Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Hansard source

So it has gone from $4.7 billion to $43 billion, and the Prime Minister stood up here today and tried to dissemble, saying, ‘Well, you only look at capex, of course; you don’t look at what the NBN has to pay to Telstra.’ This is real money. It is not like the $600 that the now Treasurer said was not real money before he got into office. It is real money. Get over it and start concentrating on how you can pay it back.

With the NBN we have seen the scope to produce the greatest level of waste this country has ever seen. This has been further highlighted by this government’s refusal to conduct a cost-benefit analysis despite the fact that it promised, before coming into office, that every significant infrastructure project would have a cost-benefit analysis. Not one significant infrastructure project in the last three years has seen a cost-benefit analysis. Nothing has been released. There has been politics writ large with every major decision, from the school halls program to the road decisions to the NBN: politics, politics, politics and spin. There has been not one cost-benefit analysis. Yet, go back and see what the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport said unambiguously and endlessly before the 2007 election: that this government, if it got into government, would undertake one and release it in a transparent way.

Such a litany of waste and mismanagement has never been seen in the history of this country. It is the most egregious and devastating waste and mismanagement, and this government stands condemned. This waste and mismanagement is one of the principal reasons the government came so close to losing the election despite the fact that, around the world and in Australia, a first-term government is hardly ever tossed out—in fact, it has only happened once in Australia’s history.

Only recently the Australian National Audit Office also revealed that taxpayers are not getting value for money in up to three-quarters of government purchases. The ANAO concluded that government agencies failed to routinely compare prices when direct sourcing goods and services worth a mere $10.2 billion a year. Again, the now retired former Minister for Finance and Deregulation said endlessly that the government had sought to improve and upgrade the sorts of processes required by government agencies. Now we see that it has failed to routinely compare prices across $10.2 billion worth of goods and services. The report stated:

For 74 per cent of the Direct Source procurements in the ANAO sample, agencies were unable to demonstrate whether the procurement gave them value for money. In the majority of cases there was a lack of evidence of any comparative analysis of the relevant costs and benefits of different procurement options to support the procurement decision.

All this waste is occurring when interest rates are going up, with the average mortgage holder paying up to $6,000 more on interest payments than they were a year ago. Cost-of-living pressures are increasing, with household bills continuing to rise and a budget built on the back of more than $40 billion worth of new taxes since 2008. The government continues to borrow $100 million a day and does not have the courage to make the tough decisions to rein in its reckless spending. This has all contributed. It is a matter of good governance, transparency and strong financial management.

Mr Deputy Speaker, I understand there is a need to sum up quickly. I had other comments to make on this. What I do foreshadow is that we have sought to move an amendment. We sought in the other place to move a private member’s bill, which failed to gain support, to introduce the need for the notion of value for money to be included within this act to ensure that there is a proper focus on the requirements to properly look after the nation’s finances. That was unsuccessful. We foreshadowed an amendment to introduce value for money along the lines consistent with what the Department of Finance and Deregulation have recommended. We were unable to get agreement from the government but they have agreed to an amendment, I understand, where we would include ‘economical’, instead of ‘value for money’, as recommended by the Department of Finance and Deregulation. So I will move that amendment in due course when other speakers have concluded.

In conclusion, while the amendment I will formally move today is a small amendment to the FMA Act, it will be a further step in reminding this government of the obligation it has to every Australian taxpayer. The coalition does not oppose the Financial Framework Legislation Amendment Bill 2010. It builds on the work carried out by the Howard government between 2004 and 2007. I commend the bill to the House.

See this speech in context