Committee mania little more than MPs drunk on ego
In an era in which we are told lowering the cost of doing business is paramount, in the federal parliament alone there are 64 separate committees holding 123 inquiries.
Former Liberal MP Tim Wilson owes us all an apology. Having used a parliamentary committee to successfully pour scorn over Labor’s franking credits policy in the lead-up to the 2019 election, earning himself frontbench promotion in its aftermath, now every wannabe MP wants to (mis)use the committee process to generate a little media, grandstand on ego, and perhaps build a profile towards higher office. You see it right across the committee system, but to what effect?
In an era in which we are told lifting productivity and lowering the cost of doing business is paramount, in the federal parliament alone there are currently 64 separate committees holding 123 inquiries. Seven new ones were added this sitting week. That’s before you consider what’s going on at state level.
The impost on business is nothing to be sneezed at: forced to appear and submit to these inquiries, the distraction from their core business only adds to the cost of doing business, thus adding to the cost of living. Supermarkets alone are dealing with no fewer than eight inquiries at the moment.
Most of these committee hearings produce interim reports before final reports are released. This tactic is all about generating media attention, to get more than one bite at the cherry. Inevitably, the reports are ignored by government anyway, left to gather dust on shelves.
This week the House of Reps economics committee handed down its report on “promoting economic dynamism, competition and business formation”. If I had to identify a sector that knows very little about such matters it would be the political class in Canberra. The report focused on, of all things, the beer industry. Not airlines, banks or transportation. Beer. And the takeout was that there isn’t enough competition, and prices are too high. Artificial intelligence and the impact it might have on business had a single page devoted to it in the report.
Auditioning to replace Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil as the Labor MP delivering the most inflammatory rhetoric, committee member and Parramatta MP Andrew Charlton used a radio interview to press the point that the biggest brewers are “Japanese-owned”. I don’t know if Charlton phoned that interview in on a mobile made overseas or drove into the studio in a car built overseas, but repeated references to Asian ownership struck me as unnecessary. Claims about a lack of competition in the beer industry belie the lived experience of consumers.
Anyone who drinks beer knows we’re spoilt for choice. To the extent some brands are concentrated into a couple of multinationals, smaller breweries don’t think beer prices are too high as a consequence, as the report claims. They worry the bigger players can afford to keep their prices too low.
Smaller breweries struggling to turn a profit are much more worried about the 40 per cent excise tax charged on beer products alongside the 10 per cent GST. Literally half the cost of a slab of beer is taxes, yet this committee report had nothing to say about lowering such taxes as a pathway to addressing cost of living.
But why is this committee – with its Labor majority – focusing on reducing bottleshop prices anyway? Has it discussed the need to do so with Labor Health Minister Mark Butler? He seems much more interested in highlighting the health consequences of too much alcohol consumption rather than how to make buying it cheaper. Is the committee’s next goal how to lower cigarette prices?
I wonder if it has thought about the fact big breweries are highly unionised, unlike smaller competitors. The Labor-controlled committee is therefore attacking a unionised industry. If the government won’t lower some of the world’s highest taxes on alcohol, another way big brewers could lower prices by lowering costs would be by de-unionising their workforce. But don’t expect to read that sort of recommendation in a Labor-majority committee.
This week also saw the release of the second interim report into the actions of PwC. While the Senate committee is chaired by former Liberal minister Richard Colbeck, the real power behind the throne is Greens senator Barbara Pocock and Labor senator Deborah O’Neill. Between them, Labor and the Greens control the numbers. O’Neill used a recent hearing to declare “the whole country’s looking, it’s being telecast”. The whole country? The hearing was being streamed online on the parliament’s website in the middle of the day during the working week. You had to work pretty hard to find it. Pocock grabbed a headline criticising PwC for layoffs after months of bad press courtesy of inflammatory committee rhetoric. What a shocking outcome!
They now want PwC to release advice covered by legal professional privilege, labelling not doing so a “cover-up”. As the Law Council of Australia states, legal professional privilege “promotes compliance with the law”, because “lawyers owe a paramount duty to the court and the administration of justice”. The problem with some members of these parliamentary committees is they think they have the powers of a court, despite their profound lack of legal training and disregard for due process. Committee hearings aren’t even kangaroo courts. And don’t forget government is without doubt the biggest user of legal professional privilege when denying everything from freedom of information requests to queries surrounding ministerial decision-making. It is happening right now in the immigration space.
O’Neill was even part of a committee that handed down recommendations in 2020 (supported by the sector both then and now) that the Coalition government ignored at the time. Once Labor won office in 2022 the recommendations continued to be ignored, but you never hear O’Neill complain about that. Had those recommendations been enacted they would have made it easier to tighten up failings we’ve seen since that time. Not having done so is the fault of politicians, yet all we hear is committee members condemning the sector for inaction when the real power resides with government.
And let’s not forget, it was government that decided to bring tax professionals like PwC into the consultation process in the first place, to gain their insights on planned changes to legislation. Just think about that for a moment. They decided to get advice on how to close tax loopholes from the very people giving advice to big companies on how to legally get around such loopholes. Such stupidity doesn’t justify breaking signed non-disclosure agreements, of course, but it is a procedurally flawed approach that unsurprisingly led to poor outcomes. Like putting your cat in charge of your pet mouse when you go out for dinner.
Dr Peter van Onselen is Winthrop Professor of Politics and Public Policy at The University of Western Australia.
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