Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

To be very clear about this amendment: this amendment seeks to remove subsections 64F(1), 64F(2), 64F(3) and 64F(4). It seeks to remove those sections and insert a new section 64F, which provides greater powers to obtain information. One of the reasons why this is a stitch up—and the Independents and others need to be aware of it—is, as I pointed out during the discussion of the last amendment, the only information that can be used by the Parliamentary Budget Office is that provided by the Treasurer outside of an election time; and during an election it is PEFO—Pre-election Fiscal Outlook—which is the only information that belongs to the Treasury and the minister for finance. When we ask how the new PBO will get behind the economic and fiscal forecasts of the government in order to understand what the assumptions are behind the individual fiscal initiatives—be it a pink batts initiative, be it a school hall initiative or be it expenditure on defence—the Parliamentary Budget Office is going to have to identify what the assumptions are in order to understand whether the fiscal contribution of the policy is accurate. The question is: how much power will the PBO have to get behind the officially published numbers? As revealed in its submission to the Joint Select Committee on the Parliamentary Budget Office, the Treasury said:

Provisions would need to be made to allow agencies to refuse requests on the same grounds that documents can be exempted under the FOI Act and for the review of those decisions.

This would include commercially valuable information

I accept that commercially valuable information needs to be protected, but they say:

… information produced for the purpose of deliberative processes or the national economy…

Well, what is the budget? What are the budget papers? What are the economic and fiscal outlook figures? They are for the national economy. Here Treasury in its own submission is saying, 'Hang on, that's exactly the sort of data we should not reveal to the Parliamentary Budget Office'—our basic assumptions that go to the heart of the budget papers themselves. They are saying, 'We need extensive powers to refuse to provide additional information to the Parliamentary Budget Office.' What does the government say? It says, 'Okay, we accept that; we don't want to go behind our numbers. We don't want the parliament's independent budgetary office to go behind the numbers that belong to the Treasurer, so we'll have a memorandum of understanding.'

This new Parliamentary Budget Office is expected somehow to enter into individual memorandums of understanding with 197 government bodies, 19 portfolios, 147 Commonwealth authorities, 83 agencies, 64 Commonwealth authorities and 27 Commonwealth companies. The Parliamentary Budget Office is going to spend the next decade entering into memorandums of understanding with individual government agencies in order to comply with the requirements of this legislation. What a complete and utter joke!

The Independents have given up on the debate. It is all a little too hard for them. They were here for amendment (1) and they participated actively. When we were starting to turn them, the House adjourned and they had to go away and get a bit of a stiffener. They were stiffened up by the government and then they came back and said, 'No, no we're not going to accept recommendation No. 1 that the PBO should be in the business of—(Extension of time granted) On amendment (1), just as the member for Lyne started to give a little bit of that open, transparent member for Lyne that we recall from the first few days after the last election—just when we had that glimpse—we realised that it was an eclipse. It was a darkened eclipse and he went back to being a yes man for the government. No surprise there. But on this initiative, where we are giving the PBO the powers of the Auditor-General to get behind the numbers and where we are giving the PBO the power to protect—enhanced protection, in fact—the information given to them by agencies, and where we are giving the PBO the power to get the assumptions, the modelling, the inputs in relation to decisions of the government so that comparable work can be undertaken for the benefit of members and senators, what happens? The government says, 'No, no, we don't want that transparency. We're going to send them off to enter into memorandums of understanding with 197 government bodies, 19 portfolios, 147 Commonwealth authorities, 83 agencies, 64 Commonwealth authorities and 27 Commonwealth companies. It is quite a mammoth task; that is quite a sea of MOUs. At least three years of work. And by the time they get to the bottom of that, they might—just maybe—have the right to request general information of a department or an agency or an authority. In making that request, they may well then be able to obtain a no—'No, we can't give you that information'. For the very same reasons that stonewalling exists at estimates committee hearings, it exists for FOIs. We know what that is about; we have seen it before. That is why we are moving this amendment.

This amendment is about transparency. This amendment is about accountability. This amendment is about actually getting to the bottom of the numbers, so that we do not have another pink batts blow-out, another school hall blow-out, another blow-out of tens of billions of dollars in the National Broadband Network; so that we do not have to suffer the rather insufferable blow-outs in defence procurement, or the situation where the government is caught out sending $900 stimulus cheques to people who are dead or who are overseas. In fact, the Prime Minister of New Zealand said to me, 'Thank God for that stimulus from the world's greatest Treasurer—because, I tell you what, it did wonders for tourism to New Zealand.' People were taking the $900 cheque, which was meant to stimulate the Australian economy, and they were going to New Zealand. It is a shame they did not hold the World Cup at that moment; they would have doubled their audience.

But, of course, there is the world's greatest Treasurer; he does not make mistakes. He is not one to blow the budget—$154 billion in deficit and yet to have his first budget surplus. I thought there was only one Bradbury in this parliament, but Steven Bradbury is the Treasurer—coming skating through after everyone else has fallen over. There are two Bradburys in this House. How wonderful!

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