Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I support the legislation to establish a Parliamentary Budget Office. Nobody will forget the furore in the 2010 federal election campaign when the coalition refused to have its policies costed by Treasury under the provisions of the Charter of Budget Honesty. Instead, the coalition went to a private firm of accountants-auditors. None of us will forget that, when Treasury did an analysis of those costings after the election, there was a massive black hole. The accountants-auditors, WHK Horwarth, said that when they were provided with the Liberal Party's election policies they checked them based on the assumptions provided. But the assumptions provided were not made public. Of course an accounting firm is going to look at the assumptions provided to check the figures, but if those assumptions are not made public we do not have a level playing field. If you provide ridiculous assumptions, your ridiculous outcomes can be signed off by a firm of auditors.

So there was a major furore in the election campaign. At the time the Greens held a press conference to reiterate our policy, which had been in place for a long time, that we needed a Parliamentary Budget Office that provided to non-government parties of all kinds and Independent members an opportunity to have budget measures costed and an iterative discussion of those measures over time, and at least the community would then have some confidence that, when the government's costings done by Treasury are released and so are the costings of the Liberals, the Nationals, the Greens, the Independents or whoever put out policies during an election campaign, the figures are reasonably based and that there is no duplicity or attempt to con the public through the underlying assumptions. That is why we reiterated that part of our policy platform in the election campaign.

The Senate will recall that after the election, when no one party won government, the Greens signed an agreement to give our parliamentary confidence and supply to the Labor Party and to the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. In our written agreement with the government, article 4.3 states:

Establishing within 12 months a Parliamentary Budget Office within the Parliamentary Library with the structure, resourcing and protocols being the subject of decision by a special committee of the Parliament which is truly representative of the Parliament.

That was clearly part of the agreement that Prime Minister Gillard signed with the Greens in order to remain Prime Minister, and I am pleased that that undertaking is now being given effect in legislation. It has been part of a process, having been subject to a decision of a special committee of the parliament. It was recognised in the agreement with the government that the process would include every aspect of the parliament—everybody's views.

I reiterate for the purposes of this debate that the Joint Select Committee on the Parliamentary Budget Office had on it representatives from all sides of politics. The chair, Senator John Faulkner, received the thanks of every member serving on the committee for the fair way he chaired the inquiry and for the comprehensive nature of the inquiry. The deputy chair was the Hon. Christopher Pyne, who is the Manager of Opposition Business in the House of Representatives. So the deputy chair was not a novice in parliamentary politics and elections, as we might have thought was the case after listening to the contribution of Senator Cormann. But, no, it was the Manager of Opposition Business. Kelly O'Dwyer MP from the Liberal Party in Victoria was also on the committee, as was Senator Barnaby Joyce from the Nationals. From the Independents there was Mr Robert Oakeshott. I was on the committee representing the Greens, and the Labor Party had not only the chair, Senator John Faulkner, but also Senator Doug Cameron and three members from the lower house—Anna Burke, Nick Champion and Yvette D'ath. We can see that the committee was made up of experienced parliamentarians from across all sides of politics who in many cases had been through not just one but several elections and who understood the process.

The Greens' commitment to a Parliamentary Budget Office particularly concerned making sure policies could be professionally costed and worked through so that the community had the ability to make judgments in an election context. The incredible thing is that the report of that committee, which made a number of recommendations that have now been given effect in the legislation—and I congratulate the Labor government on allocating the funding to not only bring the legislation but give it effect, to have an independent parliamentary budget officer employed and an office set up—was unanimously supported. It is very interesting that Senator Cormann and the rest of the coalition now do not agree with it, because, at the time, there was no dissenting report, there were no additional comments from the coalition. They were happy with the report of the committee at that time.

There is only one reason why the coalition are now running away from supporting what they supported as a result of that process—