George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to raise, on behalf of the government, the question of the accountability of the government to this parliament and to the public and to reflect upon the achievements in setting new and higher standards in the last decade. In doing so, Mr Acting Deputy President Murray, it is appropriate for me to begin by acknowledging your role as a senator, your role as a member of the Joint Parliamentary Committee of Public Accounts and Audit and your other committee work, and your being a very active and, with respect, intelligent participant in the debate on accountability and on the mechanisms of accountability of government to parliament. This is not a purely party political issue. Nevertheless, since this is the 10th anniversary of the election of the Howard government, it inevitably invites comparison between the standards of accountability then and the standards of accountability now.

I want to begin by reminding honourable senators and anyone else who might be listening to the broadcast of how low standards of accountability had sunk by the time of the end of the last Labor government 10 years ago today. Because it is 10 years ago, it is easy to forget the pass which Australia had arrived at under the prime ministership of Mr Paul Keating. Mr Acting Deputy President, I am sure you would agree with me on this: the most profound obligation of a government to be accountable is the obligation to be accountable to the parliament—in question time, in parliamentary committees and through the parliament’s other processes—and in particular at the real point of political conflict and accountability, question time, both here and in the other place.

It is instructive to remember the attitude of the last Labor Prime Minister to that central, solemn obligation of accountability. You might remember what Mr Paul Keating said to the House of Representatives about question time. He said:

Question Time is a courtesy extended to the House by the Executive branch of the government ...

Mr Keating’s imperial delusions did not end with clocks and other pretentious Louis Quatorze artefacts; they extended to the entire style in which he ran his government. Nowhere was that imperial arrogant attitude more manifestly on display than in Mr Keating’s attitude to the core obligation of a Prime Minister as leader of the government to account to the parliament at the most critical stage of the parliamentary process for scrutiny of the executive government. ‘Question time is a courtesy extended to the House by the executive government.’ What a disgraceful attitude! Yet in that one remark there was captured everything you needed to know about the attitude to parliamentary accountability and parliamentary scrutiny of the last Labor government. The Australian people were wise to it, and that government suffered its long-deserved quietus 10 years ago today.

Mr Keating was the man who also for the first and, I hope, the last time in Australian history actually edited the number of occasions on which he appeared for question time. For the only time in Australian history, we had a Prime Minister who said: ‘I won’t even condescend to come into the House of Representatives for question time every day. I’ll appear twice a week. I will vouchsafe to you, I will extend you the courtesy of my presence, twice a week.’ For half the days of the parliamentary year there was no capacity to hold that Prime Minister to account. That was the attitude that had come to pass in Australian politics by the time of the last Labor government, which mercifully expired 10 years ago today.

We heard a lot of wild claims from Senator O’Brien. Like me and most of the senators present in the chamber, Senator O’Brien was not a member of parliament 10 years ago, at the time of the 1996 election. But I would encourage him and others who may be listening to this debate to reflect upon what happened 10 years ago in another of the core areas of accountability—not to the parliament but to the public. That is a question I know you, Mr Acting Deputy President Murray, are very interested in. It is the question of accountability for fiscal management, accountability for financial management. Although today we mark the 10th anniversary of the election of the Howard government, tomorrow we mark another anniversary: the 10th anniversary of the exposure of one of the greatest deceptions in the history of Australian politics—the fraudulent concealment of the budget position by the then Minister for Finance, Mr Kim Beazley. Let me remind you lest you have forgotten what happened.

In 1995, at the time of the 1995 budget, the budget papers projected a budget surplus of some $3.4 billion. But as early as September 1995, as we now know, the Treasury was warning the Keating government, and warning Mr Kim Beazley in particular, that that estimate was awry: the budget would not be in surplus; it was likely to be in deficit. Yet Mr Keating and Mr Kim Beazley went through the 1996 election campaign well knowing the Treasury’s advice and lied to the Australian people about it. On 1 February 1996, during the course of the election campaign, Mr Beazley said this at a press conference:

We’re operating in surplus and our projections are for surpluses in the future.

Notwithstanding that, five months earlier he had been warned by Treasury officials that that was not so.

But, in any event, let me come back to the exposure of that fraud 10 years ago tomorrow. On 3 March 1996, Mr Howard, newly elected as Prime Minister, fresh to office, was briefed by officers of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. At the time, Mr Howard told the story and I will read what he said:

... the day after the election I walked up from the Intercontinental Hotel to the Commonwealth office in Phillip Street—I think all Australians and particularly members of this House—

because this was said in the course of an answer in the House of Representatives—

should understand this sequence of events—and I was handed by the Secretary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet a booklet of documents, the blue book, that had been prepared for the incoming government. As he knows better than most on the other side, a like book had been prepared for him—

he was addressing Mr Beazley—

and for the former Prime Minister if he had been successful. That book clearly spelt out the fiscal reality. It was available to me the day after the election and yet you—

addressing Mr Beazley—

and your former leader told the Australian public that it was too hard to assemble.

Mr Costello, the new Treasurer, takes up the story. He was briefed in turn by the Secretary to the Treasury on Monday, 4 March 1996—another 10-year anniversary we celebrate two days hence. Mr Costello said:

Let me make it entirely clear that on the day after the election and on the Monday thereafter the Secretary to the Treasury disclosed to the Prime Minister and to me the state of the accounts as forecast by Treasury for 1996-97. They were put out not in a press release from the government. They were put out in a press release from the Treasury, signed off by the Treasury itself.

Let me make it entirely clear ... that, as early as September in the previous year, the joint economic forecasting group was warning the government that its budget would not be as bottom line as was said in the budget papers and there was a blow-out on the cards for 1996-97.

On 12 March 1996, the economic and fiscal outlook was released by Treasury on the instructions of the new government. That revealed what the Treasury had been warning Mr Beazley and Mr Keating about as early as September the previous year: that, far from there being a surplus of $3.4 billion, there was a projected deficit of $4.9 billion representing a shortfall in the budget projections of $8.3 billion—the so-called $8 billion black hole.

How is that for accountability? The Prime Minister and the finance minister—now the Leader of the Opposition—with ministerial responsibility, well knowing that the budget would be in deficit, run an election campaign asserting that, on the basis of the projections they had from Treasury, the budget would be in surplus. How is that for accountability? Those were the standards practised by the Australian Labor Party then.

So what did the incoming coalition government do? In conformity with an election promise, this government introduced for the first time in Australian history—and I know it is something that you, Mr Acting Deputy President Murray, have congratulated the government for its initiative in doing—a charter of budget honesty, not a piece of political rhetoric but an act of parliament imposing statutory obligations. Among those statutory obligations is a statutory obligation on the secretaries of the departments of the Treasury and finance to publicly release a pre-election fiscal and economic outlook report if a general election is called. Under the act, the Charter of Budget Honesty Act, that must be done within 10 days of the issue of the writs. And at every election since the 1998 statute was passed, before the 1998 election, the 2001 election and the 2004 election, that statutory obligation has been performed to the letter so that never again can we have the disgrace of the Prime Minister and the finance minister lying to the Australian public about the state of the budget. How is that for accountability?

We did not hear that from Senator O’Brien. Perhaps Senator O’Brien was ignorant of the Charter of Budget Honesty—I should not be surprised. But that more than anything else is not a token, not a rhetorical gesture but a statutory obligation, which this government imposed upon itself and has faithfully observed ever since to ensure that in government’s most fundamental obligation—its obligation to be honest with the Australian people about how it manages their money—both sides of politics and whichever party is in government at any given time are held to neutral, objective scrutiny and accountability by the departments of Treasury and of finance.

I have dwelt at some length upon the 1996 deceit—because, as you know, Mr Acting Deputy President, I have something of a taste for history and I like anniversaries—and of the exposure of the great budget fraud of 1996. This was not merely to demonstrate the pass which we had reached by the time the last Labor government was ignominiously thrown out of power by a long-suffering public but also to show that, once you descend from the level of rhetoric, which is the only level at which Senator O’Brien seems to be capable of operating, into the hard language of the law and statutory obligation about core government functions and, in particular, about the obligation of a government to be honest about the budget position—