Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This is an Auditor-General’s report entitled Audits of the financial statements of Australian government entities for the period ended 30 June 2006. I want to make some brief comments regarding this report. In it the Auditor-General goes through a number of issues, but the one I want to focus on is the qualification of the consolidated financial statements. Yet again we have a qualified audit report in relation to the consolidated financial statements of the government. If this was a company serially offending and continuing to have qualified audits there would certainly be real concern in the marketplace over the fact that a company’s financial statements continue to be the subject of a qualified audit, but the government proceeds without worrying about that.

What is interesting to note is that one of the bases of the qualification of the audit is the misinformation that the government continues to peddle regarding the status of the GST. In fact, one of the bases on which the Auditor-General has qualified his report regarding the consolidated financial statements is the continued inappropriate treatment of GST revenue by the government, misinformation which continues to be repeated by the Treasurer and by members on the other side that the GST is somehow not a Commonwealth tax. They can keep saying it, but it is here in black and white in this report, as it has been for many years now, that that is incorrect and is one of the bases on which the audit report is qualified.

Question agreed to.