Kerry O'Brien (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Transport) Share this | Hansard source

The opposition acknowledges that there has been some serious thought put into the propositions embodied in the amendments that have been moved by Senator Milne on behalf of the Australian Greens. As Senator Allison has conceded, this is a complex set of propositions with, I think, quite laudable aims in terms of promoting the achievement of energy efficiencies and putting in place a number of measures to require corporations to identify the areas in which those savings can be achieved. They are complex, and that complexity is something that the opposition would rather look at and assimilate in a better time period than is available for the consideration of this legislation.

That in itself does not completely direct our consideration of the amendments. As I intimated earlier in this debate, our concerns also arise because this would become yet another measure creating a slush fund for the government to administer. The amendments put in the hands of the minister the distribution of moneys collected under these measures. Those moneys are to be expended at the discretion of the minister on particular projects. I have had some involvement, through this place, in looking at measures administered by this government where ministers had the final say on where particular moneys—accumulated under this or that budgetary measure or by the collection of revenues, such as the levy on milk products—were spent. I have seen the way that the government has abused the process of distributing those funds to garner political advantage. Looking at the Dairy RAP program, we have seen millions of dollars distributed across the country, not necessarily into the areas most affected by dairy deregulation but into areas which the government considered advantageous for it in the electoral advantage that such expenditure might garner. We saw such edifying propositions under Dairy RAP as the expenditure of moneys for a private school in Toowoomba for running wine appreciation classes. That was supposed to help the dairy industry in the Toowoomba region. In Beaudesert it was used to fund the purchase of property for a polocrosse field. There was of course a world-class polocrosse facility within an hour’s drive, but that did not stop the funding of this facility. As I understand it, it is not much more than a paddock with a shed, a gate and a sign. But that expenditure enabled the announcement to be made and some political advantage to be generated.

Of course, under the Regional Partnerships program, better known to the public as ‘regional rorts’—and this is probably most germane to this legislation—we have seen an amount of money approaching $1.2 million paid to a company called Primary Energy Pty Ltd. Primary Energy Pty Ltd have an idea. They have been funded for that idea. They do not have financial backers; they do not have an ethanol plant under construction; they do not, indeed, have any idea of when they will actually have that plant under construction. The final amount of money—a small amount of the original grant of something in excess of $1.2 million—will be paid when they finally get a financial backer. In excess of $1.1 million has been paid to Primary Energy to date to achieve precisely nothing. Of course, when I say ‘nothing’, I mean that there was nothing in it in a public sense. But, in a party political sense, we have seen a series of announcements and the promotion of the expenditure of this public money as an opportunity for the electorate of the then Deputy Prime Minister in the seat of Gwydir.

So we have seen the government administering these pots of money under various programs, allegedly to promote particular outcomes, and in some cases achieving them. But, in many cases, they achieve not the promotion of the public interest but the promotion of the political interests of the National Party and the Liberal Party, depending on which part of the country this falls in. We saw on the weekend the release of another paper that analyses a number of government programs, including the Roads to Recovery program. The Prime Minister promised that the Roads to Recovery program would not be used to advantage coalition seats, yet a Mr Leigh from ANU published a paper on the weekend that shows that there is a weighting in the Roads to Recovery program in funding National Party and Liberal Party seats, giving them an advantage over non-government seats, and attributes to that funding an outcome in terms of votes. I have called for the government to respond to that paper because it makes a very serious allegation. The Prime Minister, in the case of the Roads to Recovery program, faithfully promised that it would not be used in any way to distribute funds disproportionately or to the advantage of the coalition, yet that is precisely the allegation made in the paper Mr Leigh recently produced that has been the subject of some discussion over the weekend.

We want to acknowledge that in many respects this is a worthwhile proposition that has been put forward by Senator Milne, but we still think it needs some work done to it and we are not happy to give our support to a proposition that would create yet another slush fund for a minister of this government to administer when its form, in relation to those propositions, has been so bad.