Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Senator Payne. She was going to take my word for it. This morning in the paper a letter was revealed from the Essential Services Commission in South Australia, ESCOSA, which is the independent economic regulator in South Australia. The chief executive of this regulator, Dr Paul Kerin, who had been appointed by the previous Labor government to this position, resigned the week following the South Australian election. In his letter, Mr Kerin states:

I have voted Labor most of my life and I chose to join the Commission under a Labor government …

However, having seen that government from the inside, I have no appetite to deal with it for another four years.

In relation to the reforms and his oversight of particular agencies in South Australia—undergoing the water industry's economic reform, the commission's role in driving that reform, the independence of government, government legislation et cetera—Mr Kerin went on to say: 'My experience over the past three years has shown that the understanding in relation to those economic activities was incorrect. Instead, 'the government and its senior bureaucrats have clearly demonstrated that they have no interest in genuine reform, nor in serving the long-term interests of consumers. Indeed, they have stymied all efforts on those fronts at every turn.' Further, he said he had been 'appalled by the behaviours that both ministers and senior bureaucrats had engaged in to stymie' those reform efforts.

You would have to suggest that, if you were going to appoint somebody to be an economic regulator and you are completely convinced of the goodness and wellbeing that you are providing to your state and the economic development you are providing to your state by your policies, you would certainly think that you would give your economic regulator every opportunity to be able to better those policies, keep an eye on them and make sure that they really were delivering the things that you were saying. The comments made by Dr Kerin were revealed only after a freedom of information request, because the bureaucrats within the department refused to release the letter of resignation from Dr Kerin, citing that it was contrary to the public interest. I thought that was quite an interesting reason for not releasing the fact that somebody was being critical of the operation of the government. You would think that the South Australian government would have wanted a level of transparency around its economic regulator because, surely, if everything they are saying about the economic prosperity and all the great things that they are doing in South Australia are true, they would want the independent verification of their independent regulator. That is a very sad indictment of one of Australia's Labor governments. The federal government may be an indication of what the Liberal Party in South Australia is likely to inherit if and when they should win government in South Australia.

In standing here today and talking on this matter of public interest, I would like to put on the record that I think it is abhorrent that we are conducting scaremongering without any real facts around the information that we are putting into the public domain. (Time expired)