Jacqui Lambie rubbishes national cabinet secrecy bill and vows to vote it down

The prime minister’s controversial bill to keep national cabinet deliberations a secret may be dead in the water because crossbench Senator Jacqui Lambie says she will vote against it.

Lambie told Crikey she would not support the bill, which aims to subject the national cabinet to cabinet confidentiality, despite it being found not to be a cabinet under Australian constitutional law.

“Scott Morrison reckons he can pass a bill that says down is up and up is down,” Lambie said. “But he knows what we all know: national cabinet is not a committee of cabinet. It doesn’t matter what fancy language his department uses, or the legal garble they chuck in a bill. The public knows when we’re being played. We aren’t going to change the law just because it’s inconvenient to the PM’s people.”

Lambie’s decision means the bill is unlikely to have the numbers to pass the Senate after a Coalition senator, Gerard Rennick, told the AFR’s Ronald Mizen on Tuesday that he would cross the floor to vote against it.

“I don’t really know why Scott Morrison feels the need to keep it a secret,” he told Mizen. “I’ve got no time for secret stuff. I’ll vote against it.”

Own goal 

The bill is turning out to be an own goal for the government. Legal experts slammed it in a Senate inquiry on Monday, calling it “bizarre legislation” and an affront to democracy. Prime ministerial staffers made matters worse by floundering over questions about how a piece of legislation could possibly imply that national cabinet was a committee of cabinet when Federal Court Justice Richard White had ruled to the contrary in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. 

The bill has cut through both sides of politics. Rennick said it could end up suppressing government decision-making about lockdowns. 

“If you’re locking down people on the advice of an unelected health bureaucrat, people are entitled to know what’s going on in these meetings,” he told the AFR.

Unlikely to pass

Morrison’s attempt to suppress scrutiny over national cabinet has always been about much more than preventing access to documents from one inter-government agency (most of which gets leaked anyway). If passed, the bill would have widespread ramifications for transparency across all areas of government. 

Senator Rex Patrick, who ran the successful challenge in the AAT, said it was always about the government’s increasing resistance to transparency: “Rather than governing the country, the prime minister is sitting in his office thinking about what he can apply secrecy to next,” 

He believes the bill is unlikely to pass without Lambie’s and Rennick’s support.

On Wednesday the Australian Human Rights Commission condemned the bill as a “sleight of hand” by a government intent on introducing more secrecy across all forms of government. 

“You can’t just make [something] a cabinet by saying so,” president Rosalind Croucher said. 

She says the bill also goes directly to the issue of freedom of speech. 

“The transparency of government information is at the heart of that idea of the right to know. It’s reciprocal to freedom of speech,” she said. “By virtue of deeming it a cabinet process you change the level of public scrutiny completely.

“It’s a sleight of hand, quite frankly.”

Centre Alliance Senator Stirling Griff and One Nation senators Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts were unavailable to comment before deadline.