Bert Van Manen (Forde, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The list goes on and on. We could spend all night just on the list.

These arrangements purely and simply have been made to benefit the government, the departments and their agencies. They are not for the benefit of the parliament or the Australian people by giving proper access to all sides of the House to the actual information underlying assumptions that are being made. It is time for this government to honour its commitment to openness, honesty and transparency; and, for the Independents, whose absence is testament to their interest in this debate, to let the sun shine in under the new paradigm.

All we are interested in is having proper access to the information so that we can have proper, effective costings of our policies done, so that the opposition—or the Independents or even the government—can have costings released at a time when the relevant party sees fit to release those costings for their own policy purposes. The PBO is there to prepare costings and policies submitted by members and senators, but the opposition lacks access to the underlying assumptions. The assumptions underlying the carbon tax are a classic case in point. The government still has not released its modelling—some of its modelling has been done at $20 a tonne and some at $23 a tonne, but we have no idea what modelling says about $139 a tonne or $131 a tonne. Another purpose of the Parliamentary Budget Office is to allow those things to be properly assessed. That way everybody in this House will have proper access to a wide range of information, including external sources of information that are independent of the government. That will mean that the policy-making and decision-making processes of this House are enhanced, and the people who will benefit most from that are the Australian public. I commend this amendment to the House.

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