Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I am disappointed that the government is not supporting these amendments. I think it is disingenuous to say that there is a rigorous assessment of government spending through the estimates process. I remind the parliament about the grants that were made under the last government and the absolute rorting of some of those, particularly those regional grants and also the forest industry grants. I have been pursuing those through estimates. The Auditor-General wrote scathing reports on both sets of grants programs, saying they were appallingly administered.

In relation to DAFF’s oversight of grants, particularly those forest industry grants, DAFF have of course had to change their assessment procedures and so on. They were in a situation where grants were made without any kind of proper scrutiny at all. Getting the information out of them as to what happened has been like drawing teeth. There has been money spent in Tasmania in terms of the bushfire expenditure that the Commonwealth made after those terrible bushfires that happened. I have been asking for the last six months: how was the money spent? That is not an unreasonable question. Where was the money spent? How was it spent? The Commonwealth minister says to me: ‘We’re awaiting a report from Tasmania. Tasmania hasn’t provided that report.’ The people of Tasmania do not know where the money is spent. The federal parliament does not know how the money is spent.

So, whilst you might say that there are technically processes for securing this kind of information, they are long and drawn-out processes. It can take a year to get that information after the money is expended, or even longer—if you ever get to the bottom of how the money was spent. But the issue here is not that those processes do not exist; it is that it is important that those advisory boards—they are appointed with expertise and they are going to make recommendations to ministers—make their advice public in a timely manner and that it is scrutinised by the parliament. If that advice is not public, how do we know, when the minister announces his infrastructure project, whether in fact that was what was recommended?

I remind this chamber that, just before the last election, the then Minister for the Environment and Water Resources, Malcolm Turnbull, now the Leader of the Opposition, changed a recommendation that came in about a university grant process. He crossed out ‘ANU’ and put in the university of his choice, in the lead-up to the election—after an assessment process had been gone through and a recommendation had been gone through as to which universities should get this research funding, he just put his pen through it. We could not get that information for a long time—and now we have. The point I am making is that the people of Australia want the recommendations that the advisory boards are making, and any documents pertaining to that, to be available for people to scrutinise and for the parliament to scrutinise. So, whilst I totally accept the processes that the parliament has, they are neither timely nor particularly efficient in providing all the information you need. Whilst the grants I have spoken about were important, in terms of their dollar value they were small, compared with what we are talking about. That is why I have said that, where the expenditure is $50 million or more—we are not talking about every grant that is made; we are talking about grants where a significant sum is being spent—it is appropriate that the parliament scrutinise the grant.