Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

After seven long years, the only noteworthy change in public administration this government can point to is the mandating of multicoloured spreadsheets in the administration of public grants. It's an appalling track record. I commend the member for Shortland for bringing this very important issue to this chamber, because this is not just a debate today about the administration—or, should I say, the maladministration?—of one particular grants program. For me, this goes very much to the heart of why it is we're here. This goes very much to the question of what good government is. Good government, when it's assessed by international agencies around the world, when it's assessed by experts in what it is that governments can do for the benefit of people, particularly the most vulnerable, I would say, generally points to two things: probity and effectiveness.

When we think about probity we think about things like transparency, rule of law and effective checks on corruption. As the member for Dunkley so eloquently pointed out, it's all of these good practices that underpin trust in government, something that is so critically important, particularly in democracies. The member for Shortland has pointed to many practices in the administration of this grants process that profoundly undermine what could be described as best-practice probity, like a minister rejecting expert advice from the department or a minister rejecting independent advice on the worth of projects. But we've seen this time and time again. As members on this side have pointed out, we've seen it in sports rorts. We've seen it at the height of the bushfires when this government was floundering—announcements being made and then members of the public being directed to websites to make political donations. We've seen it recently. The minister for health, in a very dubious way, pointed to an announcement using a Liberal Party logo. This undermining of good practice leads to an incremental lack of trust in government by our community.

This debate today is about so much more than this particular grants process, as important as that is, and it is something that members of the government who have come in here today to speak to this motion have failed to address. It's also about the effectiveness of outcomes. The minister, in defending the administration of this grants process, gave a rather meandering speech in which he listed benefits from various programs that have been funded around the country—completely missing the point. We are not here to say that particular projects aren't providing benefits to the community; rather, we have to look at the way the scheme is being administered.

I want to turn to the definition of the social science of economics, something which perhaps wouldn't be the first thing to occur to most people in this place, when it comes to this motion. Lionel Robbins defined economics as 'the science which studies human behaviour as a relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternative uses'. The reason I raise this is that at the heart of economics is opportunity cost, and this remains true for the century preceding Lionel Robbins' definition. Every time you spend resources on one thing, you can't spend it on others. That is why it is not enough to come in here and randomly pick out areas of government expenditure and say it produced this or that benefit. Good government requires that you can explain the projects that missed out to the people who missed out—those voiceless people whose funding was denied because of choices and interventions made by the minister. That opportunity cost has to be defended by those opposite. It's not enough for them to come in here and pick out random projects. They have to explain and defend why other projects, projects that ranked above the projects that got funded, missed out.

My electorate is an example of that opportunity cost. As has been pointed out, $10 million was allocated to the North Sydney pool, not exactly a regional pool, while a major pool in my electorate has had no funding from the government to date. This pool is a facility which services a highly multicultural community. It's a community with high socioeconomic disadvantage and very poor outcomes—in fact, it has the second-highest rate of diabetes in Australia. The point is that you can look at the benefits of projects but you also have to look at the opportunity cost of the projects which miss out. It's the maladministration of these grants projects which causes so much harm on that front.

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