace there were just two carers for 20 residents. They would have 20 minutes with each resident. She said:

In those 20 minutes, we used to wake up our residents, who were about 90 years old, and do showering, toileting, dressing and undressing; tidy up their rooms; make their beds; and then take them slowly to their dining. Can you imagine doing all this just for yourself in 20 minutes?

That's while making barely above the minimum wage. And this was even before the pandemic. Does it sound like the aged-care system is doing extremely well? On top of that, there's the completely botched COVID-19 response. So I support in the strongest terms the Health Services Union's comments and I call on the government to back the HSU's application for a decent wage rise for aged-care workers. It's the absolute least this government can do for those workers.

The other point I want to cover is the stress the pandemic is having on the supply chains as a result of the government responses to these problems. We've seen workers at Teys meatworks in Naracoorte being forced to work while COVID positive. We've seen truck drivers and supply-chain workers forced to continue to work tirelessly to keep shelves stocked even as the government stands by and allows their jobs to be undermined by companies like Uber and Amazon—the race to the bottom. We've seen retail and logistics workers forced to continue working even without fair access to rapid antigen tests.

This week, the Retail Supply Chain Alliance came to Canberra to call for government backing for the new supply chain safety principles. The three principles are very simple but very important. The first is that we need COVID safety supply chains. That means free and accessible rapid antigen tests for transport, logistic and retail workers not just for their own personal safety but to keep all Australians safe and to keep supply chains running. The second principle is that we need to secure working conditions in supply chains. That means immediate government action to stop the race to the bottom on working conditions that is being driven by companies like Amazon. The third is that we need a supply-chain committee. Throughout this pandemic the government has failed to listen to advice from medical experts and from the industry. Instead of sensible planning and thoughtful solutions, we had ideas like children driving forklifts—just absurd! We need a committee that brings together government, industry, unions and workers to find real solutions to supply-chain issues and to ensure that we don't have any more stupid and deadly ideas like kids on forklifts.

Supply-chain workers, aged-care workers, health workers and workers across Australia deserve better than insecure work, wages failing to keep up with the cost of living and a shortage of rapid antigen tests. This government needs to act and it needs to act now. It's not a job well done.

Senator DAVEY (New South Wales—Nationals Whip in the Senate) (17:59): I want to remind the chamber of the motion we're actually debating here tonight because that hasn't been clear in the contributions of those on the other side. This motion, which was put forward by Labor, talks about the disastrous COVID summer. It accuses the government of failing to listen to warnings, failing to take responsibility for ordering rapid antigen tests and failing to learn from past mistakes.

I wonder if Labor would have done anything differently. When you actually look at the time lines, when you actually look at what was happening right around the world, and when you consider the scientific and expert advice that we are always told we've got to listen to—listen to the experts, listen to the scientists, take on board what they're saying and act according to that advice.

Let me remind people that, even as late as August last year, the advice from the AHPPC discouraged the use of rapid antigen tests when the prevalence of COVID was low. In August last year, they said RATs should only be used as a precautionary surveillance measure, and they recommended their use only for healthcare settings. But, according to Labor, somehow we should have ignored that advice and pre-empted things even before the Therapeutic Goods Authority had approved RATs for home use. We were actually ahead of the game. As soon as the TGA approved point-of-care use of RATs, we entered into agreements with suppliers. We secured 4.45 million RATs and commenced a trial for point-of-care RAT testing in aged-care settings. But Labor would like to ignore that fact and pretend that it all only occurred over our summer. Our summer was the European winter, at which time the whole world was struggling to source enough RATs. But somehow we should have miraculously been able to access them, when the United States, Europe, the UK and Canada could not fulfil their own demand for RATs. We should have been immune to a global supply shortage during a global pandemic, according to Labor. That's just living in fairyland.

Don't forget, as well, that even after the TGA had approved use for RATs in home settings, even after the government had started a procurement program, the states had still not approved their use. Let's not forget that when omicron raised its ugly head in Australia in late November, and when the states responded by shutting their borders, it was the states who insisted that they would take nothing short of a PCR test as proof of COVID negativity. Queensland kept that up all the way until January, such that the demand for PCR tests in New South Wales went through the roof—not from people showing symptoms from COVID, not from who were close contacts, but from people who wanted to go on holiday and from people who wanted to visit their families. Senator Sheldon talks about the squeeze on our freight and supply chains. Well, the squeeze was exacerbated by these state based policy principles that required all truckies to have PCR tests because RATs weren't good enough. This was a state Labor government demanding PCR tests so that their trucks, carrying their groceries, could get over the border to deliver to their supermarket shelves.

Labor somehow thinks that we had a crystal ball. Somehow, according to Labor, we should have been able to foresee omicron. The World Health Organization only declared omicron a variant of concern on 26 November. By that stage, we had already entered into these RAT trials in aged-care settings. We had already commenced a procurement program. But we still didn't have omicron in our country, and no-one could have predicted the scourge that omicron brought.

I want to also talk about issues in aged-care settings. COVID has always represented a risk in aged care, from the very first COVID outbreak in aged care that occurred in New South Wales in 2020. We established a surge workforce to support facilities where staff were sidelined through COVID infection or being a close contact, or where they just needed support. This surge workforce has been in place ever since, available for every state and for any facility that requests it. To date that surge workforce has covered over 80,000 shifts. Yes, omicron is rapidly spreading at the moment and our workforce needs to adjust. Yes, we now have the Defence Force assisting in that area. But somehow Labor think they would have foreseen all this.

I want to take this opportunity to thank our aged-care workforce, the surge workforce and the Defence Force, who have all worked tirelessly to do their utmost to keep the residents of our aged-care facilities healthy and safe. I want to acknowledge that working in aged care is difficult at the best of times, regardless of COVID. It is a very sad fact that people in aged-care facilities pass on. It's worse when they pass on separated from their families due to quarantine requirements in response to a once-in-100-years pandemic. I feel for those who work in this situation and I feel for the families who have lost their loved ones. I don't care whether the resident has passed away from COVID, with COVID or without COVID; it's always sad. It's always a loss.

But Labor seem to be implying that, if they were in charge, things would be different. I want to know how. It's all well and good to stand here and throw stones when you've got no responsibility for cleaning up the shards of glass afterwards. How would Labor have addressed this situation to ensure that facilities were not locked down during the various waves of COVID, to ensure families still had access to their loved ones? I don't see how. I have family in hospital right now who cannot be visited by anyone, because they are all operating under COVID restrictions. We are operating under COVID restrictions in this place. But somehow Labor would wave a magic wand, and it wouldn't be occurring. How would Labor make sure that staff at our aged-care facilities would not come into contact with COVID and would be available for 100 per cent of their shifts so that they don't need a surge workforce or the Defence Force?

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but you cannot judge our government on what you know now with hindsight. Judge us on where we are at today, on how we have responded and learnt and adapted to ensure we continue to have a strong economy, record low unemployment, one of the highest vaccination rates in the world and one of the lowest COVID death rates in the world. I think we've done quite well, all things considered.

Senator STEELE-JOHN (Western Australia) (18:09): This summer has been a summer from hell for disabled people. It has been a summer of fear, a summer of isolation and a summer of death. Disabled people have died across our community, and the Morrison government bears responsibility. The incompetence! The absolute and total inability to listen to disabled people when we reach out to our government as we have done through every stage of this pandemic! At the beginning, when we thought we were going to drop dead any minute, we put everything aside. We put aside our historic knowledge of how we have suffered at the hands of this government. We put that aside and attempted to work to keep our community safe. We did so many hours of unpaid work. Organisations that have been structurally underfunded for the best part of a decade put everything on hold to come and sit with you people at a table and offer our best hopes, our lived experience and our expertise, with the sole goal of keeping our friends, our families and our loved ones alive. And you did what you always do: you took our good faith and you repaid it with tokenism. And, once we started to get a bit annoying, you shut us out of the process.

You failed us through the first wave. You failed to order the vaccine. You failed to roll the vaccine out. When it stopped working as it should have, you deprioritised us. You deprioritised disabled people to cover up your own incompetence. Through delta, you failed to get us PPE, you failed to invest in ventilation and you failed to order the tests that your own Prime Minister was saying at press conferences we would need. It all came to bear with omicron. Driven by your corporate donors who were so desperate to begin making money again, you rammed down the borders and the protective mechanisms. People like the Premier of New South Wales lectured the community about the need to stand up to COVID and to live with the pandemic. Well, for a disabled person, for an older person, for the immunocompromised and for First Nations people, there is no living with COVID-19. Unprotected, unvaccinated and unsupported, we die. We have died, and we will continue to die, under this government. You bear that responsibility.

We had so many chances as a nation to get this right. We had so many opportunities to order the right vaccines, to give people the money they needed to manage, to give people access to the PPE, to put ventilators in schools and to give people the confidence and the ability to manage this together. At every turn, because it was too inconvenient, because it cost your donors too much money and because it dared to suggest that there is such a thing as a society wherein we have a mutual obligation to one another, you rejected it. Two years in, not a single person in the Australian government can tell me how many disabled people have died, because nobody has been collecting the data. Every day, chief health officers and state premiers go out to the media and give the COVID death figures, but they assure us that so many of these people had underlying conditions, were at the end of life or had a terminal condition—complex, co-occurring morbidities. Forty per cent of the Australian population has either a disability or an underlying condition, and this government and state governments have written us off as an acceptable collateral casualty. It's not good enough. The Greens do not accept it. We will never accept it. We will always push back. (Time expired)

Senator WALSH (Victoria) (18:14): Across the country, millions of Australians have experienced a summer of COVID chaos that they simply did not need to have. There were more vaccine delays and a COVID testing disaster. There were critical staff shortages everywhere. It is yet another aged-care crisis, and none of it was inevitable—none of it. All of it was preventable, if only the Morrison government had listened to any of the experts who were ringing the alarm bells and saying that the government needed a plan to open up safely.

At the end of last year, Prime Minister Morrison was out there urging us all to get used to 'COVID normal', saying that it was time for government to get out of our lives and revving us up for an open summer. But, unlike this Prime Minister, COVID doesn't like to take holidays, and the government should have had a plan for that. Instead, the Prime Minister checked out over the summer—again!—and he did that as the omicron wave hit. At that time, it was Australians who were ready. Australians wanted to do the right thing to protect their families and their communities. They wanted to get tested. They wanted to stay safe. They wanted to be able to go to work. They were ready, but the Morrison government was not.

Within days of restrictions, including travel restrictions, easing, we saw absolute chaos. We saw PCR testers being overwhelmed. We saw people lined up for miles waiting to get tested, only to be turned away. No-one could find a rapid antigen test across the country, and we were in crisis again—a crisis that was not inevitable—all because the Prime Minister failed to plan again. He failed to heed the warnings again. He failed to listen to the experts again. As early as September last year, the Australian Medical Association warned the government publicly—and we all knew—that they needed a plan for rapid antigen tests to support a safe reopening. The government rejected that advice, saying something about not wanting to intervene in the private market. We all saw what the private market did later on!

Then, in October, the government ignored the calls by the Council of Small Business to provide rapid antigen tests. They dismissed calls from small business that they needed RATs to keep their doors open. Even before that—a year before that—Australian manufacturers had approached the government about providing rapid antigen tests made here in Australia for Australians. What happened with that? Government sent them away. They said, 'We don't need them.' Meanwhile, other countries, who had real leaders who were on the ball, knew that they needed rapid antigen tests and started putting orders in with our Australian manufacturers. Why didn't Prime Minister Morrison do that? Why couldn't he see what was happening overseas? In the UK, free tests had been available since April 2021, and in Singapore they were in vending machines. But, despite all of these warnings and these representations from small business, from the manufacturers and from the medical experts, the government refused to heed any of these warnings. They refused to take the advice. The Morrison government simply failed to act, and they left Australians without a plan B. It was Australians who were left over the summer to pay the price for these failures, literally—at $10 to $15 per rapid antigen test, if you could get your hands on one.

I spoke to pharmacists in regional Victoria, and, out of 20 that I contacted over the summer, none knew when they were going to get any supply of rapid antigen tests. The Morrison government turned COVID testing and our health system into a lottery this summer, and Australians are still paying the price for that failure. (Time expired)

Senator VAN (Victoria) (18:19): I thank you for this MPI today. I didn't get a question in question time, so it's wonderful to be able to answer a dorothy dixer—thank you. I say it's a dixer because it is clear to everyone that the Morrison government's COVID-19 response has been an overwhelming success. Has it been perfect? No. The Prime Minister has acknowledged that, as has the Leader of the Government in the Senate. However, the overall response to the pandemic by the Morrison government has been one of the best in the world. That is simply a fact. When it comes to dealing with a once-in-a-century pandemic, there is no playbook. There is no history to guide the government or decision-makers on what has worked previously and what has not.

Labor love coming in here with their hindsight goggles on. I think their hindsight goggles work so well they could walk in here backwards! Maybe they could tell me how I could have avoided getting COVID over the summer, which was confirmed by a RAT which I bought at my local pharmacy. Undoubtedly things can go wrong, and they did, as we have acknowledged. But what is important is how we learn from these mistakes and how we respond to these lessons. This is something that the government has done extremely well on any measure.

You only have to look at the vaccine rollout last year. On 21 March, the Prime Minister announced publicly that the Australian government had a comprehensive plan to offer COVID-19 vaccines to all Australians by the end of October 2021. And guess what? We saw that actually occur. We hit 80 per cent vaccinated by the end of October. No-one said that the vaccine rollout was going to be a straight line or some perfect model that Labor seemed to think was the Prime Minister's one and only job to oversee. Sorry, is it two jobs that you think the Prime Minister does? It shows you're not fit for the job. Of course, it was going to ramp up exponentially. We delayed the rollout deliberately over summer because we did not have COVID in the country. We watched what other countries did. We learnt from how they rolled theirs out. We learnt those lessons and moved from there.

There were countries that had COVID outbreaks that were killing tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people and needed the vaccine more than we did. They got it ahead of us, which I think we should all accept was the right thing. But we still met our promise to the Australian people. The Prime Minister made a promise and we met it. There were definitely hurdles along the way, such as the change of health advice on the AstraZeneca vaccine. However, the government responded to those changes, and now we are one of the world's most vaccinated countries. As it currently stands, Australia has over 95 per cent of the population vaccinated with a first dose and over 93 per cent protected with a second dose, which ranks us sixth out of all OECD countries in the world and must be celebrated as a remarkable achievement.

I think it's important to remind Senator Brown that the effects of the omicron outbreak have had global repercussions which have affected supply chains around the world. It is not just Australia where these supply chains were put under pressure. Globally, we have seen issues occurring. Luckily for us, the Morrison government acted swiftly and decisively to mitigate the squeeze on supply chains and worked with industry at every level to iron out these problems. Decisions, such as on the changes in food and grocery supply chain and close-contact arrangements, undoubtedly had a positive impact on these issues.

With all aspects of the COVID-19 response, the government has followed the expert medical advice. The first three rapid antigen self-tests were only approved by the TGA on 13 October, for supply from 1 November. We started from a different position because we didn't have massive outbreaks. We'd dealt with them at that time. RATs were not a suitable testing regime for delta. But, since then, the government has worked to ensure they are available to those who need them. The Commonwealth provides free RATs to residential aged-care facilities, for which we're responsible. We've already provided millions of RATs to residential aged-care centres. It is the Morrison government's response that has kept Australians safe while not destroying our economy, which the Labor Party would have done. (Time expired)

The ACTING DEPUTY PRESIDENT ( Senator Carol Brown ): The time for the discussion has expired.