Parliament of Victoria | Legislative Council | Motion 1648 by Ms McArthur
23 September 2026
David ETTERSHANK (Western Metropolitan Region):
What a pleasure it is to get up and speak in support of Mrs McArthur’s motion relating to the government’s non-production of documents and confirm that – surprise, surprise – we will be supporting this motion, albeit that the punishment to be meted out to the government is, I believe, the parliamentary equivalent of being hit with a limp lettuce leaf. But it is better than nothing.
Over the course of the Parliament, as has been said by multiple speakers, we have seen so many frustrated production of document requests. Mr Mulholland, I thank you for your encyclopedic listing of the multiple offences against democracy and transparency. I think we have got a situation at this point in time where only Mr Limbrick has been successful in getting one out.
I think that is pretty much where we are at. Isn’t that in and of itself just an utter condemnation of the democratic process? This is a house of review – you know this better than me, as most of you have been here a lot longer than I have – and that is based on transparency, which apparently is now no longer optional. This is just absolutely – and I do not want to confuse people with legal terminology – flipping the bird at democracy. This is just utter disrespect for this chamber and for these processes.
As we have discussed already, we have had arguments about cabinet in confidence, which kind of reminded me of an episode of TheHollowmen, or it might have been Utopia, where he is showing school students through the Parliament and he says, ‘This is the cabinet room.’ And a woman walks through and she has got a big cart full of documents, and he says, ‘So, tell us, what are you doing?’ And she says, ‘Oh, I don’t think I want to.’ He says, ‘No, come on, tell us. The students all want to know.’ And she says, ‘Well, I’m wheeling it through the cabinet room so that we can claim cabinet in confidence.’ There is that moment where comedy and reality meet each other, and it is far more insightful than I think any of us can actually say in this place, but this is what it is like. There is this sense of surrealism.
On the one hand they are saying, ‘Trust us. We’re the government. We’re doing the right thing.’ And then on the other hand, we say, ‘Well, perhaps you could just substantiate that and then we’d all be in our comfort zone’ – and I want to come back to that theme. We have had cabinet in confidence, and we have had executive privilege.
I am still not quite sure what that is, but I know it got thrown at us in the context of the housing towers. I will come back to that one as well. And then of course we have had commercial in confidence. It is a sort of multilayered approach to obfuscation that has proven largely impenetrable.
I do not know about you, but I really, really enjoyed Ms Shing’s contribution last night. I thought it was brilliant. I was so glad that I was not speaking the same night she was, because she is so articulate. I appreciate that happened because of sad circumstances, but it was so good. She talked about all the good things the government has done. I think that was probably really good advice to the Premier about not walking away from the history of the party, but I am not going to go into that space, because obviously that is a fight within Labor that I do not need to buy into.
If we think back to some very memorable moments with Ms Shing – and I know we are not meant to have props here – I seem to recall that we saw that green book of the Suburban Rail Loop so many times, and I must admit she would wave it and I would wonder, ‘One slip and it’s going to take out Mr Mulholland.’ And she would say, ‘It’s $35 billion. It’s $35 billion. What’s wrong with people? Can you not understand it?’ So we asked for the substantiation of that, didn’t we?
We said, ‘Can we get some current cost plans, because that’s premised on something that is almost seven years old.’ Now what we know is the reason they are not going to release it is because in 2020 they were advised by the Department of Treasury and Finance that in fact it was – even then, pre COVID – already $2.5 billion over budget. So you start to understand why maybe these things are best, from a government’s perspective, not put into the light.
Of course we did not need to see that business plan, but that SRL thing is a perfect example of obfuscation. I mean, yes, infrastructure is great, but it says a lot about priorities; it says ‘opportunity cost’. And when you actually expose the truth and you know the real cost, then that argument becomes all the more compelling. I can understand why the government would not want to have that.
We also made a document request for the most basic information on housing. I know there were people that put in other documents motions, and the government said there were thousands of documents. We only asked the government, in the case of either Flemington or North Melbourne, to give us the cost plan, give us the building conditions report and give us the decanting schedule – in other words, how would residents be moved out and how would they be relocated or brought back? That is very simple, minimal photocopying; we would even accept it in electronic form, for Ms Terpstra, who seems to think we need to have it on paper – but I will come back to that. That was rejected.
What was very interesting was that the business case was rejected as being cabinet in confidence. Then we saw the inner Melbourne legal service, in litigation to protect the residents, ask for that document in the court, and the government said, ‘We don’t have a business case.’ Putting aside the extraordinary proposition that you would be entering into multimillion-dollar transactions to demolish and rebuild housing without a business case, it made a lie of what we were told through that documents motion. I guess that, to my mind, was a pretty good indication of the lack of respect.
I would, having been invited by Mr Mulholland, just like to talk briefly about the history of The Sustainable Data Centre Action Plan. We asked for this informally in October of last year – a year ago – and we were told, ‘Be with you in a couple of weeks.’ We did not get it and asked for it of the minister in November: ‘Oh, just buffing it. We’ll get back to you’ – nothing. We come to February and, ‘Oh, it’s not going to be a public document. It’s only now for internal use.’ That is despite the fact that it has been advertised as, ‘This is so that everyone can have confidence in how the system’s going to work.’
Then we had the documents motion in May, and we were told that it was too big a document and that there was not time to prepare it. Then the night before last I read about it in the Age. It has been bloody well released, and it was not even tabled in this chamber, it was tabled to the Age. I think that might be instructive, because this was too big a document to be able to prepare in time: it is 17 pages.
[Mr McIntosh interjected]
Can I say, Mr McIntosh, it is a very generous layout, with plenty of white space. I think the point was made that it may not have been so small had the government not contracted out the editing task to Belinda Dennett and the Data Centres Australia organisation – putting that aside. I mean, can you get much more bankrupt politically when that is the sort of thing that we are dealing with?
I can still remember Ms Terpstra vividly telling this chamber – she was the only person to respond to that documents motion – ‘You should be using recycled bong water to cool the data centres.’ It caused enormous entertainment amongst my members. But I mean, seriously, talk about – I will not use the expression that is coming to my mind. But it is pretty poor.
We have reached that point in the democratic cycle where you cannot say ‘Trust me’, because that has evaporated. You need to put up the documents. And here we are, with a day and a half left in school and a huge number of unmet requests for the provision of documents. I just have to say it is really, really disappointing that this is what it has come to. And with that, I will leave it.
