Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I know! Who would have thought? Who would have thought to require the Remuneration Tribunal to mandate the salary of Australia Post, I think, and another entity. It's politically tempting; it would be a bit of fun but it's not the right thing to do from a proper governance point of view.

Transparency generally will do the trick. You're going to moderate these excessive salaries in the public sector if there is transparency, and we do believe, from the point of view of good corporate governance, that boards appointed to run organisations should have a say and influence over the salaries, terms and conditions of their senior executives. Who knew?

I have a couple of brief comments in relation to the other significant issues. The NDIA is a new entity, obviously, and will be of some interest in coming years to the Auditor-General—quite rightly. There were a couple of significant findings. The ANAO found there was no documented compliance activities for payments made to self-managed participants. This is a critical part of putting choice in the hands of recipients in the NDIA's service design. The participants can choose to self-manage their plans if they want, and so it's critical that the lack of an audit framework and so on doesn't become an excuse by the NDIA, as has been alleged in some quarters of the sector, to move away from that part of the care if that's what people want. And so we turned some attention to that, and the NDIA will do some more work on that finding to make sure they have a robust framework in place and don't use it as an excuse to ditch an important part of the scheme.

We also paid some attention to a slightly concerning finding about the Australian tax office, that there were weaknesses or flaws in their estimation allocation process for revenue and expenses. Of course, that sounds dry and boring, but it's a critical part of government that the revenue and estimating processes, running to hundreds of billions of dollars, are going to be right for the budgeting process.

In closing, I thank members of the committee and the Auditor-General and his staff. I would point out, of course, that this audit report and the work underneath it reflects on the financial performance of the Commonwealth. Quite rightly, that's a heavily audited area; we know where every dollar goes. But a new frontier of work for the committee is working with the Auditor-General in complement to look at how we can do assurance audits for the parliament on the non-financial performance—the outcomes and the indicators—and start to move towards a system where we have the same level of rigour, integrity and confidence that parliamentarians and the public can have about the financial performance. I commend the report. Thank you.

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