Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It is indeed a pleasure to rise to speak on the Omnibus Repeal Day (Autumn 2015) Bill 2015, a week out from Autumn 2016. I certainly concur with Senator Brown that it has been a long time coming. This bill does not seem to have been a priority of the government. I am so glad that we are actually here. This is the third day this week that the bill has been listed on the Notice Paper, so I am very pleased that we have finally got to it.

These omnibus repeal days are presented by the government as an opportunity to get rid of red tape, to fix up little bits of legislation and to be just generally smoothing legislation out. I am rising to speak to this bill tonight to add to it. I will be moving an amendment to this bill. These omnibus repeal bills give us the opportunity not just to repeal little bits of legislation but also to add bits of legislation. The amendment that I am going to be moving tonight will add a small amendment to the Infrastructure Australia Act 2008, which was removed very sneakily by the government last year.

As Senator Brown outlined in her contribution, this omnibus repeal day covers, I think, seven different areas of government, so adding in consideration of the infrastructure act is quite appropriate. I also think it is quite appropriate that, given that a lot of the focus in infrastructure is on transport, we are talking about an omnibus bill—omnibuses and buses and trains and trams and public transport and all of that.

The amendment I will be moving will reinsert a provision that was added to the Infrastructure Australia Act in 2014. The Infrastructure Australia Amendment Act 2014 inserted part 3A, Planning and Reporting, to the Infrastructure Australia Act. That part did a number of things but in particular specified some things that needed to be included in the annual report of Infrastructure Australia. The key aspect of that amendment to the Infrastructure Australia Act that I am focusing on tonight was that the annual report must include:

(d) details of each method of preparing cost benefit analyses approval of which was in force under subsection 5B(3) at any time during the year, including the weight required to be assigned to each factor the method required to be taken into account.

Basically, that said cost-benefit analyses are really important when you are considering, judging and trying to work out which bit of infrastructure we are going to invest in, but a cost-benefit analysis by itself, without any information about how it was undertaken, can be meaningless. We have to have that information so that we know whether we are comparing apples with apples, so that we know that the cost-benefit analysis that has been done actually stacks up. So this was a very important provision that was inserted into the Infrastructure Australia Act in 2014.

However, last year, under new legislation, the Public Governance and Resources Legislation Amendment Act (No. 1) 2015, this part of the Infrastructure Australia Act was repealed and the section of the act was replaced. The result is that section 39C, which contained all the information about cost-benefit analyses, just disappeared, and all that then had to be included in the annual report was that it must:

… include details of any directions given to Infrastructure Australia by the Minister …

The revised explanatory memorandum made very little reference to the rationale for change except to say that this relevant provision would bring it into line with the Public Governance Performance and Accountability Act. So very sneakily there was removed from the act a provision requiring the explanation of what type of cost-benefit analyses were going to be done.

It was a small thing, but it resulted in a big reduction in the transparency and accountability of the work that Infrastructure Australia was doing. That is so critical when we are making decisions about where to invest our precious taxpayer dollars in infrastructure. We need to know how various projects stack up against each other. We need to know that we can compare on the basis of one methodology—or at least to know what the methodologies are—so that we know whether, when we are looking at a road project here and a rail project there, the cost-benefit analyses are comparable. This information is critical because otherwise we can have a cost-benefit analysis that is essentially just a black box and we are told, 'Oh, a cost-benefit analysis has been done and it has returned a benefit to cost ratio of just over one.' There are a couple of projects I am particularly interested in at the moment in Melbourne. One is the Western Distributor road project. We are told that that has a benefit to cost ratio of 1.1. We had the announcement of the Melbourne Metro Rail tunnel, which we are told also has a cost-benefit analysis of 1.1. But we need to know, when we are looking at those two projects and trying to decide which of them is of more benefit to the community, how those cost-benefit analyses were done, what methodology was used.

The amendment I am moving today is simply to have the need for inclusion of the methodology of the cost-benefit analysis reinserted in the Infrastructure Australia legislation. I am hoping that this will not be a controversial thing. I am hoping that it will have the support of my parliamentary colleagues across the parliament, because I think it is really in the interests of transparency, accountability and making good decisions about our infrastructure that this be done. This bill, the omnibus repeal day bill, gives us the opportunity to fix small things up, to make small tweaks and changes to legislation, so that we ensure that the legislation is of the most benefit to the community.