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

I see from the response that you do not agree with me. Perhaps we just have different ways of exploring questions and answers. I actually think, quite seriously, that sometimes we rush to answers too quickly and we should leave questions open for quite considerable amounts of time. Sometimes by doing that options come up that allow many people to be satisfied. Rushing to answers sometimes excludes options that may actually have worked out. I would hope that we are mature enough as a community and as a parliament to allow that flexibility and that creativity in our Public Service. I really hope that we are.

There is also an implication in the motion that the government has not released the modelling and costing as relevant. It claims that the government has not released any of the Treasury modelling or other relevant information and advice underlying the recommendations of the review. This is obviously incorrect. We have published the entire AFTS report, which is over 1,000 pages, as you have said. The final report contains discussion of different directions for policy reform, analysis of options for reform, Treasury modelling of options for reform and high-level indicative revenue impacts. The thousand final pages is the AFTS panel’s view, which is what they were asked to provide. It includes the Treasury modelling and any other information that the panel thought was relevant to considering their recommendations.

But we have published more than that. As part of the review we also published a number of other documents that provide further description, discussion, analysis and modelling. They include 344 pages on the architecture of Australia’s tax and transfer system, the 290-page AFTS consultation paper and the 71-page report on the retirement income system. We held conference with leading experts from around the world as part of that and released 11 conference papers. These documents provide a guide to how the current system fits together but it also provides extensive information about how the AFTS panel’s thinking developed over time and what issues they considered along the way. Take, for example, superannuation. The government has released extensive modelling of both the superannuation recommendations in the review and of its own policies.

I refer again to the issue of having trust in our public servants. I believe that these five people are worthy of our trust. I believe they have done the job they were asked to do. They were asked to come up with recommendations. They were not asked to make decisions for the government, and they have not. They have come up with recommendations and they have provided, to the best of their ability, the information that informed those recommendations. They have done their job very well. Obviously, they have probably generated other drafts of documents along the way. Again, I am sure you are not suggesting that we should see early drafts of the documents. That would be quite ridiculous to suggest that. They would have produced working documents that would have been used to inform and crystallise the panel’s own thoughts. I think that we are best served when our public servants are actually allowed to explore through early working documents before they do make final recommendations. As the Treasury’s blue book briefing—which the coalition received—says, much of the information for the Henry review was prepared for internal use and does not lend itself to publication in its original form. We do not do our public service credit if we require them to prepare all of their internal documents in forms suitable for publication. I would hope that the spirit of openness does not require that every internal document prepared along the way be prepared for publication. That would put an incredible additional burden on our public service and restrict their ability to explore issues in the way we expect them to.

A comprehensive presentation of the AFTS panel’s view is contained in the one thousand pages of the report. It also contains all the Treasury modelling and other information that the panel considered relevant when considering their recommendations. When the government has adopted some of the recommendations from the panel, we have released the appropriate modelling for those policies. But we have said from day 1 that this process of tax reform will be an ongoing community conversation. We have released the review in its entirety to start the process of that debate, and there is a lot there to discuss.

The panel has given us something to support us in trying to improve our tax system. I welcome the shadow Treasurer’s commitment to act constructively on this. We have in front of us in this review quite a comprehensive series of recommendations, ideas and questions for us to pursue and I am looking forward to the opposition starting to talk about the actual content of that review rather than suggesting that perhaps the people who put it together were less than open in their inclusions. I believe that they were and I think our public service deserves our respect, our trust and our thanks for a job well done.

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