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

I rise to note the government's response to this report of the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit on the review of the operations of the Parliamentary Budget Office. I have to say that I am very disappointed with the government's response. The Parliamentary Budget Office has been an outstanding new institution to the federal parliament. Until we had the Parliamentary Budget Office the government of the day had a huge advantage over the opposition parties in that the government of the day would prepare its own costings for its election and could make comment on opposition costings, and we had no capacity to present carefully costed policy material that was all based on the same assumptions and modelling information, so that there could be a genuine debate about the policy propositions being put forward.

The Greens are very proud of the fact that we now have a Parliamentary Budget Office. This is something that we negotiated as part of the agreement between the Greens and the Gillard government—that we would pursue a parliamentary budget office. It has been pursued, it has been a great success and it stands as one of the institutions that has improved the operation of the federal parliament for the benefit of the community, particularly when it comes to election time and when it comes to looking at and talking about what the projections are over the forward estimates and beyond.

I want to say, though, that I am very disappointed with the government's response. The committee recommended there be several legislative changes to entrench, first of all, the legal authority of the Parliamentary Budget Office. It should be strengthened, and the committee gave a specific recommendation about an amendment to the Parliamentary Service Act to express the intention of parliament that the Parliamentary Budget Officer be entitled to free and timely access to all relevant information held by executive agencies required to perform his or her functions, except where it is unlawful to do so. All the government has done is note that. It has not accepted the recommendation that the legislation should be strengthened.

In exactly the same way, the committee recommended that the government release details of the individual components of the contingency reserve to the Parliamentary Budget Officer, subject to any non-disclosure requirement considered necessary, and—what a surprise!—the government do not support that. This prevents the Parliamentary Budget Office doing what it needs to do, which is to have a look at the details of the contingency reserve. Why have the government said it is not supported? They say that they do not believe it can be published due to commercial sensitivity and national security and that the disclosure would disadvantage the Commonwealth. Once again, the sensitivity of the information means we cannot get a handle, as opposition parties, on the details of the contingency reserve. What we are now seeing increasingly from this government is 'national security', two words that are used constantly to deny the community access to the information the community needs to make good judgements about government policy.

Again, the committee recommended that, where the Commonwealth outsources the preparation of the budget estimates and costings of policy proposals to a third party, the terms of the contract should enable the agency or the third party to provide all the relevant data, including the underlying calculations, models and methodology, to the Parliamentary Budget Office under the memorandum of understanding without charge. The government has only agreed to that in part. Once again, it is going to be those costs within a very restricted budget of the Parliamentary Budget Office that will prevent it from being able to access the information that government agencies have already paid to get from an external source.

We will go on looking at the recommendations. The committee recommended very strongly that the government review the Commonwealth statutes and remove legislative barriers to the release of information to the Parliamentary Budget Office, including those listed in this report. All that has been done is to note that. There is no move to carry out that legislative change. The same thing goes when it comes to the recommendation that the Parliamentary Budget Office should prepare and publish medium-term projections on an annual basis. Once again, it is only supported in part.

The point that I want to make is that the government is still disadvantaging the community by continuing to restrict what the Parliamentary Budget Office can get hold of and then provide in its assessment of those medium-term forecasts. Given the way that we have seen the government present the figures to date, this is a really important issue if we are going to get a handle on what the government is actually doing, recalling that last year there was a budget emergency and this year the budget emergency just evaporated. The whole assumption around that remain what the government chooses to present, and the analysis from the Parliamentary Budget Office is constrained by virtue of not having access to the information that it wants to have.

The last recommendation of the committee was that the government bring forward amendments to the Parliamentary Service Act to extend the analysis in the post-election report beyond the period of four years to include, where possible, 10-year medium-term projections of the budget impact of the election commitments of the designated parliamentary parties. This is really important because when a party goes to the election and says, 'Over the forward estimates we'll spend X, but we are going to introduce some new policy with regard to funding education, funding health, funding something else,' but they only provide the costs over the forward estimates and not what it is going to cost over the period of 10 years that they are saying, as a community we need to know that cost, otherwise it is a joke. We had this with the Gonski public funding of education. People thought there had been an undertaking from the previous government to pay for public education. But it was only over the forward estimates. The rest was pushed out to years 5 and 6, which do not exist in terms of providing money or real expectations.

The Parliamentary Budget Office should be able to scrutinise what is being promised in real terms over the forward estimates and what is on the never-never, out to the 10-year mark. What has the government's response to that been? It has just been: consistent with the Charter of Budget Honesty, the government employs a medium-term estimate framework, and costings are done on the basis of the budget year and the following three financial years. In other words, take a running jump, Parliamentary Budget Office; the government has no intention of carrying out that recommendation. That is a really short-sighted thing for the government to do. It is also ironic that the government should be saying 'consistent with the Charter of Budget Honesty', when it was the Abbott government, when in opposition, that completely ignored the Charter of Budget Honesty and did not provide a costed election platform when they went into the 2013 election, contrary to the Charter of Budget Honesty. The government sold that out.

The Greens went into the election with a fully costed platform. It was costed by the Parliamentary Budget Office, and it is something we are very proud of. It was the Liberal Party and the National Party, who pretend to be some sort of management of the economy, who went into the election without a fully costed platform. That stands as a matter of fact. When we go into the election next year, the Greens will be out there again with absolutely carefully costed policies from the Parliamentary Budget Office. Once again, it will be the government, through their failure to take up the recommendations of the committee to strengthen the legislative basis for the Parliamentary Budget Office to get timely access to information, that will be denying the community the information they need, through the PBO, to do what the community needs.

To conclude, I congratulate the Parliamentary Budget Office for the work that it does. It has been highly professional, and its work has been an important contribution to the parliament and to our democracy. It is something that I, as the former leader of the Greens, am very proud to have been able to implement whilst in the leadership, because it stands as a permanent contribution to the body politic and to democracy in Australia.