Andrew Bragg (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Home Ownership) Share this | Hansard source

I want to take the opportunity to speak to the bizarre situation we have, where this PRRT measure is bundled in with significant corporate governance reforms that have been flagged after the PwC scandal. This is a very consistent pattern. Minister Jones, who is notionally the minister for corporate governance in the government, seems to have some role in this particular bill. Often his bills, which are tax bills or bills on matters related to corporate governance, are introduced by Dr Leigh, though sometimes they are not. It is a bizarre way to treat a very serious reform package that I think everyone accepts is important.

There's been good work done on the PwC matter by Senators Pocock, O'Neill and Colbeck. To bundle it up with a PRRT measure seems very strange and is quite poor governance in and of itself. But the Labor government's commitment here to parliamentary scrutiny and governance of all these matters is strange. Either there is a deliberate judgement made in the executive to have a covering-up of information that should be publicly available, or there is a Treasury official drafting all the bills and the ministers are not paying any attention to detail. This is another of three or four attempts in the past few months in which corporate governance and financial services bills have had major deficiencies. We know this because of the detailed scrutiny that the Senate Standing Committees on Economics undertake, where the non-government senators work to look at the government's efforts on legislation. I have to say that it's been pretty ordinary. Only in the last few weeks the coalition and the Greens had to issue dissenting reports to tell the government its judgement to remove the parliamentary scrutiny in proposed changes to ASX ownership are to be rejected. That's because we believe that parliamentary oversight is a good thing. If there is to be a change in the ownership of something like the Australian Securities Exchange, then it should be subject to a disallowance. Similarly, the government is proposing to issue the Reserve Bank with enormous payments powers. I believe that, from a geopolitical and an economic perspective, payments policies will be very significant judgements in the coming years. The government's view is: 'We're not going to give any of these things to the parliament. This is all going to be outsourced and delegated to the central bank.' The central bank can effectively make laws without any parliamentary oversight or any capacity for the parliament to disallow an instrument.

All you have to do is read the Economist from the last few weeks and you'll see there is a massive proliferation of payments systems around the globe. The Labor government's position is: 'That is not a matter for us. That is going to be a matter for the central bank.' It is the delegation of authority to agencies which is fundamentally undemocratic. That's why I want to put on the record the work that the coalition has done with the Greens, particularly Senator McKim, to highlight the government's commitment to covering up and neutering this parliament from having its proper role as a house of review.

The ASX ownership, this bizarre meshing of issues in this bill and the payments policy matter are all instances of poor governance and either appalling drafting or a deliberate judgement made by the Treasury ministers. We imagine it's Minister Jones; we're not sure what he's doing. It is to be called out, and I appreciate the opportunity to put these remarks on the record.