Ms Catherine King (Ballarat, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

I second the amendment. This is an important debate, and I think it is telling that the government is so unwilling to actually have a debate about the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Amendment (Waiver of Debt and Act of Grace Payments) Bill 2019. It is telling because we know the reason the government doesn't want to debate this bill, doesn't want to see greater transparency in its decision-making and doesn't want an independent anticorruption commission, is that it is up to its neck in rorting. That is what we have seen over the course of the last eight years of this government, in particular, through the efforts of the Australian National Audit Office, an incredible, important institution in this country's democracy which the government has sought to reduce the funding for. What we've seen from the Australian National Audit Office is that there is a very significant problem that this government has with the way in which it uses taxpayer funding.

The bill that we are seeking to bring on for second reading debate here makes a minor change. It's not a massive change in terms of transparency, but it is an important one. The change it's seeking to make is that, where ministers make a decision to allocate funds to a project in their own electorate or they take a decision that is against the recommendation of their own department, within 30 days they report that to the Minister for Finance—they are actually required to report that now, but there's no time limit on when they need to do that—and the Minister for Finance then, within five sitting days, tables that report in the parliament. It's an important way of getting transparency, because it provides a bit of a handbrake on ministers to think. If you are going to make a decision like that, which benefits you personally in your own electorate, as we've seen in the cases of airport rorts, sports rorts, community safety rorts, regional rorts or car park rorts; if you are going to make a decision that goes counter to the recommendations of your own department; or if you are going to make a recommendation that significantly advantage you electorally then you need to be accountable to the parliament for that, because it can take months and months and months for those letters to the Minister for Finance to ever see the light of day. Sometimes it's literally years before they see the light of day. By shortening that time frame, it is saying to ministers: 'If you're going to make that decision, that's the decision you're going to make. But you need to tell the parliament that you have made that decision within that shorter time frame—within the month to five days in terms of the sitting period.'

The reasons we need to see these sorts of changes, the reasons we need an independent anticorruption commission and the reasons this bill itself is so important are the lengths this government has decided to go to in order to rort taxpayers' funds. We saw it in the portfolio I represent. It started with the Regional Jobs and Investment Packages, basically a program, again, with no guidelines, millions of dollars of money going out the door, no process for application and no clear transparency about why decisions were being made. There were some questions the Audit Office started to ask about that program. We've all seen it in the Building Better Regions Fund, a program that the Audit Office is currently investigating and due to report in May next year. We've seen the way they've used that.

You only have to listen to the speakers on the other side of the chamber when it comes to budget time. They get up time after time and they say, 'I want to thank the minister for this project, this project and this project.' Have a listen to some of our people who can't say the same things, because they know that that money is constantly going into Liberal Party and National Party seats at the expense of Labor Party and other seats.

But then, of course, you look at the Urban Congestion Fund. This isn't just a small amount of money. Sports rorts was bad enough—the colour coded spreadsheets. A minister lost her job over it but now has been rehabilitated. You really have to question how on earth that's happened—seriously. We saw that with sports rorts, but what we've seen with the Urban Congestion Fund is that the government didn't learn from that. 'Okay, we've got a lesson here. We need to be more transparent, we need to be more careful about how we are making decisions, we need to be more equitable about how we make decisions across geographical areas in the country.' What they learned for the Urban Congestion Fund is 'let's not have any process at all'. There's no process at all. Blatantly, before an election campaign, they used this funding as a way in which to garner votes, particularly in seats that they were worried about or seats that they were targeting.

This fund in particular, the Urban Congestion Fund, is $4.7 billion worth of funding. It's not the $200 million that we saw in sports rorts. It's not even the $250 million we see in the Building Better Regions Fund. It's a $4.7 billion program that the government have made 177 decisions under. Part of that program was the subject of the audit report—the car parks rorts. What we saw in that is that, despite the fact that Treasury officials were telling the government, 'You need to have a proper set of guidelines, you need eligibility criteria, you need to actually run a proper process for this,' the government ignored all of that advice and basically took a decision on 20 marginal seats. It canvassed those projects between the Prime Minister's office and Minister Tudge. It went out to Liberal Party candidates in the election campaign and asked them what car parks they wanted in their seats; went to patron senators, as the Liberal Party calls them, and asked them what projects they wanted in their seats; and targeted these 20 marginal seats. There were multiple emails between the Prime Minister's office and the minister, deciding on these projects. The department recommends a number and says, 'We haven't talked to all the states. We've talked to New South Wales; they've said there are a couple of car parks here. From what we've seen in the public domain about where urban congestion is, these are some areas where the fund might help.' The government ignores all of that and basically decides on these 20 marginal seats for the projects.

It goes to the heart of the Prime Minister's office's decision-making. It goes absolutely to the heart of the corruption that sits within this government. This is rorting on an industrial scale, and they will keep doing it unless we put measures in place such as those in this bill and we have an independent anticorruption commission—because what have they learnt in the course of the last eight years? They've learnt that this works. 'If we keep pork-barrelling and rorting into these seats, we might win some of them.' That's what they've learnt. The only way we can teach this government the lesson that this is not okay, that this is fundamentally undermining the democracy that we so care about, is to vote them out of office. But, until we can do that, putting in place measures such as this bill, sensibly moved by Senator Gallagher—and it should be debated and voted on in this place now—is the only opportunity we've got to say to this government, 'You need to do better and there needs to be greater transparency in your decision-making.'

If this government had spent as much time getting the vaccine rollout right as it has rorting public money, we wouldn't be in the sort of mess we're in when it comes to getting out of COVID-19. There is a saying in public health and in the medical sphere—and, more broadly, about transparency—that the best disinfectant is sunlight. And that is what this bill tries to do. It tries to shine a light on the decision-making of ministers and make them accountable for the decisions that they're making, make sure that they're not seeking to hide decisions around recommendations that they're making and make sure that the parliament has an early opportunity to know about those decisions that are against departmental recommendations, in a way that hopefully puts a brake on some of the excesses that we have seen.

We're not talking, as I said, about a small number of projects here or there; we are talking about billions of dollars of taxpayers' money. Whether it's $30 million in the Leppington Triangle scandal, whether it's the $600 million in the car parks scandal, whether it's the $4.7 billion that I can bet your bottom dollar this government is going to rort again as it comes up into the next election or whether it's the millions of dollars of the community safety fund, this government is addicted to rorting public money, and we need to shine a light on it now.

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