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

I rise to second the motion on the Parliamentary Budget Office Bill 2011 and the Charter of Budget Honesty Amendment Bill 2011 introduced by my friend and colleague the member for North Sydney. These bills are about restoring credibility and integrity to the policy costings process which has been so grossly politicised and abused by the Gillard government following the 2010 federal election.

This was exposed by Jennifer Hewett in a front-page story in the Australian last September titled 'Coalition counts cost of Treasury's "political game"'. Jennifer Hewett wrote that meeting minutes revealed how the process was 'politicised and influenced by the opinions of the senior bureaucrats'. This was confirmed in the article written by Jennifer Hewett in the Australian. She said:

But the detailed Coalition rebuttal, also obtained by The Australian, demonstrates that the biggest dispute in money terms - $2.5bn over four years - was a more modest version of a similar $4.6bn change adopted by the Labor government in its own budget the previous year.

The opposition claimed $2.5bn in savings from adjusting what is known as the conservative bias allowance (CBA). This effectively meant that the opposition claimed it would be more efficient in delivering spending programs and could therefore reduce the small percentage buffer included to allow for programs going over budget.

There is no doubt that the record of the coalition government on sensible, commonsense and detailed economic management and program management far exceeds that of the Labor government. In just four short years this government has wasted tens of billions of dollars on the pink batts program, the NBN and the education revolution program. All of these things have resulted in tens of billions of dollars of overruns and yet Treasury refused, in this instance, to allow the coalition to exercise a discretion to lower the amount of money allowed for overruns.

Of course, the Treasury had a $5 billion allowance for overruns for this government. We chose to reduce that to $2½ billion because we would oversee these programs in a sensible and effective manner. In subsequent hearings the secretaries accepted that an incoming government might wish to do so as a policy measure. In other words, the same secretaries that sat with us for 3¼ hours in that politicised meeting after the federal election and before a government was formed—the secretaries who told us that they had made a decision and that that was the best they could do to justify taking $2½ billion as a so-called black hole—have subsequently, within weeks, admitted that we had that policy discretion.

This confirms, again and again, the deeply politicised nature. We have had to wear, ever since, what was a political decision by secretaries of departments who sat there and told us, 'We've made our decision,' without giving any justification. That was 25 per cent of the so-called black hole. We went through that process again and again as we challenged assumptions. My colleague mentioned one of those in relation to the interest charged on the debt coming from the NBN.

This bill aims to clear away the capacity of an incumbent government—particularly a Labor incumbent government, which is disposed to this sort of activity—to heavily politicise the nature of the bureaucratic involvement. This bill would set up an office very similar to the Congressional Budget Office in the United States, which is unequivocally independent. It is a model for budget offices around the world. It removes the opportunity for the government of the day to politicise a costing process, as this government did so comprehensively in the last election. It probably delivered them government. The way in which they politicised the process made a significant contribution and gave some of the Independents the excuse they were looking for.

These bills provide for a far more superior model for a parliamentary budget office than that proposed by the government. The government have panicked—they have introduced their own bill two days after we introduced the private member's bill in a panicked move to head off this initiative. They want to go into the next election with every possible advantage, including politicising the Public Service once again. These bills will stop that process. They will ensure that there is an independent group that will take our material—and potentially take the government's material and that of the Greens and the Independents—and will independently assess it. We will have the opportunity to look at the assumptions they make and to amend our proposals accordingly, if that is necessary. It will give this independent office access, without FOIs, which are an interminable process and are included in the government's bill to frustrate this very process.

They have decided not to have a parliamentary budget office. The government's bill, which we will debate later today, is for a politicised budget office. That is what they are looking to create. They are looking to throttle the very vehicle that has been designed to overcome the politicisation of this process. Wouldn't it be good to go into the next election and debate policy without finding ourselves on a daily basis seeking to justify leaks out of the Treasurer's office about our costing process? We spent three weeks of the campaign trying to deal with a politicised leak out of the Treasurer's office in the last campaign, until the point that we gave up any faith in that process and stopped submitting our material.

Wouldn't it be sensible, wouldn't it be the process that the community would wish to see, to go into an election after 33 days of campaigning with all of our policies having been independently and authoritatively costed by this independent parliamentary budget office, and not having to run the gauntlet of a politicised bureaucracy, a government having played tricks the whole way through the campaign? Wouldn't it be far better to go in there and debate policy? They do not want to debate policy; that is their problem. They want to frustrate and politicise the process. In doing so, they are short-changing the community.

We have to have a bill which creates an independent parliamentary budget office. Our bill, the bill introduced by the member for North Sydney, does that. It ensures that this independent office can access information and provide independent advice, with suitably qualified people running the office who look at both our work and the government's work. We will not then see the frustration arising from the nonsense that has gone on in the last 12 months or two years in terms of Treasury's spotty forecasting ability. It has been all over the place, and yet we are expected to tug the forelock and accept every word they say, even when we can demonstrate in private that their assumptions are demonstrably wrong.

There is something fundamentally wrong with this process. We need a parliamentary budget office. We introduced this notion some three years ago, under the former leader, the member for Wentworth. This process has been proven in the United States. This process was adopted by the Greens and the Independents. The government only agreed to it, in the end, to placate the Independents and the Greens—again, to get into office. They got into office, and what have they done? They have presented their own bill—and we will go through this chapter and verse later today—which totally frustrates the intention of this bill. It removes the objective and unbiased approach in the bill. What it does—you will see this bill this afternoon—is make the office just another arm of the bureaucracy, three chairs in the corner of the Parliamentary Library. It is an abuse of the process. We need a bill which establishes a well-resourced, fully independent and confidential parliamentary budget office. I commend this bill to the House.

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