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

It is probably a good thing the chamber is empty, because this won't be the most scintillating contribution to Hansard in this term—far from it! I was challenged by my friend the member for Oxley to insert the word 'unicorn' into my speech, so I thought I would meet that at the outset, hoping it may liven things up!

In thinking about this bill, we are going to hear at the outset about another mythical creature that tends to stalk the Notice Paper, and that is a 'zombie'. We've heard a lot about zombie bills and zombie budget measures that just do not die and keep coming back in different forms. Now we have before us a bill to kill three zombie acts and seven zombie bodies. It's a bill to kill, which is a nice change from 'kill Bill'—the government's latest campaign when they have nothing positive to say. This bill is again what largely seems to pass for action and reform under this government.

I say at the outset that Labor will not oppose this bill. We don't support the abolition of all of these bodies, but after they've been gutted by this government, by not appointing members, by removing funding and staff and not providing them with any work to do—left unloved to wither in the corner—they now exist, in effect, in name only. But it is important, I think, to make some remarks and not just let this stuff sail through, because these bodies did play an important role over their life, and so, if you like, this is a bit of a funeral oration, a last rites, for some of these bodies.

The bill repeals three acts and amends 10 acts to abolish seven bodies. The tradespersons' rights committee, rest in peace. The Oil Stewardship Advisory Council, rest in peace. The Product Stewardship Advisory Group, rest in peace. The advisory group of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority, rest in peace. The Plant Breeder's Rights Advisory Committee, rest in peace. The Development Allowance Authority, rest in peace. Perhaps most substantively from our point of view, the Corporations and Markets Advisory Committee, CAMAC, rest in peace. Some of them are redundant because other bodies have overtaken their roles, such as the tradespersons' rights committee, or the programs they administered have ceased, such as the Development Allowance Authority, and it is entirely appropriate that those bodies should be removed from the statute books. But it is important to note that not all were redundant in function, and so I want to provide a brief eulogy, if you like, for CAMAC, to illustrate the point.

The Corporations and Markets Advisory Committee was born in 1978, and through its life it had three incarnations. It started off as the Corporations and Securities Law Reform Council, and then in 1989 it was reborn as the Corporations and Securities Advisory Council. Around 2002, when the corporations powers were referred by the states to the Commonwealth, it was reborn as CAMAC, as it has been known until this bill passes. It was an expert advisory committee. I know experts and advice are out of fashion under this government, but it provided non-partisan advice, independent advice, to the government of the day. Indeed, oppositions throughout its time, have also drawn on its transparent, independent advice. It focused on corporations and financial markets, which are, of course, still important matters for governments to constantly pay attention to and, I believe, to receive transparent, expert advice on. In its life, it did play an important role. Some of its recommendations, even in more recent times, influenced governments in very important ways. For instance, there are the related party transactions and continuous disclosure rules—no small matters from a corporate governance point of view and in terms of ensuring as best as we possibly can as policymakers the integrity and efficient operation of the markets in this country. There are the reforms to takeover and insolvency laws, the establishment and operation of managed investment schemes, and the introduction of crowdsourced equity funding. Again, these are all important matters, which have been, I think, improved because of the independent advice from CAMAC.

Despite the importance, you would think, of these kinds of functions, the government decided early on in its term, when it was the Abbott government, before it became the Turnbull government—what is it at the moment? Abbott-Turnbull-Joyce-Chester government, depending on how things play out—

Honourable Members:

Honourable members interjecting—

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

We'll see—speculation. You heard it here—not first, actually; I think I've heard it in the other place. In 2014 there was a bill to abolish it; it was in an omnibus bill. Labor opposed that bill, as did the business community, academics and all of the experts in the country, saying: 'For goodness sake, government, this is critical. Politicians aren't always the best at knowing the detail and the ins and outs and, of course, the corporate world.' This is so even for people who come into this place, having had significant business experience. The corporate world changes fast and it's important we have expert advice. Sadly, the tin hat, Neanderthal, buffoon elements of the government seem to have won this debate and the government starved it to death. They gutted it, provided it with no funding and no people. It was unloved, left to die in the corner. It was then eaten by the Treasury when Joe Hockey was the Treasurer. He started chewing it, and here we are today.

There is benefit in independent advice, I believe, because transparency in advice, which does often have to be institutionalised, leads to better public policy in so many important areas. It's sadly a pattern of the Abbott-Turnbull-Joyce-Chester government that they ignore experts, even when they ask for advice. An example recently, to illustrate the point that I'm making, was the Finkel report. That was asked for. It provided what I think most people in the community would say is a pretty reasonable path through a very difficult maze also filled with zombies and monsters of the last decade. Trying to get a sensible bit of public policy that will last the distance in place, it proposed the clean energy target, which would lead to new investment and lower power prices. But, in response to that sort of independent advice, the government have escalated the war on evidence, reason, facts and independent, non-partisan advice. So now they're chewing off that report.

I'm not sure whether it's better or worse, though, if you ask for advice and then ignore it completely or do not even seek advice, as we've seen on other important matters just in recent weeks, like the proposal to drug-test welfare recipients. That was the subject of no independent advice and, indeed, every independent expert has spoken out on it. Or there are the citizenship changes, which were the subject of no advice from national security agencies. Indeed, 14,000 submissions received, including many from experts, said, 'That is a dumb idea,' and two said it was a good idea. Departments—and this is an important point that is relevant to the bill—are ultimately under the control of ministers. I've worked in many departments for both sides of politics. Ultimately departments are not independent bodies; they're not always best placed to provide the accurate, transparent advice on important matters like corporate market regulation that governments need. Most recently there was the fake crackdown on skilled migration by the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection, who didn't even seek the advice of his own advisory committee, MACSM. So, when you set this decision against the pattern, colour and record of the government, the death of CAMAC makes a certain kind of morbid sense. But I hope it finds a little peace, and I do, on behalf of our side, thank those people who put in their time and expertise to provide advice for governments of all persuasions over many years.

We're told that these independent transparent arrangements will be replaced by a variety of ad hoc or informal consultation arrangements—agile, innovative, not transparent and not independent. In some cases, of course, that's okay. But this is an important point. Where there is insufficient transparency, as we have here, as to what in each instance is replacing these bodies then it really is hard for the parliament to make an informed judgement. That is why, when these proposals were put forward in 2014 when there was still a little bit of life and a little bit of blood and money flowing through these bodies, the Senate committee said: 'No, you haven't given us enough of a case. It's fine to put forward a case, Government, saying you don't want this pair of socks, but what's going to replace them?' There's still no transparency. It's been buried and eaten up by government departments. Two examples of that in particular were talked about in the Bills DigestOSAC and PBRAC.

Of course there is a balance between flexibility and possibly lower costs. Yes, at times, if there is institutionalised advice with salaries for chairs and all that kind of stuff, that can have a marginally higher cost. But that does have to be weighed transparently against the quality of advice received by a government. If I were sitting there as a minister with these kinds of bodies, I would think it was good, long-term public policy architecture not to just get rid of them but to actually say: 'It's all right. I might not always want to hear the advice. I don't have to accept it.' Jokes aside, the government doesn't have to accept the independent advice it gets. It could choose to give up on renewable energy and go a different way to the rest of the world and burn coal forever. It could do that. We'll see, no doubt. The party room will be talking about lumps of coal for weeks to come.

But the point is that, at least when you have that kind of frank, fearless and transparent advice that can speak truth to power, the government and ministers of the day, whichever side they're from, are at least, I think, forced by the parliament to consider proper evidence and reason. Evidence and reason I know are sort of out of fashion at the moment, but I remain hopeful they will come back. So I think institutionalising this kind of advice is good public policy practice.

The final thing I would say—I couldn't find anything in the Bills Digest, but I will put it on the record—is that I have little bit of concern about some government legislation, and I want to build on some remarks that I made in probably an even less fascinating contribution to the Hansard in August in relation to the statute law update revision bill—catchy!

In that one we talked about the government's war on hyphens, the war on typos, the war on semicolons and curious spellings—'program' or 'programme'? These are big matters for the parliament to consider! And of course they could have just been dealt with under delegation by the Office of Parliamentary Counsel, but, hey, you've got to pretend you've got an agenda by clogging up the Notice Paper with this kind of rubbish. But there was a concern I noted then that that sort of nonsense maybe substantially counted towards the government's deregulation targets.

You'd remember there was great fanfare in the first couple of years of the Abbott-Joyce-Turnbull-Chesters government about four repeal days—

Mr Snowdon interjecting—

The acronym is UNICORN, indeed! There were four repeal days, when ministers stood up and occupied whole days in the parliament and counted the deregulation benefits to the Australian economy, repealing all sorts of things—wonderful! Now, that was 2014 and 2015, and annual reports were published for those two years. Indeed, I think the 2015 report counted $50,000 of economic value to the nation from fixing some typos in legislation. So that's wonderful methodology! But there is no 2016 annual report. Maybe it'll come, but it seems they've lost focus; the website's gone dead. But I will be interested to see what the contribution this bill, if passed, is counted as making towards the nation's deregulation economic agenda. If you get $50,000 for some typos, this could be a million dollars of economic benefit to the country—a million dollars from killing some zombies!

The final point I'd make is that, whatever numbers the government claim as the deregulation benefits of this kind of stuff, there's still no basis for public confidence in those numbers—back to that point of transparency and confidence; who knew!—because the government did have this inconvenient truth: there was a little election commitment, saying, 'We'll conduct an independent'—independent; who knew!—'evaluation of the benefits of our deregulation agenda.' But the Auditor-General noted in his report looking at the deregulation agenda in 2016 that they hadn't done that and suggested, 'You probably should go and do that.'

I'm pleased to say that, finally, after we had a public inquiry by a government controlled committee in this parliament and poked the government—'You really should go and do that, it's been four years; you've got some numbers and we don't know what they mean. No-one knows what they mean. They're probably okay, but who knows, really? What have you got to hide? Why don't you just do that'—fairly recently an independent report was commissioned and handed to the assistant minister for deregulation. I tried to google who that was and I still couldn't find out, but apparently there is one, because we were told that in the public accounts committee. It's gone mysteriously quiet since the current Prime Minister took over. But, hopefully, that report will be released and there will be a greater basis for public confidence in the numbers that are bandied around.

I've made some points there; I think I've said enough. Rest in peace, CAMAC. Really, I do think that, in future, when we on either side of politics are putting forward proposals to get rid of independent advisory committees we should be a little bit more transparent about what is proposed to replace them, because in important areas of public policy, particularly corporates and markets, I think that is good practice. So, rest in peace.

Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Statute Update (Smaller Government) Bill 2017 will enable the abolition of seven Commonwealth bodies: the Central Trades Committee; the Oil Stewardship Advisory Council; the Product Stewardship Advisory Group; the Advisory Group of the Australian Sports Anti-Doping Authority; the Plant Breeder's Rights Advisory Committee; the Development Allowance Authority; and the Corporations and Markets Advisory Committee, the sad passing of which my colleague the member for Bruce has just lamented. This bill follows a series of government decisions relating to the abolition of a number of bodies announced in earlier tranches of the so-called smaller government agenda.

Labor is not opposing this bill, but that should not be taken as support. We do not support the abolition of these bodies, but the fact is they have been gutted by the government and exist in name only—as zombies, as my colleague just remarked—with members not appointed and staff and funding removed. Some of the bodies are redundant, with their work now done elsewhere, but others could have continued to play an important role. This government, however, continues to take an axe to services and bodies whose wise counsel might prove inconvenient to its extreme right-wing agenda.

Part of that agenda is an obsession with cutting government services and slashing what it likes to dismiss as red tape—those inconvenient things like regulations about health standards and environmental management. Smaller government is a right-wing idea that has been popular since Reagan and Thatcher. It's attractive to libertarians, economists and CEOs who prefer to see democratically elected governments get out of the way of corporations, which they believe should be as unfettered as possible to make as much money as they can, irrespective of the social consequences.

The notion of smaller government appeals instinctively to voters who choose to believe claims that it leads to more money in their pocket, despite all evidence to the contrary. We already have a small government in Australia. I know, it's mind-blowing. Cutting it more is no recipe for better days ahead. Smaller government is voodoo economics. More than 150,000 people are employed by the Australian Public Service, which, on average, is a little more than 1,000 per electorate. Of course, electorates like mine in regional Tasmania have far fewer, while electorates here in Canberra and the big capitals have far more; but on average it is about 1,000 per seat. Australia has about 24 million people, so on a population basis that is one Australian public sector employee per 160 people. Imagine the scene: there is your one Australian public sector employee behind a desk in a tiny town of 160 people and they all want advice, service and action on every federal issue such as defence, health, education, social security, pensions, AFP, immigration, aged care, parliamentary services and more. That person would get worked to the bone just fielding the calls and emails, let alone doing the work. No wonder public sector employees are regarded as amongst the most efficient and hardest working in the world.

Disappointingly, 18,000 of those 150,000 are contract workers. So, while those opposite might like to boast of how they're keeping public sector growth under control and how committed they are to smaller government, what they're often doing is simply outsourcing the work. It still needs to get done and be paid for. It just doesn't show up in the books as public sector wages. But, at the end of the day, voters don't save any money and they arguably get a poorer level of service when government services are outsourced and contracted out for profit motive.

Ian McAuley, a lecturer in public finance at the University of Canberra, questions an often uncritical support for the smaller government ideal. In an extended essay published by the Australian Collaboration, The Australian economy: will our prosperity be short-lived? he writes:

Contrary to some perceptions, Australia has a small public sector, and a low level of government debt. Successive governments have kept taxes and deficits down by keeping expenditures down. As a result Australia has one of the smallest public sectors of all developed countries.

Public spending is essentially divided between goods and services, including physical infrastructure such as roads, ports, schools, hospitals, health care, education services and consumer protection, and transfer payments, such as pensions, family allowances and industry subsidies. McCauley argues that Australians have yielded to pressure for ever-increasing spending on transfer payments, with the share of total federal spending on social security rising from 21 per cent in 1972 to 33 per cent today—and that doesn't count the ever-growing amount of revenue foregone in the form of tax concessions for superannuation, private health insurance, capital gains and much else.

Combine the growth in transfer outlays and foregone revenue and what is crudely termed middle-class welfare with the pressure to limit overall spending and not increase overall taxation, and what gets crowded out in the middle is investment in public goods and services—health, education, those sorts of things. So for years Australia has been squeezing investment in education, particularly tertiary education. We see this week a higher education bill before the parliament that seeks to make Australians pay more for their studies and cuts billions of dollars out of higher education from what was promised by the Liberals before the last election. At a federal level we have neglected investment in physical infrastructure and environmental protection at the national level. These are important investments if we're to continue to have a prosperous economy in a world where success rests on the best use of human and natural resources. The Australian public has become far too familiar with computer meltdowns, glitches and system errors from government agencies jeopardising quality of life and privacy. These problems are a direct result of ongoing assaults on public sector staffing levels. There are so many examples, but let's run with just a handful.

The ATO pay deadlock is simply the latest evidence of a broken public sector failing to fulfil its most basic duties to the nation, according to insiders in the ATO. Shrinking the ATO by an incredible 4,000 people has been inefficient and has led to information leaks, delays in processing, loss of morale and loss of key agency culture and corporate memory. These are irreplaceable. After the recent staff cuts of 4,000, 'unexpected delays in recruiting additional staff at reduced classification levels', according to the ATO, led to lower than expected employee expenses in 2015-16, but that didn't result in a saving. That was because the high number of contractors needed to implement critical IT projects and deliver services meant supplier expenses were higher than expected. Of course, then there's the Centrelink robo-debt shambles and, before that, the census debacle.

James Whelan, research director of the Centre for Policy Development's Public Service Research Program, says Australia underinvests in its Public Service compared with other OECD countries and shrinking the bureaucracy affects government services, program delivery, policy advice and financial management. He sees it as counterproductive, stemming from an ideological desire to scale back government, and says bureaucrats make an easy target because of the misconception that they really don't do much—they're just shiny bums sitting around. Whelan says:

We've probably become a little accustomed to Public Service bashing. It's like the public sector has few outspoken allies or advocates. To the extent that that's true, the public sector is vulnerable.

He's right. Public sector bashing is a national sport. It's not one I like to engage in. I think public sector employees do a great job. I'd like to give a shout-out to every public sector employ in this chamber!

Writer and entrepreneur Tim Dunlop argued, in a 2012 opinion piece called 'Small government can equal big problems':

For the longest time we have been told that getting the government out of government is liberating. We have been told that 'free markets' and 'free enterprise' makes us free. Indeed, this is exactly the sort of argument our newly installed 'Freedom Commissioner' takes as gospel, and that has long been argued by his former employer, the group-think tank, the IPA. It is the logic that has been used to justify the imposition of the 'Washington Consensus' in countries all around the world.

The newly installed 'Freedom Commissioner' Dunlop referred to, of course, now occupies a seat on the government benches. Indeed, the member for Goldstein is but one of a handful of IPA alumni infecting those opposite with their noxious neoliberalism and shrill demands to reanimate the rotting corpse of trickle-down economics. My colleague the member for Lilley, named finance minister of the year by Euromoney magazine in 2011, has said in this House—

Government Member:

A government member interjecting—

Brian Mitchell (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Well may you laugh, member. Facts speak for themselves. He said:

The politically inspired inequality of the Liberals is poisoning our society, and the power of big money is crowding out our democracy. Exhibit A of that is an unfunded $50 billion corporate tax cut, where the Treasury modelling shows it will not have the power and the influence over jobs and growth that the government claims it will.

We all know that 0.1 per cent growth to GDP in 10 years time will be the magnificent achievement of this $50 billion corporate tax handout. It beggars belief. How much more could be done with that money? I agree with the member for Lilley when he says Australians of the future will rue the day when the ultralow interest rates of this period were not used to invest in critical economic infrastructure across our regions and cities, and all because of an ideological obsession with avoiding debt. Imagine: we could even have invested in more base-load power stations.

The facts are that public investment in infrastructure in Australia has been substantially cut by the coalition, whether it is in the regions, the rural areas or our cities. Not one dollar was provided in the 2017 so-called 'infrastructure budget' for new infrastructure in Tasmania. The facts are these: in the 2015-16 financial year the Turnbull government cut infrastructure investment by nearly $3 billion—a 35 per cent drop from what it had promised in its 2014 budget. That is theft from the future prosperity of Australia. The private sector simply isn't doing that job, as we can see with power generation. Seven plants have closed since this government came to office. The private sector is not champing at the bit to build more. The public sector needs to step up. The public sector needs to invest in critical capital infrastructure, especially across our regions, in order to drive private sector growth. That's the route recommended by the IMF, which states that interest rates are so low that deficit reduction will actually occur faster due to the higher growth that infrastructure drives than it will through spending cuts of equivalent moneys.

One option could be to locate government agencies in regional areas, establishing well-paid, secure employment anchors in towns now suffering from a reliance on low-paid, insecure and seasonal work. Towns with council staff in them do better than those without them, as do towns with schools and medical centres. The benefits of well-paid, secure and permanent work are not only personal to the employees involved but also social. They provide a foundation for community growth and security.

What I'm proposing is a planned regional rollout of satellite offices in areas where placement fits the community and where public sector employees can settle, raise families and work directly with communities and where they join their local footy and bowls clubs, the CWA, ambos and firefighters without having to worry about where the next job's coming from. I'm focusing on the growth that this will bring to communities, with jobs created for services, retail and local government. As towns grow, more people will be needed—firefighters, police, council workers, support staff for people with disabilities, aged-care staff for people who are aging, childcare staff for the working parents and more teachers. Then, satellite university and TAFE sites may develop or grow. Then, doctors and specialists will need to be based in those areas, along with allied health professionals and community nurses. Where towns struggle with population, it is government that can give them a boost. This is a long-term plan, and it runs counter to the neoliberal economic agenda that has run rampant across Australia in recent years—an agenda that has seen our regional communities hollowed out and services shut down and moved to cities, sacrificed on the high altar of economic rationalism and efficiency.

We are a society, not an economy. Where market solutions fail, government must step in. Some say governments should be run like a business. I do not hold to that view. I say that governments should be run like a family. A family still needs to live within its means, but its motivations are very different to that of a business. In a family, we care for our grandmothers and grandfathers, despite the cost; we love our pets, even though they have no productive value; we take care of our homes and gardens, because we feel better when we live in pleasant surrounds; we go into debt to take on a mortgage; and we care for and love one another not because of profit but because we are human beings. I would much rather have a government that treats citizens like family instead of units of production.

Good governments not only invest in education, health, infrastructure and national security but also invest in the arts, libraries, national parks, the ABC and junior sports, none of which might get a look in on business grounds. Those arguing for smaller, leaner and meaner government see these things as burdens rather than assets, and they are forever arguing for them to be cut back to the point where they are already bleeding. The fantasy that has been woven around the supposed need for smaller government has allowed this government to treat people requiring income support as criminals and bludgers. It's allowed a culture to develop that it's somehow a shameful thing to accept government money, unless, of course, you're a billionaire or a corporation with your handout for a massive tax concession or business break. The ideology of smaller government is a myth that damages our society and our economy. It is a flawed, right-wing ideology that strips society of much-needed capital and human investment and that threatens to accelerate the hollowing out of our regional communities.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.

Ordered that this bill be reported to the House without amendment.