Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

For some reason, some still refer to the members for Lyne and New England as Independents—joke! During the member for Lyne's painful speech, Mr Oakeshott boldly proclaimed:

We believe in the sunshine test.

It is this hollow promise of transparency that I am most disappointed about.

In April this year I wrote to Mr Oakeshott to inquire about one of the agreements between the country Independents and the Labor government. I inquired about a promise to implement what is called 'spatial accounting', a tool that could be used to track Commonwealth expenditure in regional areas. The response received from Mr Oakeshott was to refer my letter to the Prime Minister. This palming-off of responsibility is made even more ridiculous by the fact that the 'spatial mapping pledge' is found in the agreement of the subsection titled 'accountability'. So much for that lofty ideal!

Among the feel-good platitudes and motherhood statements in Mr Oakeshott's agreement was a promise to 'turbo-charge regional Australia'. As it turns out, there were only two regional electorates that were turbocharged—Lyne and New England. What a slap in the face for the voters living in the other regional electorates across Australia!

I recently did a comparison between the Commonwealth expenditure in my electorate of Canning and New England, and can I say that the results are startling. I actually published an article in the West Australian newspaper, called A funding tale of two cities. As for the concept of detailing expenditure in regional areas, this is one promise that will clearly not be met as to do so would expose the blatant pork-barrelling that occurs to keep the so-called country Independents as pawns of this totally inept Labor administration.

This spatial accounting mechanism is something that I believe is certainly needed, because it would then expose the misdiagnosis of what is going on. We continually try to track what Commonwealth programs are being used and money spent in each electorate. Mr Oakeshott elevated himself to a household name during the agonisingly laborious 17-minute speech in September 2010. As Patrick Carlyon from the Herald Sun described it at the time:

Give him a beard and a snarl, and Oakeshott might have been Kyle Sandilands. Throw him a cravat and he might have been masquerading as Matt Preston.

Forget 15 minutes of fame. If the election result was a (belated) triumph of democracy, as we kept being told, it was also a celebration in shenanigans.

So this rainbow coalition has just been an experiment and unless this government comes good on its spatial accounting for the regional areas we will not know what has been spent in each electorate, and it is subjecting itself to the pork-barrelling that is going on in those two electorates today.