Michael Forshaw (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have to say that being lectured by the opposition on probity, on good governance and on transparency has to be one of the all-time jokes of my political career in this parliament. I have been here for quite a few years, during the Keating government, the Hawke government and now the Rudd government. I have many, many examples that I can point to of the lack of transparency, of the political interference and of the straight-out rorting of government programs that went on during the Howard government years. I will mention a few of them in a couple minutes, but I first of all want to go to the questions that were asked of Minister Arbib, particularly those relating to employment services.

This, of course, has been an issue that the opposition have tried to get up as some sort of terrible scandal. What are the real facts? The real facts are that the Rudd government put out to tender the new Job Services scheme to follow on from the previous government’s Job Network. I was here when Job Network was introduced. Senator Fifield talked about how they progressively replaced the CES. You did no such thing. What the Howard government did was gut the CES. It had its faults, but it also had many, many examples of officers—decent, hardworking public servants around this country—who provided an absolutely first-class service for job seekers. But it was because of the drive to privatise the employment services that the CES was gutted. I can recall that under the tendering system that occurred then there were people who were successful in that tendering process that did not even have an office, did not have a fax machine and did not have a phone to run an employment service. It was an absolute farce.

What has happened under this government’s program is that it has been an open and transparent tender process. Almost 3,000 bids were received from over 400 organisations across all employment services, so it was clearly a competitive process with a strong field of candidates. As has been noted by the minister on a number of occasions, not everybody can be successful, and that is unfortunate, but that is the nature of the business. That included some of the previous providers not being successful because, on balance, other services, tenders or bids were seen as preferred, being more competitive and better according to the judgment made—which has been backed up by the probity process.

Indeed, whilst the opposition picks out a particular service in this or that electorate to highlight what they claim are failures of transparency, proper accountability and proper process, the fact is that the overwhelming majority of current five-star providers will be delivering Job Services Australia. Many of those that missed out will, of course, benefit from the adjustment grant payments. I do not recall such an adjustment grant payment system being available when the Howard government changed the scheme.

What we have is a process that has been transparent. I can compare that, as I said, to many other examples under the previous government: education funding, where the previous government skewed education funding to disadvantage public schools; the regional rorts program, into which I chaired an inquiry by the Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration and for which I could reiterate a litany of schemes that were rejected by the departmental advisers but nevertheless approved by the previous government; the Seasprite helicopter project, where we ended up paying over a billion dollars to cancel that failure— (Time expired)