Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Corporate Governance and Responsibility) Share this | Hansard source

That may well be the case. Certainly the rhetoric when this reporting framework was introduced was that it was supposedly going to make things much more understandable and much more accountable—and the fact is it has not. I think senators understand that because we do the estimates process. One would have thought it would not be a particularly difficult ask to get program level amounts, to understand what is allocated within a line item of an output to particular programs, but the reality is many departments refuse to provide that information and the information is aggregated at such a high level it is actually very difficult at times to get clear advice about how much the government is spending under particular programs. The government may want to hide that. It may want to have outputs aggregated at very high levels so it can hide a whole range of its programs and not tell us what is being underspent, what is being overspent and what it is actually doing or not doing. But it is not particularly accountable to announce packages and then not be clear with the parliament and the Australian people, through your financial reporting framework, as to precisely what is being spent and where.

There have been a number of reports by the Auditor-General which have pointed this out. I suggest that this committee report also points this out. We also have independent commentators such as Dr Fels and Mr Brenchley, who recently observed in the Australian Financial Review that the government’s financial discipline and management is in decay and its approach to the financial framework appears to be alarmingly weak. This is an issue of accountability. This is about ensuring that you do with the money what you say you will do. It is about ensuring the parliament is clear about what moneys are being appropriated for. But it is also about performance. We can talk about accountability, which is an extremely important principle, but it is also about performance, because the logic behind a financial reporting framework is to enable users of it, including the public, members of parliament and senators, to be able to make some sort of judgement on the information presented as to whether the purpose for which the money has been appropriated has been achieved and whether there has been performance. If the government were confident about their ability to justify their performance then clearly they would be far more open about disclosing the state of government finances. The government should listen to this report, just as they should take on board the Auditor-General’s report. I look forward to their response on this issue, but I have a feeling it will be a very long time coming. I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.