Mike Kelly (Eden-Monaro, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Defence Support) Share this | Hansard source

The Minister for Finance and Deregulation and the Special Minister of State got rid of the MCGC when we got into government and handed control of advertising back to the Department of Finance and Deregulation instead of PM&C. They also put in place arrangements for the Auditor-General to vet ad campaigns to determine if they are partisan. As Bernard Keane said, the accountability of this government is light years ahead of its appalling predecessor.

There was another ANAO report which referred to and dealt with the Regional Partnerships scheme. What a wonderful example of the administration of public finance that was. I had a particular interest in the record of that program because in the course of the campaign in 2007 over 100 promises were made under Regional Partnerships in Eden-Monaro alone. Flagrant promises were made to people who had not made applications for funding. Promises were made to people that money was available when it absolutely was not. Many councils and organisations went out and began expending moneys on programs when no process had been applied to those programs or applications, and we were left with an incredible mess to clean up under the Regional Partnerships program. Many of those programs breached the program’s guidelines or lacked required documentation. They were reviewed against the coalition’s own Regional Partnerships program guidelines and found mostly not to conform; nor were they costed and budgeted with the same rigour that was applied to our 2007 election undertakings.

The ANAO report’s scathing condemnation of the Howard government was summarised in the line that they fell short of acceptable standards of public administration. That is a clear condemnation. But, more than that, we found that $110 million or a third of the program’s funds were pumped into just 10 coalition seats. Contrast that with this government’s record on allocations of infrastructure expenditure around the country. We also know that $2 million of that Regional Partnerships money went to Bondi. What a suffering, difficult region Bondi must be. The only cows I have ever seen in Bondi are cash cows. It was gross misexpenditure of a fund that was meant to support regional Australia.

Let us have a look at the record of this crew in relation to the largest strategic management of public finances. ‘Those Howard years were characterised by a failure to align fiscal and monetary policy.’ Those are not my words; they were the subject of a great deal of commentary by the former Treasurer, the member for Higgins, who had a lot to say about his failure to reign in the former Prime Minister and line up fiscal and monetary policy. What was the outcome of that failure? Ten interest rate rises in a row. The income of the family household was chewed up by those interest rates. Let us refer to the record of this government in lining up fiscal and monetary policy since we came into office.

I would like to highlight their record in relation to the Regional Partnerships program through some examples. These examples will show how the Howard government had no idea of how to invest public finances to deal with a strategic situation. A couple of examples from Eden-Monaro illustrate this. There was one private business in particular, a bakery in Eden, for which funding was provided. That business went bankrupt and the workers were dudded. The government, under the Special Minister for State, received another application from the same businessmen, who wanted to set up a bakery in Nimmitabel. Unfortunately, that bakery went bankrupt as well—two bankruptcies in a row. (Time expired)

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