Sue Boyce (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will speak briefly to give other members of the Senate Select Committee on State Government Financial Management the opportunity to say something. I would like to add my thanks to those of Senator Macdonald and Senator Forshaw to the secretariat, particularly Mr Palethorpe, Mr Watling and their staff, for this report.

Unlike Senator Forshaw, I am confident that this report in the years to come will make a valuable contribution to our understanding of how the states have managed their funds. It has some very, very useful information on the history of payments from the Commonwealth to the states. It contains some other extraordinarily useful graphs and tables, developed specifically for this select committee, on the way that the states have gone about accounting for their expenditure and for their assets, particularly in regard to the government business enterprise accounting procedures.

I will briefly comment on Senator Forshaw’s rather extraordinary claim that the Senate should not inquire into matters other than those that the government thinks should be the ones that get inquired into. We apparently now need the Rudd Labor government’s permission to decide on topics to inquire into. But even Senator Forshaw could not help but comment that in fact the inquiry came up with some important and interesting results; he could not get past that.

Of course Senator Forshaw could now happily bag the former Treasurer of New South Wales. But the fact remains that, even if this inquiry had happened when the Howard-Costello government was in power, the now government, the Labor Party, would still have had to produce a dissenting report. They would have had to look after their Labor mates irrespective of whether they were doing the job or not doing the job, and this report clearly points out that they were not doing the job. If this report had come down two or three months ago, I am sure the government would have been telling us what a sterling job New South Wales was doing and what a wonderful man Mr Costa was. Now that he is no longer the Treasurer, they feel safe to criticise him—when he is finally the one telling us the truth about where the big black holes are. They are not in this report but in the accounting procedures of the states.

I would also like to point out that Senator Forshaw claimed that we only had evidence from a few Liberal shadow treasurers and a couple of academics, who presumably are in Senator Macdonald’s pocket, to comment on financial management. I would have thought that perhaps Mr Derek Bazen, who is an analyst with the State Finances and Reporting Unit of Treasury, might be considered someone who is not entirely in the Liberal Party’s pocket. He talks about the need for a uniform presentation framework for the way budgets are presented. I do not think Treasury are known for their overblown language. In fact, they are known for their very measured assessments of things. Mr Bazen points out that the states do not publish their budgetary information in a uniform way; they can do it to suit their own purposes. He says:

In our monitoring of state finances we tend to rely on a uniform presentation framework, particularly because of the ability to compare what is happening between jurisdictions. But states do vary in terms of what they feel the most important fiscal indicator for their jurisdiction is, and this is why the headline measures that states report often seem a bit at odds in terms of how they present their material.

That is the very dry Treasury view of the sort of accounting that went on, which others in the report call creative accounting and even in some circumstances duplicitous, had it been used in the private sector. There is of course a lot more material in the report on infrastructure spending—the need for it, where it went and the way funding has been used by government business enterprises. But the core of this report is about the desperate need for a charter of budget honesty for the states to use in their accounting so people can be clear about what is held, what is not held and how it is being expended on behalf of the Australian taxpayers, who the opposition represents as does the government.