Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The final report into the Senate Select Committee into the Abbott Government’s Commission of Audit that is being tabled here reveals the commission of audit process for what it was: a sham, a fraud and a fig leaf with predetermined outcomes designed to ascertain one single political goal of producing a report that is so outrageous, so devastating, so bad for the people of Australia and so unpopular that it could even try and make the last budget look reasonable. It failed on many levels. The report that was produced by the Commission of Audit was predetermined from the start, and our report into that process reveals this. It was an inquiry where not one of the commissioners was there to properly and adequately represent the community sector and the services sector.

Let me be clear: five very eminent people were chosen to do this Commission of Audit review for the government, and I have no issue with any of them as individuals. Many of them have contributed in many ways, particularly in the business field and many of them have a contribution to public policy. My issue throughout this whole process was that they were the only voices that were participating in this. Rather than having a balanced process, with people from the community sector, from the charity sector and from the trade union sector included as part of this discussion, you had a process that was stacked by the Business Council of Australia, who themselves had called for this review in the first place.

Let us be clear, the first people to call for a Commission of Audit were those in the Business Council of Australia. They called for this process, and in calling for it, they produced their own report in the middle of last year about what they would like to see in a commission of audit review. The government then appointed the chairman of the Business Council of Australia to head up the inquiry and, more worryingly, hired the policy director from the BCA—the person who had already produced their report—as the head of the secretariat. This was not an open process; this was not a transparent process; this was not a fair and equitable process; this was a predetermined process. The terms of reference themselves were highly worrying. There is no doubt that if you are going to have a debate about debt and about spending, firstly, you have to be honest about the facts—and there is a lot of debate going on in politics at the moment about what those facts are. Secondly, you have to make sure that you are looking at not only expenditure but also income. I think a major flaw in this process was that failure to have a proper process where the income component was also being looked at.

So, what did you get at the end of this? You got a series of outrageous measures and outrageous proposals that came through from the Commission of Audit, some of which, worryingly, this government seems to think are something that they want to inflict on the Australian people. The ideas that came through included ideas like the co-payment for Medicare services; they floated a $15 fee, but the government proposed a lower figure. It is another example of where this report has been—