Andrew Laming (Bowman, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There is somewhat of a parliamentary tradition, isn't there, that each year, at the end of the financial year, governments with an agenda rush to get critical legislation through before 30 June. You can definitely understand a first-term government with plenty of legislation on its books doing just that. I certainly recall that, in previous years, even Labor governments in complete disarray managed to find themselves with legislation stacked up and needing to be passed by 30 June.

What makes this very different is that we did not write this original legislation. This was legislation written by the Labor Party, and we are finishing their work for them. This legislation has Labor fingerprints all over it. They drafted it. They even passed it, in July last year, with the intention of it coming into force on 30 June this year. So to claim they have never seen this document before is a masterful waste of 30 minutes of parliamentary time. I have to commend the member for Watson. Many of his frontbench colleagues struggle to see out their time talking about their own portfolios, reading word for word from notes diligently prepared by staffers. Here is a man who can speak for 30 minutes about absolutely nothing. He did it with aplomb. He went on for 30 minutes, complaining that he did not know what cross-references had been changed in the two acts and that he would normally read the entire bill. He could have read the bill in the time he gave that speech. In that 30 minutes he could have turned his attention to the hundreds of cross-references that were omitted by his own drafters in the Labor Party this time last year. Let us be honest: we are just fixing up someone else's mess. Doesn't that ring a familiar bell—fixing up someone else's mess?

We are finishing a reform process that Labor started, making sure there is a new PGPA Act that will take the place of those two very important pieces of parliamentary architecture, the FMA Act and the CAC Act. But we know that a number of acts will be rendered completely ineffective if we do not make these changes. Apologies that it is being done late, but I think a first-term, first-year, first-six-months government has a perfect reason for having a large amount of legislative material to pass through these two chambers between budget and 30 June.

The bills are all about accountability and red tape. They do four things which should be broadly supported. They certainly do the things Australians would expect. What would they expect? They would expect that statutory bodies that operate under federal legislation report closely to parliament on their achievements compared to their objectives. That makes complete sense. They would hope that those who run these entities are responsible for risk management and the performance and sustainability of their departments. That makes perfect sense. You would hope that officers working within those departments also ensure that any funding they expend is expended for a proper purpose and, lastly, that red tape is never imposed unnecessarily. They are the very familiar tenets on which the coalition government was elected last year.

This is a bill that can hardly be a surprise. It is almost impossible for the opposition to claim they have been ambushed by this bill. I could understand if this was a newly created, freshly minted bill which the opposition had not had a chance to look at—but this is Labor Party material, Labor Party documentation and Labor Party legislation, scrutinised by both sides of this parliament as recently as the middle of last year, with changes that effectively amount to little more than cross-referencing. That is right: we realised, through diligent and iterative consultation with the respective authorities, that in many cases the footnoting and cross-referencing did not transfer correctly from the FMA Act and the CAC Act into the new PGPA Act.

This is a thoroughly reasonable proposition. It is vitally important. It has some connections to the Williams High Court decision, interestingly enough, and this bill will be needed by 1 July. But to hear the opposition with so little to say about a bill that is so obviously of their conception—one that is so thoroughly noncontroversial—and for someone as senior as the member for Watson to come before this chamber and claim that MPs have not read every word in the bill, stimulates me to highlight all the little pieces of cross-referencing that have been added in which were omitted originally and which made this bill ineffective, because that is all the member for Watson needs to read. If he really needs someone to do it for him, I am sure he can find someone and we can highlight the footnotes. Do we need to detain the chamber for half an hour to argue about that? It is pretty disappointing. There are some far bigger agenda items facing this country than the waste of that 30 minutes by the previous Labor speaker.

I will commend anything that reduces red tape. We are all passionate, on both sides of this chamber, about governance and probity reforms. To say this is an ambush of the Labor Party by the coalition is a complete fabrication. We support these laws. We support these amendments. We support these tiny changes which make this bill work and we support their introduction before 30 June.

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