Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be given this short amount of time to make a contribution here. I am going to refer to the Public Works Committee Act 1969:

(8) A public work the estimated cost of which exceeds the threshold amount shall not be commenced unless:

(a) the work has been referred to the Committee in accordance with this section;

(b) the House of Representatives has resolved that, by reason of the urgent nature of the work, it is expedient that it be carried out without having been referred to the Committee;

(c) the Governor-General has, by order, declared that the work is for defence purposes and that the reference of the work to the Committee would be contrary to the public interest …

I put that up there by way of a preamble. The responsible minister is the Minister for Finance, the honourable Senator Matthias Cormann. He also gets a guernsey in this contribution, because under the sections of the act entitled 'Exemptions', he is the only responsible officer who is able to give an exemption. As action by the Minister for Finance and Deregulation is necessary for all exemptions, Finance is responsible for coordinating necessary actions and must be informed at an early stage that an exemption to the act has been sought. So, any project over $15,000,000 is subject to a definition in the Public Works Act and scrutiny by the Public Works Committee. We know that Senator Cormann is in entire agreement with this, because I am going to quote his statement from Hansard:

I am sincerely shocked at how quickly this government have turned into a secretive government. I am shocked at the long and detailed presentation we have just had from the government, which essentially sums up one thing: they are running scared from openness, transparency and public accountability. This runs counter to everything they have said not only before the last election but also since. I will quote to Senator Ludwig a statement made by Senator John Faulkner at a recent conference. The speech, entitled ‘Open and transparent government—the way forward’, was made at Australia’s Right to Know, Freedom of Speech Conference. He said:

… the best safeguard against ill-informed public judgement is not concealment but information. As Abraham Lincoln said: ‘Let the people know the facts, and the country will be safe.’

Well, a quick scrutiny of the AusTender website, which details Australian government published spending on Nauru for the 2013-2014 financial period, accessed on 29 May, reveals that $2,977,204,122.98 has been spent in Nauru. Nauru has a GDP of $112 million. It is the recipient of about $20 million in Australian aid. We have spent—this government has spent—$2.977 billion on items in Nauru and not one item has been referred through public scrutiny of the Public Works Committee.

Mr Pezzullo, when asked if he was aware of the Public Works Act, and whether he had referred anything through the public works referral process, said:

The answer … is yes, I am certainly aware of how the relevant public works legislation works … In my time as secretary, since October 13 last year, we have made no referrals.

So we have the Minister for Finance and Deregulation, who promotes openness, transparency and scrutiny, and yet under his watch nearly $3 billion worth of expenditure has occurred—$40-odd million in a construction tender, no scrutiny of the Public Works Committee, and no adherence to parliamentary process or probity of taxpayers' money. And this is a person who lectures us and throws across the chamber at every opportunity: 'We do it better'! Well, I think at the very least he owes the Senate an explanation as to why there has been no public scrutiny, no public probity, about this very large public expenditure in Nauru.