Andrew Leigh (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, the less they have to say, the louder they shout it! This is simply another stunt from the opposition, another attempt to pretend that they themselves are the friends of transparency. Of course, as the House knows, the great transparency measures in Australian governance have come about under the Gillard government. The MySchool website: tomorrow we are going to see MySchool 2.0. I had the great pleasure today of being with the Prime Minister and the Minister for School Education in Turner public school—a terrific school in my electorate—where we focused on the great transparency initiatives. This was an initiative those opposite were happy to back. It is a bit like the tariff cuts: they were there cheering from the benches, but they were not the ones implementing the transparency reform. That is what they hate: they like to talk the talk on transparency but they are not the ones who walk the walk. The MyHospitals website provides Australians with more information than they have ever had before about the performance of their hospitals. The MyChild website has provided critical information to Australian parents choosing a childcare centre. These are the kinds of fundamental transparency reforms that the Gillard government has brought about—not stunts, not tricks, not ‘divide it by the number of taxpayers’ exercises, which is really all this amendment is, but new information.

I would suggest that those opposite might do well to spend more time looking at the budget papers and less time thinking about how they can come into this place as wreckers, playing stunts, pretending to be friends of transparency rather than standing up for new information coming into the public domain, as the Gillard government has done.

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