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

Exactly; as the member for Kingsford Smith rightly points out: they would probably get that for one report in one year. CAMAC, which is able to attract talented people from across business and academia who have done this work; CAMAC, which would sit within the government, will now be abolished. And as a result, we will now see this amount of money used to support, no doubt, a plethora of consultants' reports—to support the work that CAMAC once did quite efficiently. It is simply bizarre. You cannot justify what is going on: here. It has been rightly pointed out—and this has been raised with the government—that trying to replicate CAMAC's role within Treasury is going to be a hard ask. During the consultation process, the Governance Institute of Australia has said that: 'Treasury cannot replicate the independent research and stakeholder consultation undertaken by CAMAC due to its charter of responding to government policy.' So if you want CAMAC to provide the independent advice, and if you want people to give it in a frank and fearless way, and if you want them to do it in a way which provides a much more rigorous and robust way to determine policy, then you set them up as independent. You do not set them within Treasury. Everyone gets that when you set them within Treasury, they going to do what they believe is right for whoever is in power at whatever stage of government. They will do what Treasury does, and which it is their task and their responsibility to do, to provide advice in that way. CAMAC was deliberately set up in another way. These are the types of comments being made—the one that I have just quoted, and this one, also from the Governance Institute: 'We also are of the view that Treasury will not be able secure access to the calibre of expertise represented by the members of CAMAC in any ongoing and timely fashion or at comparable cost.' Again, I would respectfully say that for the $1 million you save now, you are going to pay way more for that type of advice down the track. It makes no sense. This is not about efficiency. This is not about making government work smarter.

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