Mr GARRETT (Kingsford Smith) (4.15 p.m.)—The Deputy Leader of the House refers to the number of questions that have been asked in this House on the Wheat Board affair and other matters. What he does not acknowledge is the failure to answer those questions. There is a reason these issues are alive and kicking, and they will be pursued until the truth is out. The charge made by the Leader of the Opposition today is that the government has forgone the much needed traits of fairness, honesty and decency. It comes at the end of a year that has seen the government engage in the brute exercise of power since taking control of the Senate, and the result has been a whittling away of the proper exercise of functions of the parliament and the rivers of arrogance that have flowed in excess from portfolio to portfolio.

Here is what we have witnessed in this House: debates have been gagged, time for adequate consideration of significant legislation has been cut short, massive pieces of legislation have been dumped into the parliament, and parliamentarians elected to the duty of scrutinising that legislation have been prevented by this government from doing their job properly. That has been the effect of the government taking control of the Senate and of the government introducing big pieces of contentious and complex legislation into this House. The effect of that has been that we as parliamentarians on this side of the House have been unable to do our job properly. As a consequence, the Australian people have been denied, as their elected representatives were shut down. As we have been prevented from speaking in debates on legislation of real impact and of real import, it has been the Australian people who have been denied. As their representatives are denied, ultimately a democracy is denied, and that is what the charge is in the House today as we close our business for the year 2005—that democracy under this government has been denied by its exercise of power and its curtailing of debate.

The claims made by the Deputy Leader of the House were trivialising the charges that have been made in this debate, so I invite people to consider his claims and the substance of what has been put in the House at this point in time. There has been no fairness here and no fairness either in the substance of the government’s legislation, including the so-called notorious Work Choices bill. Working Australians have been stripped of their rights and denied the opportunity to join and organise together. In this House this year, the Prime Minister has refused time and time again to guarantee that no employee would be worse off and, as it turned out, fairness was literally removed—excised, we might say—from future determinations by the so-called Fair Pay Commission. That was made clear in this House.

All of us on this side of the House and most Australians too understand that fairness is a value to be taken seriously. It is an abiding value for Australians over generations, but it has also been an organising principle for our society. For Australians, fairness has meant that rights were seen to be in balance—in industrial relations, the rights of employer and employee, mediated through a duly constituted court; fairness in the provision for those less fortunate; and the rights as balanced between governments and citizens—yet, in the Welfare to Work legislation, people find that they receive less money as they travel from one welfare situation to another. It was fairness as embodied in the system that characterised the Australian way, but this year, under this government, fairness has been torn out of the heart of Australians.

Has there been any decency on display from the government? ‘Indecent’ probably describes the haste with which legislation has been forced through the parliament this week. Indecent were the amounts of hard-earned Australian taxpayers’ money—some $50 million plus—that were spent in the biggest advertising propaganda blitz the country has ever witnessed. Indecent were the amounts of money spent in regional rorts—some $506 million, at last count, scattered pre the last election around the country by a government that sought to buy itself into power. Who could forget—and I am sure members will remember—that the government’s actions became literally indecent when a North Queensland hotel received half a million dollars for a strip joint while the town’s water supplies were left without sufficient funds for repair. The guardians of moral rectitude on the government benches were strangely silent over this small matter of indecency.

But decency is also about the nature of the arguments and the way in which they are put in the people’s House. Again and again, senior government ministers—with the Minister for Foreign Affairs a serial offender—impugn a lack of genuine concern by opposition members, for example, for the fate of our armed service personnel overseas, at times veering into catcalls, claiming a lack of patriotism on the part of members present. It is cheap; it is baseless, but no better example of personal indecency need be offered. But perhaps it can. Only yesterday the Minister for Education, Science and Training was at it again, wasting time and insulting the intelligence of those who were listening, drawing the longest possible bow on patriotism. People inside and outside the parliament would have considered the remarks of the minister indecent—and then his troubled VSU legislation went south for the Christmas break. There is a god after all.

I return to where a number of us started this morning. We were singing A Christmas Carol then but now, more seriously and reflecting on another Dickensian title, we take not A Tale of Two Cities but ‘A Tale of Two General Incompetencies’—gross incompetencies concerning the appointment by the Treasurer of a senior Liberal Party supporter with serious tax issues to the board of the Reserve Bank and the payment of commissions under the watch of the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Minister for Trade of $300 million to Saddam Hussein’s regime and the use of those funds.

In both of these cases the truth remains under a cloud of denial and half-baked processes, with the subtext, a career—namely, that of the Treasurer—in abeyance. The facts of these two matters are at hand and have been put by the Leader of the Opposition, the member for Lilley and the member for Griffith. They go past issues of competency to issues and questions of honesty. They are questions that have not been satisfactorily answered in this House and, until they are, the charge of honesty being absent from this government is a charge well made.

There is another word to be used in this context in this debate along with expressions like ‘decency’ and ‘fairness’ and that is ‘respect’. For what I have spoken about today in this matter of public importance shows clearly that the government actually has very little respect for the Australian people. Oh, yes, platitudes are in abundance. But when you listen closely and watch the government’s actions you find that respect for people—for their intellect, for their ability to discern arguments or for their aspirations—is in short supply.

This government talks of family values and Australian values—talk that has recently fallen on deaf ears as the public reaction to the current legislative program shows. But it is really just thoughtspeak politics. They do not mean it. This government just mouths the words of family values and then, with harsh industrial relations legislation, puts the squeeze on the family unit as never before. This government talks up big on family values. In the election campaign—aiming for those Family First preferences—it made much of family impact statements. It has all come to nought. Senator Fielding must be gnashing his teeth in the Senate—‘But they promised me.’ Memo to Senator Fielding: welcome to the world of core promises. There is history here. There is form and there is a track record.

This government does not practise family values; it just talks about them. So too when it comes to political values. Freedom and democracy, the bywords for a war in Iraq now made the sacrificial lambs by a government intent on imposing sedition laws on Australians—Australians whose very freedoms have been compromised by the deliberate actions of a government intent only on securing political advantage where it thinks it can.

What are we left with at the end of this year? Father Time stops for no-one and, as we go back to our communities and our families and express as we will those Christmas wishes, as we do to people in the House—wishes of goodwill, wishes for a peaceful future—so too will we make clear the failure of this government in this parliament to display that which remains essential to the health of our body politic. Many bewail the ebbing respect people have for the political process and those involved in it. But this government bears a primary responsibility. The traits of fairness, honesty and decency will always be needed in this House, but they are nowhere to be seen from the Howard government.