Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The member opposite can vote his way and we will vote our way. We could get it done and we could save $122 million. These bills are about the proper management of public money and public resources. It is pretty hard to imagine a worse use of that money. This is something that isn't urgent and isn't unforeseen. The so-called postal vote was flagged by the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection in March this year. Having a postal survey is not an unforeseen proposal. It was even mentioned in the statement of risks in the Treasury's own budget in May. This is not an urgent or unforeseen event that we're having now; this postal survey is an unnecessary event that we're having now. It is very divisive, very harmful. It's non-binding—unless the answer is no—so there are substantial problems. And that's an example of the fact that we have more work to do to ensure that we are spending public money in the best possible way. Wasting $122 million on that purpose is certainly not a good use of taxpayer arrangements.

A final point on this: it was astonishing to hear the Treasurer say on breakfast television last week that he considers that $122 million to be money well spent. If he considers it to be money well spent, it's no wonder we have half a trillion dollars in gross debt for the first time in Australian history.

More specifically, this legislation is important. Although it doesn't solve any of the broader problems in the budget. It won't safeguard against the Treasurer's incompetence—I don't think anything could, if I'm honest about that. And it doesn't fix some of the other issues we have with transparency. We'll have more to say about the issues, for example, around remuneration for places like Australia Post and other agencies. You will recall, Deputy Speaker Vasta—of course, you would have followed this very closely—that the PGPA Act provided more flexible arrangements for entities and relied on a number of subordinate rules and regulations. An important part of that effort is that officials are expected to be held to a high standard of accountability. Yet, quite recently, we have seen attempts to hide the remuneration of senior executives on some of our boards. This was enabled by changes to the reporting rules made by the Minister for Finance, Senator Cormann. This bill does not fix that problem, but there are other things we can do to fix that problem.

The government has informally requested a number of Commonwealth entities revert to the previous regime of remuneration reporting. The Auditor-General looked at this and considered that there would be benefit in making the aggregate level of transparency for key management remuneration in the public sector consistent with that required for listed entities. That means that we will have good public standards to match some of the standards we have in the private sector. We welcome the work that the Auditor-General did on this. We welcome the release of those reports, but the government should now act to ensure these are formally required of all Commonwealth entities if they are serious about some of the measures which are dealt with partially in this bill. They could go further. They haven't acted on it. It's an example of some of the further steps that we can take, and we will have more to say on it.

But we do support this legislation. We are always onboard for further improvements to public governance and the management of public resources, especially when they build on the good work of former Labor governments, as these amendments do. There will be even more to do after these bills pass with the support of both sides.

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