Roche Denise: Families Commission Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRoche Denise: Families Commission Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 11 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16508. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENISE ROCHE (Green):I would like to respond I think to some of the comments that the Minister in the Chair Associate Minister for Social Development Borrows has just raised particularly around the fact that the new legislation for the Families Commission is being enacted in order to make the commission more relevant. What I have seen through the select committee process was that this was something that was not that broken to start off with. In fact the Families Commission was acting quite well it was commissioning research that was incredibly useful and it was able to provide its functions and carry on and do the work that it was set up to do.During the select committee process we heard from submitters who were actually really concerned about the role of research and that this research would be taken over and directed towards the purpose of the Government’s policies. The Greens maintain that we have not seen any changes to the bill as it has come back to the House now and for its third reading that address those issues. The development of the social science experts panel—essentially it is the Government and Government Ministers who determine who will be the members of that panel—means that there is the risk of research being developed that does not really offer free and frank advice to Ministers. We are seeing that more and more. Dr Prasad started to talk about the politicisation of the Public Service and that is the risk that we see as inherent in this bill—that is that the advice given is the advice that the Government wants and is not the full advice that the Government should receive to make good decisions. Basically it just stacks up the cards to reinforce the Government’s position. From our point of view that would be a major undermining of the functions of the Families Commission as it has acted to date.There are clues throughout the bill around the removal of the Families Commission’s ability to provide free and frank advice. One that I can point to I think is in Part 1 new section 7 where the word “independent” has been removed. It says that the commission’s main function is to “act as an advocate for the interests of families generally …” and to “monitor and evaluate programmes …”. In the words “to provide independent monitoring and evaluation” “independent” has been removed from the bill. This is the main reason I think why the Greens still have quite a lot of hesitation about supporting the bill. In fact we are quite clear that we are opposing it. We have seen the commission provide very good solid research that backs up good policy. An example of that is the research that was done around paid parental leave. With a new commissioner we suddenly saw quite a comment from that commissioner saying basically that paid parental leave should not be a priority and that it would cost too much which was a direct contradiction to the previous research that was undertaken independently and with a wide range of views incorporated into the final research that was put up on the Families Commission website.We are concerned that this legislation takes away the functions from the ministry towards the oversight of an advisory panel that is hand-picked by the Government. We are concerned about this tendency towards using advisory groups. We have seen it before with the Welfare Working Group we are seeing it with the welfare reform board and we are seeing it now with the social science experts panel. We are alarmed at what sort of impact that is going to have on the quality of research that is commissioned. These were the concerns that were coming through time and time again from organisations that have contributed in the past towards research that looks after the well-being of women and children and families.