Stephen Conroy (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President, I accept your admonishment. Mr Howard and Senator Minchin think that a gold-plated horse carriage for the Queen of England is more important than the proper management of $10 billion of taxpayers’ money. What would your mother say about that, Senator Ronaldson, if she were listening today? There was a cabinet discussion about the royal carriage, but, for a $10 billion program to save the river system in this country, nothing.

Maybe there was a time when Australia dropped everything to tug one’s forelock and swoon before the Queen. I thought most people would agree Australia got past that in the 1960s, but the living embodiment of that era is on the other side of this chamber. Today, Australians struggling to pay off mortgages are far more concerned about responsible economic management. Talk about a government that has got its financial responsibilities completely upside down. I have got a message for the minister for finance: the $1 billion per year that he so arrogantly dismissed is taxpayers’ money. It is money he has taken from working Australian families and he has an obligation to treat that money with the utmost respect. I would like to see the minister look a working family in the eye and tell them he does not need to watch over $1 billion worth of spending, tell them he does not need to carefully account for every cent that he spends of their hard-earned money.

If this kind of complacency and arrogance were just an isolated incident, it would be worrying enough. But, unfortunately, the water policy debacle is just one example of the government’s recent financial mismanagement. When you start totalling them up, the Howard government is starting to accumulate quite a tally of financial debacles. We have got the 2004 election promise to introduce a $50 billion mature-age worker tax offset. Fine—except for the fact that the cost of the program blew out by over $380 million before it was even introduced. We have got the grossly inaccurate costing of the government’s 30 per cent childcare rebate program. Then there is the utilities allowance, a program that the government has failed to publish updated costs for. Given recent history, we can only speculate on why the government is keeping mum about this program. Forget about the Charter of Budget Honesty; this government tallies up a few numbers on the back of an envelope and then announces billions of dollars of policies.

In my own portfolio area we just recently exposed that a $50 million metropolitan broadband black spot program had only actually issued $200,000 nearly 18 months since the announcement, and the cost of managing the program is over $1 million—to administer $200,000. It is a Commonwealth record, a gold medal performance. It is like that episode of Yes, Minister: it is a great hospital because there are no patients; it is running smoothly! The mob on the other side are running a $50 million program; in 18 months they have spent $200,000 and it has cost over $1 million to run so far. And they claim to be the party of economic management. No wonder that a few years down the track their costings are consistently out by hundreds of millions of dollars, because they are not doing the job, they do not want to do the job and they are not up to the job.

On top of that we have the Australian National Audit Office reporting that more than one-third of agencies administering government spending programs had no performance indicators to assess their effectiveness, quality or cost—no performance indicators. (Time expired)