Gerard Rennick (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to again address the issue of the Auditor-General's Leppington Triangle report that came out two years ago. One of the criticisms, of course, was the fact that there was a lack of documentation on behalf of the department in regard to the purchase of the land. I spoke about this yesterday, and I pointed out that the land market value was paid for the land in accordance with valuation standards and accounting standards. However, I thought to myself, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. So I asked the Auditor-General if he could provide minutes of meetings held with staff and his office involving the audit of Leppington Triangle. Well, well, well. Guess what the reply was? 'The ANAO does not release specific items of audit evidence that were not included in an audit report, as the public interest benefit in the ANAO providing the audit evidence is outweighed by the potential for public interest harm to the operation of the legislative framework for dealing with sensitive information in the Auditor-General Act.'

That's interesting because, first of all, I didn't ask for specific audit evidence; all I asked was for the minutes of meetings. If the Auditor-General wants to criticise the previous government for not disclosing and having minutes of every meeting that they hold every five minutes of the day and wants to criticise people for having meetings in coffee shops—if we're all going to get locked up for having meetings in coffee shops, I think we'd all be in jail pretty quickly. I don't know about you, but I like to have my meeting in coffee shops. I love a coffee in the morning. The point is that I want to know why the Auditor-General isn't disclosing the minutes of the meetings that he had with his staff and what it is that he is hiding.

It should be disclosed that the Auditor-General was a former Labor staffer. It is very important that the Auditor-General remains impartial. I fear that this was nothing but a stitch-up, and it calls into doubt his credibility and whether or not he can continue in this role.