Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Seniors) Share this | Hansard source

It made no sense then and it makes no sense now. Very simply, we are now at the stage where the Joint Standing Committee of Public Accounts and Audits came to a unanimous conclusion—that GBEs should be able to be audited automatically by the Auditor-General. It is something that I personally think, as I said earlier, is rightful for the Auditor-General to be able to do. It is now also, by the government's amendments, reading down the ability of the Auditor-General to chase money given to state and territory governments.

This is a hugely important factor in seeing the way in which federal government policy is carried out and is part of the Auditor-General's responsibility. That is his task—to look at whether the way in which monies are spent is in accordance with the policy of the government. That is why we have that type of audit, as distinct from the perfunctory one, which says, 'Money in, money out. Nobody had their hand in the till.' The question is: is the money from the taxpayer being spent so that government policy, as stated, is in fact carried out?

The fact that the government's amendments are fettering the ability of the Auditor-General to do that relating to state and territory governments and putting a stop to the ability of the Auditor-General to automatically audit government business enterprises—claiming as its defence, in the explanatory memorandum to the amendments, that GBEs are subject to competitive pressures and disciplines that do not apply to other Commonwealth bodies—is to make a joke of what the public accounts committee had to say. The private sector is subject to a whole host of auditing procedures which are properly carried out by private sector auditors, whereas the public sector auditor has a whole lot of different tasks which it has to perform and which do not apply to the private sector. This situation where the government can always stop the Auditor-General auditing a GBE—as he has done many times before—by simply stopping a request brought up by an opposition senator, or by an Independent for that matter, on the public accounts committee because it has the numbers to say, 'No, you may not carry out this audit,' is shameful. So the good work that was carried out has been negated.

I see the member for Banks has come in, and he perhaps will be the first member who might have actually read the government's amendments, and he might be able to tell us precisely how the government is justifying the action it is taking. He may be able to tell us precisely why the government has brought in these amendments. On the other hand, he might just have come in here to have a bit of a punch-up. But there we go; we will see when he speaks. But I will put on record, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the amendments that I properly foreshadowed in my second reading speech which would prevent an automatic right to audit the private sector but would support the automatic auditing of GBEs and the automatic right to properly follow the money trail through to territory and state governments.

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