Brendan O'Connor (Gorton, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industrial Relations) Share this | Hansard source

by leave—I rise to comment upon the 70th annual report of the Public Works Committee. I will start where the member for Pearce ended, by thanking the secretariat, Hansard, and indeed all involved in assisting the committee with its work. As the member for Pearce, the chair of the committee, indicated, the work of the committee is quite fulsome. It is an ongoing committee. It may not have the profile of some other committees in the parliament, but in terms of its workload, in terms of scrutinising significant sums of Commonwealth expenditure, it does a very good job and it works in a very consensual way in order to fulfil the requirements of the act.

I want to touch on some of the comments made by the chair in her speech. I agree with her that there was a need—and I supported the proposed amendment—to lift the threshold from $6 million to $15 million. As the years went by we were, effectively, having problems with the amount of work being referred to the committee. As the real value of works being submitted to us was falling, the number of projects was increasing. As a result, we were spending more time on smaller projects when a great deal more time should have been spent on large expenditure items—large projects with a value in the tens, and in some cases hundreds, of millions of dollars.

As you would well know, Mr Deputy Speaker Jenkins, the increase in the threshold was pretty much a reflection of the increase in inflation since the time the $6 million threshold was first introduced. It was not an attempt by the committee to allow the executive government to obviate its responsibilities, nor was it in any way looking to reduce the capacity of the committee to scrutinise. It was an attempt to improve the effectiveness of the committee. I think it is already showing signs of doing that. That is a very good thing in terms of government accountability and the importance of committee scrutiny.

It is important to comment on the committee’s efforts to improve the act so that we can properly scrutinise public-private partnerships. As the chair indicated, it is still an area of concern to the committee that there is an absence of a legislative framework. Whilst there have been some amendments seeking to address the issue, there may be a need to consider the way in which these partnerships operate. They are quite complex. It makes it more difficult for a parliamentary committee to consider the value of work given the construction of the partnerships of these ventures. We may have to review the way in which we proceed in future if it transpires, as I think it might, that more questions are left open as a result of our scrutiny of some of these projects. Given that this is a report on the year’s work, I foreshadow that it may well be something that the committee, and indeed the parliament, will have to address in future.

As the chair said, there have been some significant changes. I can assure you, Mr Deputy Speaker, that they did not deprive the committee of its workload. It is a committee that is still having to put in every week. There is a lot of travel involved, which makes it very difficult for members and senators. Members of the committee have to put in a lot of time, and that will continue to be the case. The amendments that have been made will ensure that there will be greater scrutiny of the larger amounts of money expended by the Commonwealth that are under the purview of this committee.

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