Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Greens will be supporting these amendments. I do not propose to rub Senator Johnson's nose in it. I think it is quite refreshing to have something like this come forward, based not only on the work done by the Senate standing committee but also I think fairly widespread and widely understood views in the community that this is the right way to go. If the opposition has thereby withdrawn its amendment to that effect, we can move through this reasonably quickly.

Initially this was cause for us to vote against the bill in its entirety. I think Minister Truss has certainly recognised that this is about the independence. The last thing you want is for Infrastructure Australia to be told either, 'You have to evaluate this pet project that has fallen out of some political analysis about a marginal seat and someone wants to cut a ribbon before the next election,' or, 'You are precluded from evaluating an entire class of proposals.' That is what I was getting to before with a government's policy position that says that public transport no longer needs any kind of Commonwealth investment, even though these are very large—in some cases decades long and quite expensive—infrastructure projects that I think require a Commonwealth funding stream.

The government amendments also go to the fact that the minister would have been able to withhold the release of project evaluations that he did not like or that were politically inconvenient. Sometimes you are going to get inconvenient evidence from an independent body and you take the good with the bad; that is why we have these things. Keep in mind that Infrastructure Australia is not an executive body as such; rather, it is an advisory body. It provides to elected MPs—people who are accountable at least every couple of years—the benefit of its work. It is not actually a decision-making body so much as an advisory one.

Nearly every submission to the Senate inquiry raised this section as a huge concern, including groups as diverse as the Australian Sustainable Built Environment Council, or ASBEC; the Urban Development Institute of Australia; the Committee for Melbourne; Consult Australia; and even the Business Council of Australia. As Senator Conroy pointed out before, if the Business Council is against coalition policy then you know you have got it very badly wrong. As I said, this would have allowed the minister to exclude classes of projects. I am not sure, and I do not think anybody is very sure, what the motive was for the coalition to attempt to introduce such radical powers to weaken—