Ken Wyatt (Hasluck, Liberal Party, Minister for Indigenous Australians) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the second reading be made an order of the day for the next sitting.

Jim Chalmers (Rankin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Link to 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.

Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is the amendment seconded?

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

Kevin Andrews (Menzies, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that the motion be agreed to, to which the honourable member for Rankin has moved as an amendment that the second reading be considered immediately. Therefore, the question before the chair is that the amendment be disagreed to.

Original question agreed to.