Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in strong support of Senator Patrick's amendment to the appropriation bill, which would restore some of the necessary funding to the Australian National Audit Office, and I want to just put a few facts on record. The ANAO sought additional funding from this government as part of the budget process. They wrote to this government—and I know this, because I asked them in estimates—and specifically spelled out that their target audit number of 48 was not going to be able to occur if they didn't have additional funding. The reason is that the costs of the other audits that they're legislatively mandated to undertake have increased and therefore there's less money to go around. So, they made a very modest request for a small modicum of funds to be able to continue at their target audit level. They got no response at all to that letter. They wrote to this government saying, 'We stand on our record; we'd like to be able to do it', and this government didn't even see fit to respond, let alone give them the money they had sought. So, that's the first offence.

But it's very interesting when you look at the distinguished and outstanding track record of the Auditor-General and the office he leads in holding this government to account, and all governments to account. That perhaps explains why this government is so desperate to muzzle them and to reduce their audit capacity by 20 per cent over three years. It's sports rorts 1; it's sports rorts 2; it's the 'watergate' scandal; it's the Leppington Triangle scandal. There are a few others here. It is the consistent failure to implement recommendations to make the lobbying code of conduct mean anything and have any implications—another thing that this government has completely ignored.

They've also done some really revealing work on our environmental protection laws and a critique of the approvals process, all inconvenient matters for this government. This government has a glass jaw such that, rather than behave like a responsible, democratic and modern government, cop this on the chin and fund this body to do that important transparency and accountability work, they'd rather muzzle it and have it do less scrutiny work. It suits the government beautifully.

The other interesting thing is: I wonder what the ANAO have got planned that they might not be able to do 20 per cent of now, thanks to this government not giving them the extra funding? They had been planning to do audits—and now don't know whether they can do them—into a whole range of COVID programs: JobKeeper; the JobMaker hiring subsidies, which had a huge number of loopholes that we tried to fix in this place but, sadly, didn't get the support we needed in order to protect older workers; and the COVIDSafe app. They were going to look at all of that but, gee, they might not be able to now, because they're 20 per cent down on their capacity, thanks to this government not giving them the right amount of funding.

They were going to look into the Great Barrier Reef Foundation partnership, another scandalous overallocation of money to a very small and perhaps meritorious organisation that didn't seek the money and, frankly, didn't have the capacity to properly administer the money, when we have actual statutory authorities that are charged with protecting the Reef and are used to doling out that sort of money. That would have been a very interesting audit. We know, with this Senate already having inquired into it, that there are an awful lot of questions that still need answering, but no: this government isn't going to give ANAO the money to do that work. That's now got a question mark over it as well.

There was a proposal to look into the whole-of-government Legal Services Panel and how Mr Sukkar's old firm ended up investigating whether or not he had acted with impropriety and the mismanagement of conflicts of interest there. That, too, would have made for a very revealing expose by the ANAO—another inconvenience for the government that they wanted to avoid, no doubt. And there are a range of others, such as Defence's implementation of cultural reform. That's topical this week, isn't it, folks? That's another audit that the Auditor-General may not now be able to do because this government didn't give them the extra money that they need to maintain their output. They're not even asking to increase their output—which frankly they could, because they're doing such great work. They just want to be able to maintain their output. This government won't even give them the funding to do that.

There were a few other things they were planning on looking at but now they don't know if they can. There's the administration of the COVID commission. There's been an awful lot of debate over the selection of the folk that sit on that commission and the management of their own conflicts of interest, because many of them are steeped in the gas sector and the other fossil fuel sectors and the conflicts-of-interest rules are very weak and don't apply to all echelons of that commission. The ANAO could have looked into that and made some recommendations about strengthening those processes. But we'll never know now, because that's perhaps one of the audits they can no longer do because they've now got a 20 per cent capacity reduction over the next three years thanks to this government deliberately not giving them the tiny amount of money that they sought.

It's not just that the government are not funding the ANAO. This is the same government that, for years, described a federal corruption watchdog as a 'fringe issue'. Then, finally, the Prime Minister saw the light. It was almost two years ago that the government thought, yes, they would do something about it. They've done virtually nothing since. There's been a waffly discussion paper that's got so many loopholes in it it's basically a colander and experts have rightly criticised it. That was then put on the shelf and gathered some dust and they've just trotted it out again with no changes to the last version that they already consulted on. They're now doing new consultations and trying to claim that they're somehow champions of consultation when it's got the same old problems that the last experts said it had when they did the first round of consultation. It's sham consultation to avoid actually establishing a corruption watchdog at the same time as muzzling the most effective transparency body that we have at the minute, thanks to this government's intransigence, which is of course the ANAO and the Auditor-General. This is exactly why we will be strongly supporting these amendments by Senator Patrick and the request for this Senate to allocate a very small amount of funds that the ANAO will do excellent work with.

We think there should be a federal corruption watchdog. Actually, this chamber thinks there should be a federal corruption watchdog. In September last year, and thank you all for your support—not you guys, but you guys—we passed a bill for a federal corruption watchdog with teeth. That's actually what needs to happen. Yes, we need to fund the ANAO, but that's not a panacea. We need a whole range of improvements to whistleblower protections and to protections for public interest journalism. We need to get big money out of politics. We need caps on election spending and on donations. There is a whole raft of transparency measures we need.

There was a survey, the results of which were published today, that found that two-thirds of Australians think that corruption is indeed a big problem in politics, and a good 20 per cent of people thought that this government was doing very badly at handling corruption. That was a Transparency International Australia report done in conjunction with Griffith University. It makes for some very sobering reading. People can see that the public interest is being sold out to the political interests of those in charge. They can see the influence that donors have on the decision-making process. They can see this government consistently failing to uphold the very basic standards of ministerial accountability that used to mean something in this place. Scandal after scandal gets either pushed under the rug or glossed over. Now the government have the hide to not give the ANAO a tiny increase in funding to continue to do the job that the government won't let anybody else do because, sadly, there are clearly more skeletons in the closet that they want kept secret.

This is a very modest request, and I hope that the Senate will consider supporting it. Unfortunately, I am informed that the opposition won't be supporting this amendment either, which is very perplexing because the second reading amendment that we just passed in their name had a reference to the need for a strong and well-funded ANAO. We agree that is, in fact, why we're here and why we're supporting Senator Patrick's precise amendment to deliver that. So I'm a bit baffled as to why the opposition is taking that position. I would urge them to reconsider because, frankly, we've got an opportunity here. This amendment would otherwise pass, is my understanding. We could, in fact, charge the ANAO to continue doing the excellent work they're doing and empower them to do all of the things on their work plan for 2020-21 that they now might not be able to do because this government, and it seems perhaps with the opposition's full support, is happy to starve them of funds. We'll see how the vote goes. But, once again, democracy's for sale and transparency's at stake. But we've got a chance to fix it, so let's do that.