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

I would like to know: during this caretaker period, what opportunity does the Parliamentary Budget Office have to seek additional information without the provision of an FOI? Secondly, if there are options for recourse, what are those options for recourse? The bill is silent, vague, open-ended and discretionary in regard to that recourse item, which means again we will face politicisation of this process. Last time we were subjected to the politicisation of this process, so much so that the secretaries of departments were brought in and used by this government to politicise the process and to in fact mislead the Independents in this House, who subsequently took a decision to go with the Labor Party to form government—much of that predicated on the misuse of the Charter of Budget Honesty. As a consequence, we requested this bill some years ago.

This bill has been prepared by the government under duress. They have now misrepresented in almost every provision of this bill the original intent of this bill. This bill will again lead to a dog-fight over the 33 days of the campaign, where there will be nothing more or nothing less than accusations going from both sides of politics about the costings, the veracity of the costings and the inability of the Parliamentary Budget Office to acquire information and about the inability of us to keep material confidential until we wish to release it.

This is an appalling situation where the government has totally bastardised this bill to the point where it cannot be trusted. There is no trust associated with this bill. That is the problem with this situation. There will be no trust. You can pass this bill tonight—you can get this through—but there will be no trust. As a consequence, when we come to the next election and the issue of costings is presented, there will be no trust on either side of politics. There will be another dog-fight. Policies will not be discussed according to their merits. We will see another debacle, which means that government could hinge on the result of the politicisation of this process of costing—this process that should be above politics.

We should be able to have confidence in an authority that does the costing for both sides of politics independently so that we can put that aside and debate the merits of the policies. But here tonight we have a man who has been silenced for hours—who has made an absolute spectacle of himself because of the orders of the Leader of the House. (Time expired)

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