Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

On the Department of Finance website, it describes the Department of Finance as a partner in 'public sector governance and managing public resources'—two incredibly important roles which, under this government, have been undermined time and time again. The federal government has a procurement policy, and when one looks at procurement on the website of the finance department, it says:

In 2018-19 there were 78,150 contracts published on AusTender with a combined value of $64.5 billion.

That's a huge amount of taxpayers money, but also a huge amount of money to wield in our economy, in our country, for the benefit of our people; to grow our economy; to have an economy that is sustainable, and investment that mitigates the impact of climate change and doesn't increase it; and to use taxpayer money wisely. But, sadly, under the current government, we have seen undermining and cuts to parts of the Public Service that should be delivering those things for the Australian people, and, importantly, to the parts of the Public Service that oversee the delivery of those things, to make sure that they are done fairly, properly, without pork-barrelling and without corruption.

We all know, because we've heard about it time and time again over the last few months, about the way this government has punished the Auditor-General for uncovering things like sports rorts. It has taken an extraordinary public intervention, one might think, from the Auditor-General to point out that the ongoing cuts to the ANAO will have ongoing limits on his ability to do his job properly. And that's not important for a political reason; it's important for democracy. It's important for the people who vote for those of us privileged enough to be in this chamber to believe in the system and to have trust in the system. The Auditor-General isn't just there to uncover wrongdoing, although he has been incredibly successful at that lately, it must be said; the Auditor-General is also there to safeguard trust and therefore to safeguard democracy. We only have to look at what's happened to other Western democracies around the world over the last few years, and the election that we've all just witnessed in America, to know what happens when a significant part of your community loses trust and faith in not just the people who are in public institutions, but in the public institutions themselves. That's why it's so important that the government establish an integrity commission that is real and that has teeth, because to do anything other than that would be to continue down that path of undermining trust, as well as undermining the capacity of institutions to hold government to account.

The Mandarin , in October, suggested that, based on reports, about $1.4 billion in real terms has been cut from accountability institutions over the last decade or so federally and that funding as a total percentage of federal budgets has dropped from what I would say is a paltry 1.1 per cent or so, to 0.6 per cent. That's a trend that has to stop. My question for the minister is: will this government commit to using its procurement policy, that $64 billion or so of investment opportunities that are on the tender website, to do what our regulators, APRA and ASIC, are asking other investors to do and to commit to reducing climate emissions and to commit to ESG principles—environmental, social and governance principles—to make sure that government money is spent not just on the infrastructure and the projects that are needed at any one point in time but also on the infrastructure and the projects that will deliver long-term ESG benefits to the taxpayers in this country?

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