Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The contributions this morning have been fairly wide-ranging, and I do not want to traverse ground that has already been covered, but I want to put a specific scenario to the Senate in terms of why transparency and accountability are required and need to be enhanced. Before I go to the details of that, I want to put on the public record some comments made in the Senate by Senator the Hon. Mathias Cormann. He said:

I am sincerely shocked at how quickly this government have turned into a secretive government. I am shocked at the long and detailed presentation we have just had from the government, which essentially sums up one thing: they are running scared from openness, transparency and public accountability.

That is a very interesting comment that was made way back in 2009. On 13 May 2009 he said:

There will be always times when new people come to the Senate. They are going to face all these problems of trying to find out how to get the information and the documentation out of the government they need in order to properly scrutinise its activities. And clearly it was not in the political interests of the government but I think there is a serious question mark here as to whether there are proper and legitimate public interest grounds.

And in The West Australian Mathias Cormann said: 'Proper scrutiny leads to more informed debate and, ultimately, to improved public policy.

I will now quote from Hansard on 24 November 2011. He said:

On this occasion, the government does not want to tell us what it is up to. It wants to say to us, the parliament, to us, the Senate, representing people from across Australia: 'Just trust us. …. We know what we're doing. Just give us a blank cheque.' Well, that is not the way the Senate should operate, in particular on this occasion, because we have a terrible government. We have a terribly incompetent government. We have a government with a track record of failure, broken promises and incompetence.

These comments on the public record by Mathias Cormann really indicate his support for openness, transparency, probity, due diligence and proper process. But what do we have when we look at the situation in the regional processing centre space? We know there are regional processing centres at Manus and Nauru. If you are diligent and you go to the budget papers, you will see that there is a global figure of expenditure there. But you will not find a breakdown of how much is spent at Nauru or at Manus Island. And when you dig down and try and find that information it is not immediately available; your request is taken on notice by the department and they respond obtusely. So you take a shortcut, you go to AusTender and search for 'Australian government expenditure on Nauru in the year 2013-14'. And what you get is '$2.9 billion worth of expenditure'. A contract of $2 billion-plus. You get advice that a prison is being built in Nauru. Nauru has a population of 10,000 people. The Australian government is building a prison in Nauru.

All of this comes back to the central lack of probity and transparency. Dare I say it, the finance minister, as the minister responsible under the Public Works Act, can grant an exemption from scrutiny by the Public Works Committee of expenditure of money in excess of $15 million. This is one of the oldest standing committees of this parliament. It was put in place to scrutinise probity, value for money, public interest and return on investment. That committee has done its work for 100 years. But what we do know is that since 2012 when these processing centres were put in place, the Labor Party, despite Senator Cormann's denigration in his previous contributions, actually followed the act. Due to the urgency of the work, they sought an exemption and, quite properly, that passed through the House of Representatives. That exemption said: 'We value the work of the Public Works Committee. We will provide a briefing on what we are doing and we will keep the committee fully informed of further works as they come about.' Two exemptions were tabled by the Labor Party in the lower house and, quite properly, the work proceeded in accordance with the act. But as we know from direct evidence and an examination of the records of the Public Works Committee, there have been no referrals since then for proper public scrutiny of items of expenditure over $15 million within the definition of the act.

But what we also know through the published AusTender process is that there has been a huge spend. What we do know from a question or two to the department is that they have quite recently taken legal advice that the work they have done may not have been applicable under the Public Works Act because it could be construed as foreign aid to a country. Here we have a country with a GDP of about $112 million, an existing foreign aid component of about $20-plus million, a spend on AusTender of about $2.977 billion and an environment where we are cutting our foreign aid budget, but no, no, we are going to donate a prison to Nauru as part of our foreign aid budget; we have legal advice to do this. If this is not a lack of transparency, accountability and presenting matters and expenditure for a proper scrutiny of either a standing committee of the parliament or the Senate during estimates, I do not know what is.

We do know that, if it is an on-water matter, it is national security and you will get no information about anything—and I think that has been well demonstrated in the parliament in the last couple of weeks. Nauru is an island; it is not an on-water matter. The minister responsible and his department should have put the expenditure to the finance department either for an exemption or for scrutiny. They should not have just whistled through and spent hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money because they were in a hurry or because the department was in turmoil. This goes to the very heart of why there is a public works act and why there is public scrutiny.

I can tell you, Mr Acting Deputy President Whish-Wilson, it shocked me that a hearing was arguing about whether a marquee was a marquee or a tent. The only marquees I have ever been in were at the Melbourne Cup, and they were very grand. But I would not like to spend 402 days in a tent or a marquee—that is the average length of time a detainee in Nauru is spending in accommodation like that. They have been built with taxpayers' money with no scrutiny by the appropriate standing committee, and there is no immediately transparent way of getting this information.

We know from a website that over $40 million was spent on constructing a camp for 2,000 people. It was done in about three weeks. I had a little bit to do with construction when I was bit younger. If you are going to construct something for 2,000 people and it takes three weeks, it sounds like a tent city—or maybe it is a marquee city—or maybe they just got it from Toowoomba Party Hire, which is allegedly printed on one of the marquees in Nauru. Either way, if you are going to build a prison in another country and call it foreign aid, put up a camp for 2,000 people in three weeks and spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers' money, then it should be appropriately scrutinised. And it ain't an on-water matter. There is no security in this. If you are going to go and lease ground on Nauru at $8.50 a metre—what legal tenure you have to it after that, I know nothing—and spend hundreds of millions of dollars putting infrastructure and improvement in place, there should be parliamentary scrutiny.

If you actually take these figures and divide them by the number of people in detention there, it is astronomical. If you simply take the number of refugees that are there and divide it by the money that is spent, we are spending over $1 million per person and, allegedly, to keep them in abject—and the allegations are widespread, with people prepared to give them in camera and in public. The allegations are that money has probably not been well spent, because people are complaining about mould, mildew, lack of privacy. You have a 10-metre by 12-metre marquee with a two-metre division and six families in there. And we spend hundreds of millions of dollars doing this without any parliamentary scrutiny. There appears to be no parliamentary scrutiny. The latest advice we got was that people had taken quite recent legal advice to say that some of it could be construed as aid to a foreign country. This goes right to the heart of openness and transparency.

As senators, we all know that through the estimates process it is often quite difficult to get an answer. I have taken it as a learning curve. I have put questions on notice, and the questions have come back with the answer 'No' or 'Ask another department' or some other deflective answer. So I just take that on the chin. But when we are actually spending what, I think, is $580 million in this budget year and if we add that on to what has been spent previously without proper scrutiny and process, I think the finance minister has a bit of work to do to reconcile his previous public statements of transparency and accountability with his actions as the person responsible for making sure that government expenditure gets the proper scrutiny of the parliament. There is a very strong case here that that has not happened. It really does go right to the heart of this attempt by Senator Ludwig to shine a light in areas where we need more information so that we can get it quicker and that it can be more transparent.

I want to give you a short summation of Nauru. At 30 May 2015, there were 718 asylum seekers at Nauru Regional Processing Centre—480 adult males, 126 adult females and 103 minors. As at 30 April, the average length of time a transferee spent on Nauru was 402 days. The total operating costs of the NRPC from July 2014 to 31 January 2015 were $276.45 million. We know from AusTender, as I have said, that in 2013-2014 the contracts and published spending by the Australian government on Nauru was $2,977,204,122.39.

Without the ability to get the true and correct information as to what applies to where and what it was spent on, you could do a very rough analogy. As of 30 June, 2,026 people had been transferred to Nauru, according to the department's annual report. If you compare the AusTender spend in that financial period to the number of transferees, that equates to a spend of about $1.47 million per transferee in Nauru. According to the department, in RPC2, Regional Processing Centre 2, where single adult males are held, they are provided with 10 by 12 vinyl marquees in three separate compounds. Each accommodation has been capped at 22 in a dormitory-style living arrangement. RPC3 provides accommodation in 10 by 12 vinyl marquees in six separate compounds. These are occupied by families and single adult families. Each accommodation marquee is separated by vinyl walls. Families with children under the age of four are placed in air-conditioned marquees. RPC1 is the accommodation for 850 staff in permanent, modular accommodation. The site provides for staff administration, catering facilities and a warehouse. Transferees use the RPC1 interview room, medical buildings, soccer field, educational facility and managed accommodation for high-risk transferees. We know from that short paragraph that there has obviously been a good spend on infrastructure.

If you do a cursory examination of Nauru you know that it is very short of water, so we have had to put in some reverse osmosis, or desal plants, or some water accommodation. We have had to put in place some infrastructure. We know that there was significant damage, up to $75 million in a riot, shall we say, on Nauru. We know all this because we read it in the paper.

We should be able to, in this place, in this Senate, properly scrutinise expenditure. If we are spending one point something million dollars on a transferee or detainee, I am not sure they should be in tents or marquees—choose your option. The department prefers the word 'marquee', and other people prefer the word 'tent'. It makes no difference. Once you are in a marquee for a month, it is a tent. If you are in it for 402 days, it is a pretty miserable tent. If it has mould on the inside due to weather like a Darwin, Northern Territory climate, it would be a pretty horrific place to stay.

My question is: has this been an open and transparent process? I am finding that it has not. The Public Works Committee and the Public Works Act has not been adhered to by the person, the Hon. Mathias Cormann, who throws to our side of the chamber—and also threw to our side of the chamber when we were in government—the need for public accountability, public scrutiny, openness and transparency. He has not done it himself. He has not followed the basic principles of being a minister by following the acts that govern expenditure. He is the person responsible for all of the department spend. It is his department that can grant an exemption. He has not done it. He has not sought exemption for a really large expenditure of public money. He has not followed his own due process.

May I say, in the short time I have remaining, that I have never been to Nauru and I have no great inclination to go to Nauru. What I have seen in submissions and photographs and read in reports shows that the outcomes in terms of the Australian taxpayer spend are not high. In fact, they could be regarded as truly abysmal. We are spending, and continuing to spend according to Mr Pezzullo, another $580 million this year. In all of that—and I do not want to go to the issues of immigration, or stop the boats, or on-water—proper probity and scrutiny by the Senate and the standing committees of the parliament should always be in effect when we spend more than $15 million, if the items are construed under the definitions of the act. I call on the finance minister to follow his own rules and his own guidance to this Senate in previous statements. (Time expired)