Jenny McAllister (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak about the inquiry that I chaired into the location of corporate Commonwealth entities order. It is disappointing that Senator McKenzie has chosen to disparage in the way that she has the work of the Senate Finance and Public Administration References Committee. The committee undertook that work with the seriousness that the finance and public administration references committee approaches all of the tasks it is allocated by this chamber.

It is true that through the inquiry there was a campaign from National Party members of parliament to broaden the focus of the committee beyond the focus that was set out in the terms of reference for the committee. The Senate asked us to look at the government's decision to relocate the APVMA. The National Party established a campaign, including writing to a range of regional councils, asking them to submit information to us about the much broader question of decentralisation of government services and departments.

I put on the record that Labor is enormously interested in that question and sympathetic to the agenda set out by those councils, but the place to progress that was not this committee. This committee had narrow terms of reference, and we fulfilled the mandate provided to us by the Senate. I should note that Labor members in the other place, in fact, supported the establishment of a joint committee that could examine this question of decentralisation, drawing on representation from both the Senate and the other place. Unfortunately, the government did not choose to support that in the other place, and we now have a House-only committee, dominated by government members of parliament. That is a great loss to a policy agenda that could have been fleshed out by a much broader range of participants.

I want to make a couple of remarks about the findings of the committee. The first is this: that this was a decision to move one government agency to just one electorate—the electorate that happened to be held by the Deputy Prime Minister. It was a decision that was announced during an election campaign. During the course of our inquiry, we asked all of the regional councils that appeared before us which of them had had the chance to make their pitch to government about why their town would be deserving of the $25 million investment that the government has elected to make in Armidale. The answer to this was, of course, none—not a single one of those councils had had that opportunity. When asked, 'What would be a good process for decentralisation?' all of them said, 'It ought to be transparent, and we all ought to have the chance to apply. We all ought to have the chance to make the case for our community to receive the $25 million that, on this occasion, has been allocated just to Armidale.'

Senator McKenzie referred to the role of the finance minister. The evidence from the departmental officials in the Department of Finance was very clear. They basically said, 'The finance minister had this role. It's his job to sign off on it, and so we did it.' There was an opportunity, of course, for the finance minister to apply a very different kind of scrutiny to a decision of this kind. The finance minister could have looked at the cost-benefit analysis and scrutinised whether or not the benefits that would arise for Australia from a relocation of this kind were really worth the $25 million investment. But the evidence from the department was that that was not part of the consideration. It strikes me that this narrow reading of the finance minister's role in the making of a general policy order is, at minimum, a missed opportunity for the finance minister to exert his authority in making sure that the decisions of government properly reflect the social and economic interests of the country.

The assessment around economic benefit was, of course, that there was very little economic benefit at all from a move of this kind and, on the contrary, there were very great risks associated with the relocation of this agency. The estimate from Ernst and Young about the financial cost to government of the relocation was that it would be $35 million in the short term. In the last budget, the government allocated $25 million for the relocation of this agency. I understand that Mr Joyce has indicated that the balance of that will need to be made up from within his own department. As it stands, the move of this agency is not fully funded.

It is also the case, of course, that additional costs emerge every moment that this sad story drags on, because many of the staff have indicated that they do not wish to move to Armidale. The workaround for this currently being contemplated by the APVMA is a complete reworking of the computer network. The cost of that is unknown, but the evidence from the then CEO of the APVMA was that it would be many millions of dollars. There has been no indication from government about whether funding for this element of the project will be provided nor indeed what the total cost will be. There is some indication that the total cost of this farrago could be as much as $60 million.

What I say to those listening is that, if we are to spend sums of this kind to move agencies, it ought not be done because it is politically convenient to provide a significant investment to one electorate during an election campaign. There ought to be a more substantial basis for analysis than this, and unfortunately, through all of the committee's deliberations, it was not at all clear that that deliberation took place in any serious way.

The prospect of harm to the agency's capability is very real. Industry body after industry body lined up to tell us that at the hearings. You know you have a problem—quite a serious problem—when the National Farmers' Federation turns up to criticise a National Party decision. We have a very serious problem where all of the businesses who are reliant on the APVMA to approve in a timely way their importation of chemical product are deeply concerned that that capability will be compromised by the move of this agency to Armidale.

Regional communities should have access to public sector jobs. We heard repeatedly about the damage that has been done to regional communities by this government's obsession with slashing public sector jobs—an obsession which is felt most keenly in regional Australia. In Townsville, where we visited, 200 jobs have been taken out of the ATO. The Department of Veterans' Affairs has been rapidly downsized despite the fact that Townsville is host to a very significant Defence community. The Department of Human Services has been subject to repeated job cuts. Regional communities should have jobs and they should not have to live in the Deputy Prime Minister's seat to get them.

Question agreed to.