Stephen Jones (Whitlam, Australian Labor Party, Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

It's important because it consolidates over 30 government business registers into one place and puts them under the control of the Australian Tax Office, which will manage these programs. It's an important program for businesses because it means that their interactions with government are made more efficient—saving money—but also ensuring that users of those businesses are able to access important information, such as the identification of directors or the locations of businesses, important in all sorts of programs and processes, including in insolvency processes. At the time of its establishment, the government told us that this project was going to cost $480 million—a lot of money, but we thought that was going to be enough to make the project successful.

On coming into government, we were briefed almost immediately that the program was woefully underfunded. Emergency funds were allocated to the Australian Tax Office to attempt to see the project over a fiscal cliff, which was fast approaching. We then asked them to give us a detailed analysis of how much the entire project was going to cost. The cost envelope kept moving and moving and moving. We are now aware that, instead of this project in total costing somewhere around $480 million, as we were informed by the former Assistant Treasurer, the project will cost in excess of $1.5 billion. That is a billion dollar blowout in the cost of this program.

Day after day, members of the coalition come into this place and ask that we, as the government, pay recognition for their excellent record of economic management. The fact is that they were incompetent economic managers that left us with a trillion dollars worth of debt and program after program unfunded and unable to be delivered, and this is just another one of them. The businesses, including the small businesses of Australia, deserve much better than this—an incompetent government and an incompetent opposition. (Time expired)

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