Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

To quote Oscar Wilde, the bureaucracy is expanding to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy. Yes, I am being facetious; it's not normally in my nature to do that. I could also quote the late Bert Lance, a Georgian banker and confidant of the 39th President of the United States of America, Jimmy Carter, who said, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' I think we should take a little bit from both of those quotes from those learned gentlemen when discussing the Treasury Laws Amendment (Financial Reporting System Reform) Bill 2026.

Like you, Deputy Speaker Sharkie, when I go home after a parliamentary sitting week, a lot of people ask me: 'What did you discuss in the parliament? What were the big issues at stake?' I look forward, when I attend various events this weekend, to saying, 'Well, I discussed the Treasury Laws Amendment (Financial Reporting System Reform) Bill 2026!' They'll say, 'What was that all about?' and I'll tell them it's about bloating the bureaucracy, but what I won't be able to say is that we talked about the issues that are really important to people.

This morning in Cowra, in central-western New South Wales, the price of E10 went up to 207.9 cents a litre. The price of diesel is 219.9c. That's more than $2 a litre for diesel. In regional areas not only is energy the economy but so is fuel, because it powers cars and trucks and anything else to enable people to get places. More importantly than that, it also powers trucks to get food to capital cities. We do it very well in regional Australia—that is grow food and fibre, of course, as well. Those prices are extraordinary. And the mayor of Cowra, Paul Smith, was beside himself when we spoke this morning about it. In Wagga Wagga, the price is significantly cheaper. Indeed E10 is 167.9c, and diesel is 175.9c. That's the cheapest. It does go up from there, but it's nowhere near the over $2 a litre that they're paying in Cowra—so unnecessary.

I know what's going on in Iran; we all do. But the Strait of Hormuz is still operating. I appreciate that it's one of the most strategic choke points in the world, as far as a shipping lane is concerned, between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. But, seriously, we should be talking about what we're doing about the price of petrol, the cost of living and the price of energy, rather than discussing what we are here.

Let's focus on some of the elements of this bill. I do really question why it is even necessary. The coalition will rightly ask the questions in relation to that. The bill ends the Financial Reporting Council, the Australian Accounting Standards Board and the Auditing and Assurance Standards Board and is updating them. 'Updating' is not the greatest word I could have used in that sentence. Let's just say it replaces them with a single statutory body: External Reporting Australia. Now, accounting and audit standards may sound mundane, may sound technical, but they underpin the credibility of Australia's financial markets and our international reputation. Those two things are very important. They certainly are.

The coalition opposed the government's 2024 climate related financial disclosure regime on the basis that it went way beyond its remit—way too far. As the environmental social governance reporting requirements are expanding reporting standards, they do become sensitive politically. Absolutely they do. Stakeholder submissions looked at this. It was a rarity, I suppose, for this government to actually do a lot of stakeholder submissions. Normally they don't. They normally just rush things through the parliament and rubberstamp them because of their 51-seat majority in the House of Representatives then hope for the best in the Senate. There were concerns over too much power being concentrated in one entity, which is understandable; the removal of clear separation of oversight between the Financial Reporting Council and the technical decision-making of the Australian Accounting Standards Board and the Auditing and Assurance Standards Board; the risk to technical experts of independence and having that independence they have enjoyed in the past; and the scope of ministerial and board powers, particularly given accounting standards apply to both public- and private-sector accounting.

I said in this chamber yesterday that I'm not against ministers having discretion. I'm not against ministers actually doing what ministers always did in the past under this very good Westminster system we operate under. I've bemoaned, many times since Labor took office, the fact that they are, I do believe, watering down the ministerial responsibility. When you do that, you water down the standards of ministers. Ministers have to make decisions. The buck stops with the minister. I know, having been a minister in various portfolios, that it's important that you read the correspondence you get from bureaucrats. I have nothing against bureaucrats. I do not. I think we've got some outstanding bureaucrats in the public service. I have quoted many times the efforts and work that Steven Kennedy, head of Treasury, and Simon Atkinson, head of Infrastructure, went to during COVID-19. They saved many jobs. In fact, they saved many lives with the work that they did.

Right across the board, our bureaucrats do an outstanding job per se, but they don't run the show, and no bureaucrat is ever going to have their name on a ballot paper. I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but they are faceless people. It's the minister who has been appointed by the Prime Minister and by the cabinet and had that ministerial commission adopted and accepted and acknowledged by the Governor-General of the day who gets to make the final decision. We can't give the final decisions to the bureaucrats. We have to have a minister who is willing to make a decision and willing to buck the trend. I do find that sometimes our ministers are not standing up to the bureaucracy and are just being railroaded into doing what the bureaucracy wants.

Importantly, no compelling case has been established that the current model is failing. I revert to Mr Lance's comment, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it,' because it is an issue. He popularised that term in 1977, and it's true today as it was then. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. Why look at it? Why try and adjust it? Why try and amend it? Why try and fix it? If the system is working, leave it well enough alone. The coalition believes that these changes are unjustified.

We believe that there should be Senate scrutiny of governance safeguards, of appointment processes and of independent protections and limits on intervention powers. That's why we've got the Senate there. That's how and why the Westminster system operates so well. Whilst we do have the people's house, the House of Representatives, the house we all belong to, that we were voted to, we've also got the upper house. We've got the house of review, the states' house. They do a mighty fine job in running a ruler over legislation—sometimes before it's even appeared in the House of Representatives, if it's in a draft exposure form. They do a fine job in scrutinising that. They play an important role in overseeing and refining and fine-tuning legislation that has passed the House of Representatives and made its way to the upper house. Then, often it goes to committee to be looked at before it passes the Senate and goes back to the House of Representatives for the final tick-off before it gets to the Governor-General at Yarralumla. That's how the system works.

But, unfortunately, what we've got now is a government which is all too fond, all too keen, to just rubberstamp legislation and push it through the House of Representatives. We saw that yesterday when the member for Lalor, the Chief Government Whip, once again just silenced the debate on an issue, and we saw that with the extraordinary sittings of parliament during January when we were given one day, one morning, to discuss nation-changing legislation—hate speech laws and gun reform. We got very limited time, and very few speakers were able to address those bills. Even those speakers, those members of the House of Representatives, people sent here to do a job by and for and on behalf of their electorates were only given five short minutes to debate what needed a lot longer and probably needed every member of the House of Representatives, all 150 of them, save maybe the Speaker, to talk and discuss and put forward their views on those important nation-changing reforms. But oh no—government doesn't do that.

The coalition does not support reform for reform's sake. We never have and never will. That's what this legislation is. This is just reform for reform's sake at a time when we should be discussing important things such as the cost of living and the outrageous increase in the price of fuel in regional areas. The bowsers from which people are sucking petrol this morning for their cars will not have been affected by anything in Iran yet; that fuel would have been there last week, before Iran was even under attack and when the Ayatollah was, unfortunately, still alive and kicking. We're discussing this bill about changing the bureaucracy—for what reason, I do not know.

This bill abolishes longstanding accounting and auditing standard setting bodies that, I have to say, have served Australia well for decades. The question I have to ask is: why? Why is Labor doing this when we've got so many more important things we could be doing? Is this just a vanity project from some bureaucrat down the hill who's thought: 'Let's just change the organisation. Let's change the letterhead. Let's change the sign on the front door and increase the bureaucracy'? There's been no international credibility crisis—although, I must say, people sometimes must look at Australia and wonder about some of the decisions we take and make. But, anyway, there has been no demonstrated governance failure or international credibility crisis in, I stress, the bureaucratic sense.

Our accounting standards and institutions are respected and internationally aligned—so why change them? To quote Mr Bert Lance, 'If it ain't broke, don't fix it.' Why fix it? If the government wants to dismantle three institutions, it should first show what has in fact failed. What has let the government down so badly that it needs to push these three institutions into one? I do not understand it; I simply don't.

I think that what needs to happen now is that we need to have a good, long, hard think about this. Those who are putting together the legislative framework for and on behalf of the government should think about the things that are important to average, ordinary, everyday Australians—and, at the moment, that's the price of fuel, the cost of living, the price of power and the ability to get things done. But, no, we're talking about bureaucracy. We're taking up the parliament's time talking about putting three organisations into one entity, to satisfy the bureaucratic desires and vanity projects of somebody who will never have their name on a ballot paper. I simply don't understand it. We need to seek a referral to the Senate Economics Legislation Committee for some common sense in regard to this legislation.

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