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

I was so disappointed with this minister's response to my order for the production of documents—incredibly disappointed but not surprised. This government has got form. They have got so much form with hiding information—hiding the fact that they make decisions based on their political interests, what suits their interests. They make decisions based on the interests of themselves, their mates, big business. They make decisions based on what they think it's going to take to win them seats rather than what's in the interests of ordinary Australians. This is the second time the minister has failed to present the documents that were set out in this order. I was particularly disappointed that they didn't even attempt to give any extra reason as to why they shouldn't give these documents. Basically, they simply resent a letter stating that, in relation to some of the requests, neither Minister Fletcher, his office or the department have seen the documents.

May I remind people that this is despite the fact that these documents were referred to by the Australian National Audit Office at a hearing of the rural and regional transport committee. The ANAO aren't making it up. The ANAO are there as the Audit Office to inquire into actions and programs of departments. They don't make stuff up. The Auditor told us there was this document that referred to the top 20 marginal seats. Yet Minister Fletcher and Minister Hume are saying that no-one happens to have seen these documents. How closely have they looked? The letter says the documents 'aren't to hand'. How convenient! Maybe they just fell into a shredder or something!

Of course, what makes this so upsetting is that this isn't the first time. This government has got form. Let's take us back to sports rorts. In January 2020, when the Prime Minister was asked about sports rorts at the Press Club, he said, 'All we did was provide information based on the representations made to us, as every Prime Minister has done.' And in March 2020 the Prime Minister said, 'We provided information based on the representations made to us, and that included information about other funding options or programs relevant to the project proposals.' It wasn't until two months later, in May 2020, after significant new information had come to light, that the Prime Minister admitted they'd been involved in providing approvals for those sports rorts programs. 'The only authority sought from the Prime Minister's office and from me was in relation to announcements,' they said, but what we subsequently learnt through the committee process was that Minister McKenzie's office had sent dozens of spreadsheets to the Prime Minister's office and had sought approvals for particular rounds of funding. And the sports rorts funding was expanded after a meeting between Minister McKenzie and the Prime Minister following spreadsheets being sent to the Prime Minister's office. So let's be very clear, when it comes to hiding information, being slippery with language and conveniently forgetting things until they're forced to acknowledge them, this government has got form.

When it comes to the information in these documents, this is not the end of the matter. There is a long way to go. We've got Senate estimates next week and we've got a committee into these car park rorts. I'm confident that more information is going to come to light. The refusal by this government to be transparent with the truth doesn't change our commitment to actually getting to the truth and holding this government accountable. We will use the Senate. We will use the information that we have got from the ANAO. The rorting of this grant scheme matters on multiple levels. As I've been saying, it's consistent with the government using government processes, using government funding and using grant processes to serve their own political interests rather than the interests of the community. But it also matters when it comes to just good governance and making good decisions.

I want to talk about the transport policy, before going on in a bit more detail about the corruption. This whole grant fund was the Urban Congestion Fund. The whole point of this grant fund is supposedly to be busting congestion. Let me share one of the submissions we received in the car parks inquiry that we've just set up on this issue. It's from the University of Melbourne transport experts. They say that after years of research on how to solve urban congestion:

The overwhelming conclusion of these investigations is that congestion reduction has failed because of the bias to solutions based on expanding road capacity. Put simply, the experience all over the world since the 1970s confirms that additional capacity induces new demand. This ensures congestion returns to or exceeds initial levels very soon after additional capacity is added. In the case of bottlenecks (a specific focus of the UCF), when one bottleneck is removed the choke point simply moves to the next.

It is now widely accepted by transport planners that building additional road capacity is not a cost-effective means to reduce congestion. More success has been achieved through measures that address demand such as pricing reform and strategic land-use planning.

Sadly, we haven't seen that road pricing reform, despite years of waiting for it. The submission then goes to what is so tragically wrong with this rort: building new car parks, just like building new roads, will not solve congestion. When we asked in Senate estimates what the justification was for even spending money on car parks in order to solve congestion, the officials of course had no clear answer about how they identified these car park projects or how they linked into broader infrastructure planning, including the work done by Infrastructure Australia.

But we know why that was—the officials had to try to pretend that there was some rhyme or reason or semblance of connection with transport policy behind them. But it was because the entire program is a rort. They didn't pick the car parks on any kind of sensible plan. Basically, they sent around yet another spreadsheet with a list of electorates each project was in. So it wasn't at all a surprise to learn that the same staffer who was involved in sports rorts was involved with the car park rorts.

We also saw government moving projects between programs—shifting them from the community support infrastructure fund to the Community Development Grants fund and the Urban Congestion Fund. It seems increasingly clear that this isn't a case of just a single rort multiplied multiple times: it is basically the Prime Minister's office serving as a coordination point between the Liberal Party election campaign and different programs that are being run across different portfolios. This is one mega rort being run out of the Prime Minister's office. That's why the wish lists that were used for sports rorts mattered. They weren't just wish lists for changing rooms; they were wish lists for election projects across multiple types of projects. As Michael West Media has noted, often these projects, particularly the car parks projects, follow a pattern. First, the MP organises a petition to harvest contact details. Then, hey presto, suddenly they've got a grant to announce right before the election. It's almost as if there was a systematic, coordinated process to use public announcements to bolster their election chances without doing the hard work of genuine consultation and policy development!

The scale of the Liberal Party's approach to these funds is so awful that there are layers of misspending. We saw that in New South Wales with the recent ICAC inquiry. One of Mike Baird's staff has questioned the advocacy by the then Treasurer of New South Wales, Gladys Berejiklian, and questioned why they were spending money in a safe seat. Clearly they saw the value in spending public funding in marginal seats for their electoral benefit. On top of that layer of corruption, the former Treasurer wanted a pet project. Entirely coincidentally, it appears it was in the electorate of someone she was in a relationship with! The sad truth with this government is that it's genuinely hard to keep track of all the different programs they've tried to rort: sports rorts, car park rorts, the Community Development Grants fund—the list goes on. It's exactly why we need a federal ICAC with teeth. It's exactly why we need to have something that goes to the heart of the corruption in this government, highlighting the inaction of this government and their refusal to pass an ICAC, despite the fact that the Greens bill for a federal ICAC passed the Senate two years ago and is there on the books ready to be implemented, if we only had an honest rather than a corrupt government. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.