Pat Conroy (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to make some brief remarks regarding the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit report entitled Regional Development Australia Fund, Military Equipment Disposal and Tariff Concessions: Review of Auditor-General Reports Nos 1-23 (2014-15).

Leave granted.

Mr Speaker, can I congratulate you on your election to your high office. I am sure you will do a wonderful job. I want to add some remarks on chapter 2, which is probably the most contentious part of the entire report, regarding the Regional Development Australia Fund. The ANAO audit and hearings rested on two agreed facts that are contained in the report: firstly, that the minister was subjected to conflicting and flawed advice from the department advisory panel and chose projects listed as suitable for funding and a small number of projects not recommended by the panel; secondly, that the incoming minister, the member for Mayo, when presented with the same advice from the department around value for money confirmed funding for the dozens and dozens of projects that were uncontracted in rounds 3 and 4. This was despite his clear right to cancel these grants, as he did for the publicly announced grants in RDAF round 5. These are the two central facts of this entire audit, and both of them confirmed that the previous minister's role in this program was exemplary.

The ANAO audit confirmed the following issues: there were flaws in departmental methodology, there was a problematic panels process and there were serious contradictions between the advisory panel and departmental assessments. Fully one-third of applications awarded the highest possible ranking against each selection criteria by the department were placed in the lowest merit category by the panel. Furthermore, the formal advice to the minister was flawed, poorly constructed and contained numerous mistakes. On this basis, the minister ultimately had no choice but to trust her own judgement about what projects were suitable for grants funding.

Mr Taylor interjecting—

Regarding the ultimate distribution of grant funding in this project, given the interjections from the member for Hume, across RDAF rounds 1 through 4, 46 per cent of funds went to the coalition held seats; 46 per cent of funds went to Labor held seats. In fact $4½ million of additional funding went to coalition seats compared to Labor seats. As a proud regional Labor member, I think this is a fair distribution of funds.

Furthermore, nearly half of the projects approved in the not recommended for funding panel category by the minister were in non-Labor seats. If we strip away all the political rhetoric, all the false bluster from those opposite, when Minister Briggs had the choice to cancel projects under RDAF rounds 3 and 4, he chose not to. He had that right. He exercised that right in RDAF round 5. In rounds 3 and 4, when presented with exactly the same facts that the previous minister had, he confirmed funding for those projects.

Furthermore, this audit and the hearings did reveal that the ANAO misunderstood or misapplied the AEC geographical classification of electorates. For example, the seat of Macarthur, which is classified as outer metropolitan, has the town of Appin, which is 30 kilometres from Wollongong and 75 kilometres from Sydney. Yet again, they drew conclusions about the classification of that seat. The seat of Franklin has towns 100 kilometres from Hobart and there are towns in the electorate of Canning 140 kilometres from Perth that are still regarded as outer metropolitan, which skews the analysis of the electoral distribution of grants in this scheme.

The committee hearings also explored where there was usual practice for projects that were not recommended that received funding, and projects that were recommended that did not receive funding. For the list of those projects to get into the public domain, the department confirmed that this was very unusual. The committee furthermore confirmed that the only people outside the department and the former minister who were given this information was the panel and the incoming minister, the member for Mayo. I draw no conclusions about how this information entered the public domain in newspaper reports but merely make the point about who had that information.

I was heartened by the ANAO's commitment to look at the Stronger Regions Fund, the current regional grants fund run by the current government. I agree with the recommendations from the committee's report around strengthening oversight of regional grants programs.

I thank the secretariat for their excellent work in this audit and hearings. I thank the ANAO and the departmental officials who appeared. I also thank the committee chair for the very mature way he ran the committee hearing in what was obviously a very politically contested audit. I commend the report to the House.

See this speech in context