Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yet, as they see it; of course as they see it. Their role as that panel was to produce a report including the relevant information as they see it. We all might have different views, we all might want to see draft 2 and compare it with draft 3 and decide which one is better. But their job was to come up with the report and I believe we are in a world where our Public Service has served us well. The five people on this panel have incredibly high reputations and credentials and I believe that we owe it to them to trust that they did their work to the best of their ability. The idea that they might now be deleting emails because of this review is not particularly pleasant. I am sure that is not what was intended in the motion but when I read it when you ask that from this date of motion no existing papers, emails or other information relating to the Henry review may be destroyed it implies that that action may actually be taking place. Again I think we need to give these incredibly committed and skilled public servants the trust and the credit that is due to them, and also recognise the quality of their work.

I would like to point out too what the report actually is not. I am going to refer to it as the Henry review because we all do. I know it is called Australia’s future tax system but I will shorten it to Henry review. It is not a comprehensive list of recommendations that are ready to roll. It is part of a comprehensive ongoing review of the taxation system, part of a process that will take a considerable amount of time. The report makes absolutely clear that the AFTS panel did not seek to provide detailed policy options ready for implementation off the shelf. Rather, they aim to provide broad directions for reform. The AFTS report contains indicative fiscal impacts of some of its key policies and economic modelling of the impacts of its overall vision. But given that their recommendations were not designed to be detailed, implementation ready policies, the broad indicative costings that they included are also not designed to be budget ready—they are just not designed to be that.

The report also notes that there are not a set of budget costings for firm policy options. The report states that the estimates are indicative and not comparable to conventional budget estimates, they include recommendations that might not be implemented for many years, they exclude the fiscal implications of phasing-in some recommendations and not all recommendations have been costed. This is a broad-ranging report that includes in it as many questions in its recommendations as it does answers. Again I would hope that we would allow our Public Service and some of the extraordinary people that we engaged to do this work for us the opportunity in their process to explore things that they later reject. I would hope that we allow them to do that. We get a better answer if we actually allow people to engage some investigations quietly and privately to explore options. We get a better answer if we do that. If we actually forced every person that we engaged to release every beginning of a thought without its conclusion, we would be significantly hamstringing our public sector from doing its work.

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