Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

How often is it that we have a government body lauded by business and professionals like this? This is what the Law Council has had to say about the Corporations and Markets Advisory Committee:

CAMAC has delivered a substantial quantity of first class reports and discussion papers very economically.

The Australian Institute of Company Directors says:

Regardless of one's views as to the recommendations proposed by CAMAC on particular issues, it has played a critical role in identifying, explaining and analysing corporate law and market related problems.

George Durbridge, a consultant with Herbert Smith Freehills—Freehills, that big defender of anything to do with the public sector—says:

CAMAC has issued at least one substantial report in every year of its existence, often two or three.

Professor Ian Ramsay, University of Melbourne Law School, is quoted as saying about the abolition of CAMAC:

That's the complete irony of this. It cuts directly against the government's own philosophy and position about facilitating business

The Chief Executive of CAMAC says that the government is losing a valuable resource, and that:

Access to this brains trust cannot be replicated by Treasury.

You have all these people who have reflected in such strong and positive terms about CAMAC, and what is the government's position? The government's position is to kill it off—it will just wipe it out, having just come to office, and for what reason? The reasons offered are, frankly, bizarre. One of them is, 'Well, the National Commission of Audit told us to do it, so we are doing it; they said that there would be an efficiency made in doing this, and so we are cutting it.' Really? How much is being saved by getting rid of the three officers who work in CAMAC or support CAMAC's work—a body that has been around in various forms and that in one way or another has been providing this type of independent and impartial advice since 197? It has been re-formed and reshaped until its more modern version, which came about in 2002. What is the grand saving from getting rid of an impartial body like CAMAC, with its three people—it is $1 million. And the government tells us it is doing this because the National Commission of Audit told them to do it. The National Commission of Audit also wanted to take a fairly significant hammer to the Diesel Fuel Rebate Scheme, and that is billions of dollars being directed to certain parts of the country. What happened? That was left alone. When it comes to CAMAC and the enormous $1 million strain it is putting on the budget, it is being got rid of. This is the mentality of efficiency and streamlining that would suggest that if you ripped your car aerial out you would be more aerodynamic. This is the type of thinking we see from the government in the abolition of CAMAC. It is bizarre.

We heard the last speaker, the member for Dobell, being asked to defend this, and he could not actually get to the substance of the matter. Instead, we heard the mantra that comes out of this government—which only ever focuses on what happened in the last three years and cannot think about what should happen in the next three. And, when they put forward ideas that are as useless as this one that is being put forward now, they cannot defend themselves. There is no ability in this government—in anything they do—to put a cogent, logical, substantive and defensible position forward as to why they would put these types of reforms on the table. CAMAC has demonstrably been seen to provide independent and fearless advice in corporations reform. So why would it surprise me that a party which is responsible for deforming FoFA—and which is doing whatever it can to bend itself to the will of major financial interests—takes this position? And of course, that is the only logical consistent position that this government could have: 'Well, we do not want anyone independent giving us advice on how to manage the Corporations Law or markets advice.' Look at their track record: when it came to doing the right thing on financial advice, or on corporations reform, what did they do? They listened to the big end of town on FoFA. And they have—

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