Craig Laundy (Reid, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In back-of-the-envelope ballpark figures, we have 11.7 million people that have jobs in the Australian economy at the moment. Of those 11.7 million, two million are public servants, as of the last round of state budgets, with more due coming up shortly; 2.5 million are employed in medium-sized businesses, 2.8 million are employed in large businesses; and 4.5 million are in small businesses. This is why this side of the House talks so much about small and family businesses. I include family business, because that is where I come from. We started from a small business, and we have worked hard and been lucky enough to grow it to a large family business. Of all the assets that my family has, the most important asset that it has is its staff. This is what comes out of small and family business. You cannot open the doors in the morning, you cannot take any money and you cannot close up at night unless you have your staff.

It is quite ironic, when talking about work conditions and standards of living, that the members for Grayndler and Gorton, who both come from a union background, stand up and profess a love of small and family business and then divert to talking about big business and unionised workforces. On this side of the house, we concentrate on the section of the economy where we will get growth. If you want to talk about policy development, what I would love to talk about is those opposite in government. I note that there is a member of the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit over there. I refer to ANAO Report No.23 2014–15: Performance Audit into the administration of the Early Years Quality Fund; this is how policy development works under the Labor party. I quote from a key finding:

Successful implementation of policy initiatives requires early, informed and systematic consideration of implementation issues. The design of the EYQF policy contained inherent risks and it was foreseeable that these risks—particularly the funding constraints, the first‐in first‐served approach and the short timeframe—would affect access to the program and its ultimate success.

Normally in policy you would rely upon briefing from the department. In this report, it bells the cat; the briefing went the other way:

This role was made somewhat more challenging for this program because many of the key elements of the EYQF policy were developed by advisers in the offices of the Prime Minister and Finance Minister in negotiation with the key stakeholder representing child care workers.

I thought that 'stakeholder' was a typo. Surely it has to be plural! But no, it was not. When questioning the Auditor-General, it was United Voice. They were in the offices of the Prime Minister and the finance minister, dictating policy and giving it to the department in a first-in, first-served approach. When we had this investigation—with the combined 40 years of audit experience between Mr McPhee, the Auditor-General in this country, and the lady from the Department of Education—they had never seen a first-in, first-served approach to funding. Was that the optimal policy approach? No, it was not. What happened? Well, $150 million went to the Labor Party's mates between 11 am and 2 pm on announcement of this fund.

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