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

I am very happy to have that further discussion with Minister Fletcher, but I think that can be after we have this amendment put into the legislation. This is a very useful opportunity while this legislation is before us tonight to do exactly the thing that these omnibus repeal days are set out to do—make some fine tweaks to legislation to improve it. I know the government's position is that those fine tweaks involve removing what they called red tape, but so often one person's red tape is another person's very important and critical piece of regulation that enables better governance, transparency and accountability.

There are people who are interested in how these decisions are being made, as we are spending billions of dollars. The cost-benefit analysis and ending up with that final benefit-cost ratio, whether it is 1.1 or 0.9, can make the difference between whether we spend billions of dollars on one project or another. If we do not have that granularity, if we do not have all that detail of information, it is obscure and there is no opportunity for peer review, for the experts in the community to do the assessment and say, 'Ah, yes. This is how they got to their figure of 0.9 or 1.1.' It is really important that we have that level of detail and all of that detail.

I think it is really important that that detail ends up being in the annual report of Infrastructure Australia. Infrastructure Australia was set up to be an organisation that was meant to take the politics out of decision making and meant to be assessing the information objectively so that we knew we had reliable, objective information about our infrastructure requirements. But in order for the community to be assured that that objectivity is there, we need to have this level of information.

If Infrastructure Australia is doing its job correctly and if it is supplying the cost-benefit analyses equally and objectively across all projects and if in fact the proponents of the various projects have cost-benefit analyses that are comparable, there is nothing to hide. The details can be made public. It is not a big thing to do. Those details can be made public and then we can all see how the decisions are being made. It is really only by having that information and those details that it can be made clear and that the community can have faith and can trust that decisions are being made completely transparently and completely objectively.