Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Coalition Policy Development Committee) Share this | Hansard source

Last week the Prime Minister, in a speech which mapped out or sought to map out the key principles that she and the government would take to the reform process for this term of office and that would underpin any reforms that were introduced, pointed out, amongst other things, that transparency would be central to the government’s approach. One of the key planks of reform and debate and the resolution of matters in a balanced way would be the need for transparency. Well, here is the first opportunity. Here is the first test that the Prime Minister is being given to prove that she meant what she said last week. It is the first test of the Prime Minister’s very clear commitment to the principles that she said last week, unambiguously, would be the key planks of any reform by this government.

It is the first chance to prove that this government has changed its modus operandi since the first term of office. It is the first chance to contradict the observation by John Faulkner last week. He put his finger on the problem of Labor’s first term. He said when he was reflecting on Labor and the perceptions of Labor in the community, ‘We are very long on cunning and very short on courage.’ Of course, the first term of this government was characterised by a litany of lack of transparency on very major reforms. We saw with the commitment to the national broadband network, the biggest commitment of funds for any project in Australia’s history, absolutely no transparency, no acceptance of or commitment to a cost-benefit analysis and still no commitment or any attempt to reveal a business plan for a $43 billion project. It is an absolute disgrace and a totally irresponsible position by this government. It is characterised first and foremost by the lack of any transparency about how that decision was taken, why it was taken, how it would stand up and why it is good value for money for the taxpayers who will have to fork out that $43 billion.

On Infrastructure Australia we saw again project after project worth billions and billions of dollars, for which cost-benefit analyses were conducted by Infrastructure Australia but the board was totally frustrated by the government’s refusal to release any of that information. The government made decisions again to the tune of tens of billions of dollars without any release of cost-benefit analyses, why they took those decisions, why one decision was better than another or why it was value for money. We have seen it again and again. We saw the Minister for Infrastructure and Transport say that it was commercial-in-confidence. That, of course, is a total nonsense. Look at the Victorian government. Rod Eddington put up a very comprehensive infrastructure plan for that state. It had every working, every cost-benefit analysis, every piece of modelling—everything is on the state government’s website.

The world has gone on. There has been no conflict of interest between commercial interests. There is no argument other than the government being ‘long on cunning and very short on courage’. We saw it again with the mining taxes referred to over the weekend. We find from FOI that the government in June were advised that the superprofits tax could be found unconstitutional if just one state changed a mining royalty rate. The same argument applies to the tax’s successor, the mineral resources rent tax, which means that there is $10 billion in anticipated revenue in doubt. This bill must be passed. It is essential for good government and for transparency.

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