Senator McKIERNAN(6.01 p.m.) —When this bill was debated last year, I was critical that the Minister for Social Security (Senator Newman) did not front the chamber to have carriage of her own bill. My criticism is on the record. I am actually beginning to regret that criticism because, despite the difficulties that we had last time and the confusion that arose in voting on the amendments during the committee stage, I think we were making far better progress in carrying out our responsibilities and obligations to the people of Australia to scrutinise legislation than we are now.

We have just heard yet another tirade from the inept and incompetent minister with a personal attack on one of my colleagues in this chamber. This does not do the minister any good. It certainly does not do the chamber itself or the institution that we represent any good. It had not been my intention to enter into this committee stage debate on the bill but, while I was watching the proceedings on the monitor in my room, I heard the minister regurgitate some of the arguments that led to the reference of the bill to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee, that led the Legal and Constitutional Committee to take evidence from the community of Australia in different parts of the country on the provisions of the bill. I was saddened that, despite all the time since the bill was first introduced to the Senate, some mistruths still prevail; mistruths are still being put to the people of Australia. I do not think that is good enough.

The special benefits were the subject of quite a detail of deliberation during the committee processes when we took evidence in Canberra and Sydney. The special benefits were also the subject of many of the submissions to the committee. They were the subject of scrutiny by the committee, so much so that the majority of the committee, which was mainly made up of government members, made the following recommendation:

Recommendation 2: that guidelines made pursuant to the proposed section 739C should not be exclusive and should allow the Secretary of the Department of Social Security to exercise a general discretion to grant special benefits if in his or her opinion the person "has suffered a substantial change in circumstances beyond the person's control."

I recall seeing some guidelines at the time of the committee deliberations which was in the middle part of last year. I cannot recall seeing anything since. We are now deliberating on this bill for the second time in the committee stage. Where are those guidelines? The Leader of the Opposition in the Senate made what seemed to me to be a very reasonable request of the minister: to have a look at the document relating to special benefits which she was quoting from. What was the response? A blunt and ignorant no. The minister is saying that the opposition—indeed, the chamber—is not entitled to look at something of great concern to her colleagues who served on the Senate Legal and Constitutional Legislation Committee. That behaviour is not good enough for a minister of the Crown. I hope this is the only occasion when that behaviour will occur.

What really provoked me to enter the debate was this fallacy about the mandate for the change. The mandate is a figment of the imagination of the minister and a figment of the imagination of the government. The mandate received some attention in the committee's report, which was tabled in this place in September last year. On page 11, paragraph 3.5 of the report, the committee went to the extent of quoting the relevant parts of Mr Costello's Meeting our commitments document, which was issued on 19 February last year. The relevant part, in an extensive quote, is as follows:

In January 1993, the Labor Government introduced a six month wait after arrival in Australia for migrants, other than refugees and humanitarian migrants, before they became eligible to receive most welfare benefits. Access to welfare benefits for migrants other than refugee and humanitarian migrants will be available after two years under a Coalition Government. This will have little impact on those migrants, particularly those in the Preferential Family Reunion category, who are accepted for entry into Australia on the basis of formal assurances of support. Full access to Family Allowance and Medicare will be maintained for all migrants immediately upon arrival. As well the Coalition will provide a "safety net" in the form of a special allowance for those migrants whose circumstances change significantly after arrival in Australia for reasons beyond their personal control. The Coalition projects that this will achieve savings of $602 million over three years. However, this policy will apply to prospective migrants only. It will not be applied retrospectively or to migrants who arrive in Australia before 1 April 1996.

If that was, as Senator Newman has said on innumerable occasions since then, a clear enunciation of the policy to the electorate prior to the general election of March last year, then I certainly need some greater education in the Australian political scene, and I do not believe I do. I am not alone, nor are my colleagues on this side of the chamber, in stating that there was no clear enunciation of how the now government was going to attack newly arrived migrants. There was no clear enunciation in that policy statement whatsoever.

Some of the people who came before the committee complaining that they did not accept that there was a clear enunciation of a mandate for the extensive changes which were later introduced in the form of this bill included Mr Simikoff, the chief executive officer of the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia. The committee's report registered the federation's opposition to the bill on the basis that the content of the bill had not been adequately foreshadowed during the election. There is an extensive quote in the committee's report of what Mr Simikoff had to say on behalf of the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia, the peak body of ethnic community councils in Australia. I will not labour the committee by going through it all.

Further down on the same page of the committee's report is a quote by Ms Angela Chan, the chairperson of the Ethnic Communities Council of New South Wales, who also objected to the bill on the basis that it was not adequately foreshadowed during the election. Ms Ulrike Bartels, a member of the Fairfield Migrant Resource Centre—the committee thought it worth while to include this—said:

The government's pre-election multicultural and settlement services policy gave no indication of the introduction of this bill. It was not until mid-February that an extension of the six-months waiting period was proposed, and it did not embargo the range of social security system payments now included. This was only two weeks before the election, an inadequate time frame for the com munity to really debate the subject, and we are grateful that we are here—

That is, at the committee's public hearings in Sydney—

to debate it today.

Clearly there was a lot of smoke around at the time of the election. There were no clearly defined policies out there in the public arena. The people of Australia were hit with a number of major policy statements over a short period of time. Some of them, those relating to immigration and ethnic affairs, were released almost in the dead of night, but certainly after most of the main TV stations had gone to their news breaks, so those statements were covered up. If this is an example of the government's clear enunciation of policies to be administered on election to government, if this is an example of what a mandate is about, it sets a new low mark in the Australian political scene.