Senator Andrew Bartlett
Friday, April 01, 2005
 
What Value are Senate Inquiries?
A comment to my recent posting on this week's Senate Committee hearing had me thinking about just how useful or otherwise Senate Inquiries are. I’m not sure how many different Committee Inquiries I’ve been part of in one way or another in my 7 and a half years in the Senate, but I imagine it would be well over 50.

Given the number of times the media run with stories about “a call has been made for a Senate Inquiry into bla bla bla”, it’s surprising how little follow-up there is on many of the proceedings, the final recommendations and the frequent lack of response from the Government.

However, while some Inquiries don’t achieve much, some have political value, many have policy value and some help with raising public awareness – and sometimes a combination of those.

Another recent Inquiry which has got some interest has been the one into the Regional Partnership Program. The broad focus of this is a Government funding program which allegedly was (mis)used for political porkbarrelling and vote buying in the lead up to the last election. Its narrower focus is the allegation that independent MP Tony Windsor was offered an inducement to retire so the National Party could regain his seat of New England. I wrote briefly about the incident when it made news back in November last year.

Alan Ramsey's SMH piece from last weekend gave a good description of the role the Democrats often find ourselves in with these inquiries when he wrote:
"What the committee is mostly doing is (a) Labor is trying to embarrass the Government; (b) the Government is trying to embarrass Tony Windsor, and (c) the Democrats' Andrew Murray is trying to get to the truth."

Andrew Murray is one of the best at this sort of task, as he has a good grasp of administrative procedure and accountability mechanisms. The sorts of things that he and other Democrats have done over the last decade in getting better transparency are rarely noted and their real value is recognised even less frequently, but it does have had a big impact on improving stansards. That’s why going along to some of the Committee hearings can be important, even though the media interest may not be there. Of course, things can still fall well short of where they should be, as shown with the disgraceful rort of pro-Government advertising costing the taxpayer hundreds of millions of dollars.

As I also wrote back in November, I do feel a bit for politicians like John Anderson (and Tony Windsor for that matter) who get caught in the spotlight with these sorts of allegations. However, some of his own Government colleagues do have a habit of trying to publicly undermine the credibility of their political opponents. I also recall when I was being publicly attacked by a Government MP, John Anderson was prepared to join in attacking me, despite having no knowledge of my perspective on the allegations (of course he wasn’t alone in that regard).

I do think it is fair for people who are the subject of public allegations to be given the opportunity to put their side of the story and for the facts to be properly examined before conclusive statements are made, although I know this can sometimes be hard as there can be a media demand for immediate, definitive statements. Whilst John Anderson won’t appear before the Senate Inquiry, there’s certainly been good opportunities to test the evidence and I’ll read the final Senate Committee Report with interest. There is virtually no chance of a unanimous finding being reached with this Committee, but I think Andrew Murray is more likely to have an impartial view than anyone else so I’ll certainly be guided by his assessment.

I should note the comment from Federal Police head, Mick Keelty, in Senate Estimates back in February, where he confirmed the advice he’d got from the Director of Public Prosecutions was that “even accepting that absolutely every allegation that was made by Mr Windsor had been said, there was no prospect of a criminal offence having occurred.” (Hansard page 18) Whilst he also said he was going to clarify his understanding of that and get back to the Committee, it does suggest that, whatever else might come out of the Inquiry, findings of a potential criminal offence won’t be one of them.


posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Friday, April 01, 2005 Permalink
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