Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

This is a joke! We have legislation that is probably meant to be bipartisan. This was handed to the parliament at 4.30 yesterday, which, at more than 500 pages, in the words of the second reading speech:

… from the sheer size of the legislative package the effect of these amendments goes across all of government and is essential to effective implementation of a new resource and governance framework.

The legislation affects every portfolio, covering amendments ranging from the Auditor-General Act to the Water Act and many in between.

So for this being handed to us for the first time and to the parliament for the first time at 4.30 yesterday we are now meant to be in this chamber on a gagged debate to have a formalised position on it right away! This is the worst sort of governance. Let us make no mistake, there is a reason why this has occurred. If you go to the minister's web page, it was made clear that this legislation was meant to be ready from the beginning of this month, to be introduced in the week of 2 June. Why did it happen? Why do we have a situation where there is a minister who is so overloaded that we end up with legislation of this gravity and of this reach in a rush to the parliament in the final days which was actually meant to be largely bipartisan? A lot of the work on this was commenced when Senator Wong was Australia's finance minister. There is a simple reason: we have a finance minister who is currently doing the job of two people.

This is the direct consequence of Arthur Sinodinos as Assistant Treasurer having stood aside and not being replaced for so many months. The outcome is you have got one person with a workload that he cannot handle and, as a result, the parliament gets completely bypassed on a piece of legislation that covers and affects every portfolio and agency. The reason we are in the situation of the opposition being expected to have a position on all of this when we only got it at 4.30 yesterday is a direct consequence of this government not been willing to make a decision on whether or not they have an Assistant Treasurer, because what has happened is that the finance minister has been dealing with the budget issues and at the same time has been dealing with the superannuation advice issues—the FoFA legislation—and this got put in the back drawer. So even though the department had every belief that this was going to be introduced to the parliament in the first week of this month, the fact that we have not had an Assistant Treasurer, the fact that this government cannot make up its mind on the future of Senator Sinodinos, has put us in a situation where we have a finance minister who cannot carry the load. The outcome of the finance minister not being able to carry the load is very simple: this parliament gets bypassed.

We cannot have a situation where this legislation does not make its way through both houses by 1 July. There are deeply significant outcomes for government if this legislation has not made its way through both houses of parliament by 1 July. The opposition will be responsible on that. The opposition will play a responsible role in making sure that we deal with these issues in a more responsible way than the government has. But no-one should be in any doubt. It is not that Senator Cormann does not have the capacity to deal with legislation like this—I presume he does; the problem that we have is that we have not had an Assistant Treasurer for so long now that we have got one person with an inbox that is meant to be there for two and the outcome is work that is meant to have been done is falling apart. And, of all things, what is it about? Public governance! The thing that they cannot actually have any orderly system for is something that is about public governance, performance and accountability.

This parliament should not be in a situation where a decision by the Prime Minister to be one down in his ministry while the inquiries are going on in New South Wales—and I make no reflection on any of those inquiries or the likely outcome of them—results in a policy outcome that we are facing right now, and the policy outcome we are facing right now is that we have a finance minister trying to also be an Assistant Treasurer and not keeping up. As a result of that, the opposition is put in this position. I am not going to pretend to the parliament as I make a speech on this bill that I have been able to read it and work through with all the different 250 acts that it intersects with, checking all the cross references, as I normally would, as any responsible member of parliament already would. I do not know this for a fact, but I suspect the member of the executive responsible for introducing this legislation was not afforded that opportunity either.

I expect we have a situation where even the executive member of this House who introduced the legislation had not been given the opportunity to go through, clause by clause, what he was introducing. That is an appalling situation for this parliament to be in, an absolutely appalling situation. Normally, on any bill, we have a circumstance where there is an opportunity for scrutiny, and it is frequently the case that the government play a very constructive role with the opposition. If we have not been able to answer all the questions, having read through legislation, they will then afford us a briefing with senior public servants to work through the detail. If there are questions that we still have not had answered and a bill is up for discussion, it is not uncommon at all for ministers to play a responsible, decent, cooperative role—as we did when we were in government—and say, 'Okay; we'll put that bill back for a little bit longer.' No-one has that option now, because the Minister for Finance has been overloaded with too much work, because of the circumstances of Senator Sinodinos, and we end up with a circumstance where the parliament is now debating legislation where the truth is that none of us are sure what is in it.

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