Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That all words after "That" be omitted with a view to substituting the following words:

"the second reading be considered immediately".

This bill goes right to the core of the problem with this government. This government has a problem with transparency. It has a problem with rorting taxpayer funds. It has a problem every time the parliament says that there should be more transparency, as those opposite reject those efforts. And so it is the case when it comes to the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Amendment (Improved Grants Reporting) Bill 2021. This bill is the private senator's bill of my colleague Senator Gallagher. Right there in the title is all we're trying to achieve with this private senator's bill, with this bill before the House that should be considered immediately. All it does is require the government, where a minister has made an allocation of money that is contrary to departmental advice, to notify the finance minister within 30 days of that and for that to then be tabled in the parliament within five sitting days of that being received.

This is not an especially onerous ask for a government that isn't up to its neck in rorts. This is the most wasteful government in this country since Federation. It is a government that has a serial problem with serial rorting. We know why the government doesn't want a bar of this bill. We know why it wants to put it on the never-never. We know why it doesn't want it considered immediately. It's because the issues with this government—with rorting, with a lack of transparency—go all the way to the Prime Minister and his office. That's one of the key lessons we've learned from all the interrogation in the Senate—again, a credit to Senator Gallagher and the team over there in the Senate; a credit to the member for Ballarat when it comes to the car parks program, and a credit to the member for Scullin and others who have done their best to shine a light on the serial misuse of public money that we see on a regular basis when it comes to those opposite.

As the member for Ballarat said in question time today, when she was asking the Prime Minister to justify all of this rorting, particularly when it comes to car parks, this Prime Minister said five times in a 50-second span that the ministers make decisions about the allocation of this public money. If the ministers make those decisions, then surely the Australian people need, deserve and have a right to expect that those decisions are reported in a timely way. The reason this Prime Minister and this government don't want that to happen, whether it's in this House or in the Senate, is that they know the Prime Minister himself is up to his neck in these rorts.

When the Prime Minister was answering the member for Ballarat's question, he talked about a hunting licence. A hunting licence is a budget term for when an expenditure review committee delegates a decision to a minister. It's called a hunting licence for the minister to go away and make a decision and to justify that decision to the ERC. What we're really talking about here isn't a hunting licence; we're talking about a licence to rort. The current arrangements—encouraged, given succour by this Prime Minister—are a licence to rort. All we are trying to do here, with this legislation, with this bill, is to say that, when a minister makes a decision contrary to departmental advice, it is reported in a timely way so that the parliament can consider it—in the hope that a minister who is about to make a dodgy decision of the kind that so many of those opposite have made on such a regular basis would think twice about it if they knew it would be reported to the parliament. Those opposite don't want a bar of it because of the Prime Minister's own involvement.

I'm not talking here, unfortunately, about a nod and a wink or anything like that. We know from our questioning and from the forensic work of our colleagues here and in the other place that a lot of this work—the colour coded spreadsheets, the marginal seats, the shovelling of money in the direction of vulnerable sitting members—has been a climate, an arrangement, which has been fostered by the Prime Minister from the beginning. That's what we're discovering more and more about.

This government has never seen a bucket of public money that it didn't want to rort. The list now is getting embarrassingly long for those opposite: sports rorts; dodgy land deals; the rorting of the Safer Communities Fund, if you can believe it; billions of dollars of JobKeeper money being sprayed around on already profitable companies that didn't need help, at the same time as the government was refusing to step in and help those small businesses that genuinely needed help. When you think about the most egregious revelations—in recent times, anyway—about the car park rorts, then you do see a pattern of behaviour here. The parliament needs to take steps to rein in this kind of rorting.

Lest the public think that this is a problem limited to one minister or another minister, that it's maybe now the education minister or maybe Minister Fletcher and not a widespread problem—I've already talked about the Prime Minister's own involvement—then think about the Treasurer. When the Treasurer was under pressure, or thought he was under pressure in his own seat at the last election—this has been uncovered in the last couple of months—he promised millions of dollars for a train station that shortly wouldn't exist. This is the kind of madness that has prevailed amongst those opposite as they clamber all over each other to try and rort these buckets of public money for their own base electoral and political benefit. That's why this bill is necessary, and that's why the second reading should be considered immediately.

You don't have to be long in this place to hear the lectures, the rubbish in lecturing tones, from those opposite about the fiscal position, about the budget position. Those opposite printed the mugs that said they were back in black, despite the fact that they have delivered eight deficits now and the Intergenerational report says there are going to be 40 more, consecutively, and despite the fact that they multiplied the levels of debt so as to describe them as a 'debt and deficit disaster', when they were a mere fraction of current debt levels. We get all these lectures from those opposite about economic responsibility and budget responsibility at the same time as they're shovelling out money, spraying money all over the place in the least responsible manner in order to protect their own political prospects. With this kind of rorting and this kind of spending, it's no wonder this country is a trillion dollars in debt for the first time in his history. With this kind of wasteful spending, this kind of irresponsibility and this kind of rorting, no wonder this country doesn't have enough to show for the trillion dollars of debt that those opposite have racked up. So spare us the lectures about economic responsibility, when it seems like day after day after day we hear a new revelation about the wasteful rorting of taxpayer dollars for base political purposes.

The reason we want this considered now is that the time has long passed since this government, and future governments, deserved a dose of transparency to try and prevent the kind of situation that, under those opposite, we are seeing emerge with the encouragement of the Prime Minister. Whether it's sports rorts or land rorts or safer communities or JobKeeper or car parks, the pattern of behaviour that exists in this government puts at risk public faith in this place, public faith in politics and public faith in Australians' own democracy. That faith, that trust, is not exactly thick on the ground at the moment, as you might have noticed, Deputy Speaker Andrews. What we need to do in this place is work out what meaningful changes we can make to make sure that this spending is a little bit more transparent, that people have to justify decisions when they knock back departmental advice, so that ministers will think twice before taking the kinds of decisions that we have seen come to light in recent weeks and recent months—really, since the Prime Minister took office a couple of years ago.

It says it all about this government that they don't want a bar of this bill. It says it all about this government that they are trying their best to protect their Prime Minister, their cabinet ministers and others from the kind of scrutiny that Australians have a right to expect and that Australians deserve. It's their money. Their money should be directed towards the right kinds of purposes in the national interest and not just in the political interest of a government which has become addicted to rorting taxpayer funds.

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