Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The President has received the following letter from Senator Moore:

Pursuant to standing order 75, I propose that the following matter of public importance be submitted to the Senate for discussion:

"The failure of the Abbott Government to release the interim report of the Commission of Audit."

Is the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

I understand that informal arrangements have been made to allocate specific times to each of the speakers in today’s debate. With the concurrence of the Senate, I shall ask the clerks to set the clock accordingly.

Kate Lundy (ACT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At 12 noon today the government defied a Senate order to table the first report of the Commission of Audit. They did so because this is a secret report. We know that the last time a coalition government prepared a commission of audit, in 1996, it laid out a blueprint of cuts to the public sector in such a way that it permanently changed the nature of public service in Australia. We are at risk of them wreaking such damage again. And, whilst this report remains secret, the Australian people are uninformed of its contents. The threat of cuts has hung over the Australian people since the election.

I would just like to go through a chronology of events leading up to this day. On 6 September last year, Mr Abbott suggested that there would in fact be no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS. Then, on 22 October, the National Commission of Audit was announced by the Treasurer, Mr Joe Hockey, and the Minister for Finance, Senator Cormann. At the time, the government said this:

The Commission has been established by the Australian Government as an independent body to review and report on the performance, functions and roles of the Commonwealth government.

Then, at the end of January, the commission reported on the first phase of the review to the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and the Minister for Finance. Yet, on 14 February, we know that phase 1 of this report was provided to senior ministers, according to the letter tabled by Senator Cormann. Then, on 5 March, an order for the production of documents was put forward by Senator Di Natale. On 11 March, Mr Abbott changed his tune, asserting that the only areas quarantined from savings pre the election were defence, health and medical research.

We are now heading towards the end of March, when we know that the Commission of Audit is to provide the second phase of its review. The government have so far refused to put a date on when the Commission of Audit's report will be released publicly, although Mr Hockey has said that they hope to release it before the budget. But today we find that not only have they defied a Senate order but they have claimed public interest immunity for doing so, and we are still left in the dark. We do not know where the government plans to make cuts. We asked questions about this today in question time and we got back words that I believe show that this government is keeping some room to move. I asked a question specifically about cuts to the ABC and SBS. I did not get a definitive response of 'No cuts'—reflecting on its previous commitment—'We have no plans to do that.'

But what we know about the behaviour of coalition governments from previous reports is that they had no plans to do a whole heap of stuff that was subsequently outlined and recommended in their commission of audit report—and I think they are going to do it again. Labor has been meticulous in expressing its concern about what this Commission of Audit will mean, not only for the Australian Public Service but for so many of the essential services that it provides the people of Australia.

One of the big issues that has emerged since we have been debating this issue is the timing of the report. We know that the government have said that they are using this information in the lead-up to the budget and we know that the commissioners themselves have been told no area is off limits. We know that Mr Hockey, the Treasurer, has said that they are looking forward to adopting—and I am paraphrasing—pretty much all or most of the Commission of Audit's recommendations. This government cannot have it both ways. They are going either to use the Commission of Audit report as a basis to progress cuts or ask these commissioners to do a whole heap of work that will mean absolutely nothing.

What I defer to is what I know about the coalition's previous behaviour. What we know about the pattern of behaviour of coalition governments is that they go into elections, as they did in 1996, saying: 'We're not going to do anything much. We're not going to cut much. We're going to do a few things here and a few things there; but don't worry, it is business as usual.' Nothing could be further from the truth. The Australian people endured a similar response this time from the coalition as they did from them when they went into the last election: 'Don't worry. We're not going to make cuts.' The Prime Minister said then, 'No, there are not going to be any changes to health, no changes to pensions, no change to the GST, no cuts to the ABC or SBS, no cuts to education.' We have already seen a very different story emerge.

The secrecy surrounding the Commission of Audit means that, in going into this budget, we are fearful of the sort of havoc that the coalition government will wreak. We have established a Senate select committee, which has already tabled an interim report. In its very first chapter is a recommendation for a series of measures of accountability and scrutiny to be applied to the commission of audit process. Several recommendations were prepared and expressed in such a way that even things like the schedule of meetings should be laid out, the evidence collected should be expressed and, of course, the report—its outcomes and recommendations, which we know are sitting on ministers' desks right now—should be open to the public. This report should be open to scrutiny. If it is an input to budget, it should be scrutinised.

I would like to use my final couple of minutes to talk about some of the important evidence we have gathered. I am a senator for the ACT, as my colleagues are aware, and I remember the experience of the last time a coalition government came to power and had a national commission of audit. Its report back to the government was that the cuts to the public sector were both arbitrary and harsh—so much so that many people did lose their jobs in the ACT and our economy took a dive for a substantial period of time. This time the coalition government has relied on similar rhetoric, saying things like 'The Public Service has expanded significantly over the last 20 years'. That is not true. Over the last 20 years the Public Service has gone from 160,000 to 167,000, whereas the population has increased from 17.8 million to 23 million. So the population has grown by nearly 30 per cent but the public sector workforce has grown by just four per cent. There is no explosion in the Public Service. Further, Commonwealth Public Service expenditure is a mere 0.2 per cent more as a share of GDP than the last commission of audit back in 1996.

Evidence was taken from a number of people who appeared before the committee, and here I refer in particular to the evidence provided by Ms Nadine Flood, the National Secretary of the Community and Public Sector Union. She very clearly laid out the credentials of the Australian Public Service: it was rated by the World Bank in 2012 as being in the top six in the world as far as government effectiveness was concerned and in the top three per cent for regulatory quality. At the same time, Australia was the lowest-taxing country. Some of the most compelling evidence that we have received during this inquiry is starting to unpick some of the assumptions and assertions that have been made in the terms of reference of the Commission of Audit and the work that it is doing. If you analyse closely how the terms of reference are expressed in the brief that has been given, they are misleading in the very first instance. We do not have an exploding Public Service. We do not have an inefficient Public Service. We do not have a high-taxing government that somehow needs to find those savings, and we do not have a commission of audit process that is even addressing the revenue issues, which can start to look at some of the structural challenges of the budget going forward. As all of this piles up, it looks like a very political exercise put in place by a government committed to cutting government, not committed to good public policy or good governance.

This is a great shame for the Australian people. If we see anything like the contrivance that has been conducted in the past, if we see this coalition government using their Commission of Audit report to justify a series of cuts, then that will be the evidence we need to say to the people of Australia: you cannot trust a government that keeps secrets, you cannot trust a government that is unprepared to share its processes and allow the light of day to be shone upon them as it considers its budget contributions. I certainly commend my colleagues to support this matter of public importance and to watch this space as the mystery of the secret of the Commission of Audit continues to unfold.

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This morning, when I read the matter of public importance proposed by Senator Moore for today, I smiled. It reads:

The failure of the Abbott government to release the interim report of the Commission of Audit.

As you know, Mr Acting Deputy President Bishop, I am an admirer of Senator Moore. She is always eloquent, often elegant, always interesting, extremely polite—and you cannot say that about all my colleagues! But always—

Opposition Senators:

Opposition senators interjecting—

Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Some of them, but not all! But I thought that Senator Moore might have injected this MPI into the Senate for debate this afternoon as some sort of ironic flourish, perhaps with a smile upon her face. One only has to go back six months, to the parting gift of the former, Labor government to the people of this country, to think Senator Moore's MPI must be ironic. As their parting gift, Labor left us—I just checked before—$123 billion worth of cumulative deficits over the forward estimates, gross debt headed towards $667 billion within a decade and our current net debt at something over $185 billion.

Now the Labor Party have come into the Senate with seemingly straight faces, arguing—let me get this right—that the Abbott government should release the Commission of Audit's report so that we can straightaway determine how pathetic, how hopeless, how unruly, how shambolic the Labor Party were in government! That is clever. I do not quite get the game. Obviously, it is a more sophisticated political game than I am aware of! I find it strange that the government should be forced to quickly tell how dismal, how wasteful and chaotic Labor were at governing. The Labor Party are saying, 'How dare the government keep the voters from knowing the extent of Labor's mismanagement; how dare they'! I do not like giving advice in this place—far be it from me to give advice—but if I were in the opposition I would not want the Commission of Audit's report ever to be released, because all it will say is what a shambles the last government was, what a fiasco that government was and what a failure it was.

The report will come out, no doubt, when the government have fully considered all the detail and when we have had the time to carefully and deliberately examine all the issues raised. I hate to score a political point—because I never do that!—but let me remind the opposition that it took Labor about 130 days to release its taxation review, undertaken by the former Treasury Secretary, Dr Henry. It was 130 days before that was released. I can promise you this: at least when the Commission of Audit report does come out, when it finally comes out, we will not do what the Labor Party did to the Henry report—that is, completely ignore it. We will be listening, we will be learning and we will be acting.

The root problem with the Australian Labor Party at the moment, and I think I have touched on this before along the way, is that the social democratic framework they are working from, that their counterparts in Western Europe are working from, has been exposed as a great con, like a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme, not only sanctioned by the Labor Party but also eulogised by them.

The Labor Party, from the beginning, have assumed that the number of taxpayers as well as national productivity will continue to grow at a sufficient rate to support growing social welfare. The assumption always by the Labor Party and, no doubt, the Greens is that there will be more taxpayers and greater productivity to continue to fund greater and greater expenditure on health, education and welfare. But it breaks down if either of two things happen: (1) if the number of taxpayers or the productive output of a nation is insufficient to meet the obligations made by government; or (2) if the obligations keep increasing because of, for example, increasing life expectancy. What has happened in the West for least the past 20 years is that both scenarios are now appearing. There are not enough taxpayers and we are not sufficiently productive to meet the ever-expanding welfare demands. That, in effect, is the problem. We have neither the taxpayers nor the productivity to continue to fund health, education and welfare. Before anyone says, 'It's all about infrastructure,' it is not. What is killing the West and killing Australia, in fact, is recurrent expenditure. We cannot afford the health, education and welfare expenditure that we are currently committed to. That is the problem.

So how have Western nations met these increasing welfare demands? By going into debt. They have borrowed money to pay for them. Because we do not raise enough money through taxation to pay for health, education and welfare, we have borrowed from our kids and from our grandchildren—so we can live better at their expense. That is what the Labor Party believe. That is what the Greens believe. They think it is okay to borrow from our children and our grandchildren so we can have more welfare, so we can have more superannuation; of course, it is bad luck for them, because they will be paying the bill. That is okay, to the Labor Party and the Greens. It is all right to borrow money from our kids and our grandkids to pay for the high life for us! That is what they say.

The report of the Commission of Audit will say that. It will talk about the economic failures of the Labor Party. Of course it will. They were economically illiterate. But there is something far worse than that about the Left in this country—far worse. It is not just the economic failure; it is the moral failure of the Left in Australian politics and in the Western world. Anyone who believes that it is okay to borrow from our children and our grandchildren to pay for recurrent expenditure is absolutely disgraceful. That is the problem with the Left in the Western world. Why do you think the United States, Great Britain and Western Europe are falling? Why is their power, relatively, starting to fade? I will tell you why. It is because they have lived beyond their means. That is the truth.

Australia, just six or seven years ago, did not have any debt, but now we are stuck with it. What is worse is that it is becoming structural, which of course the Labor Party and the Greens do not mind. They do not mind if there is constant debt, because governments then become the centre of the economy. When all the spivs, the speculators and the rent seekers come along, they can decide who gets the money. That is what the Left in this country believe. They stand up here, as they will in a minute, and say, 'We should not cut X, Y or Z.' That is what they will argue. They never come in here and say, 'We should cut A, B and C.' They never come in here and tell us how they are going to solve the problem—a problem that they created. They created this huge structural debt, the fastest growing debt in the Western world. They created it. Have they ever come in here and said, 'We could solve it by doing A, B and C'? Never. All they do is run a scare campaign saying that the ABC is going to be cut or that the Public Service is going to be cut.

The fact is that someone in this country is going to have to make some tough decisions—not, frankly, for my welfare, the welfare of the government or the welfare of the Labor Party or the Greens but for the welfare of our children and our grandchildren. Either we start to live within our means—either we cut expenditure or raise taxation, one or both of those things—or our children and our grandchildren will be paying our debt. If you do not believe me, go and speak to a teenager in Greece. Quite frankly, if I were a teenager in Greece, I would want to shoot every baby boomer and every politician in the damn country. We should not ever let that happen in this country. Under our watch, it will not.

Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am reminded of the words that the Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, uttered during the election campaign. He made this promise to the Australian people. He said that he would lead an open, honest and transparent government. He made that promise to the Australian people and those are very noble sentiments. They are sentiments that, regardless of what side of politics you are on, ought to be acknowledged and agreed with—because transparency is the lubricant through which governments function properly.

That is why so many people have become alarmed at what has emerged from this government since the election. This concern does not come from just the usual suspects; it comes from right across the political spectrum. It comes from commentators and from people right across the media. They are concerned about the culture of secrecy that has emerged and that has infected everything this government does. We are now seeing information tightly controlled by the Prime Minister. We have seen leaked newspaper reports that state that all media coordination and requests need to go through the Prime Minister's office—centralised control.

During the election campaign, you could not shut the Prime Minister or Minister Morrison up on the issue of refugees and asylum seekers. You could not shut them up. They were photographed next to banners with tallies of boat arrivals, we heard them talk about towing back boats and we even heard them talking about buying boats from Indonesian fishermen. What has happened now? They were elected into government and Minister Morrison and the Prime Minister have gone missing in action on this issue. 'No comment—that is an operational matter.' 'No comment—that is an on-water matter.'

Remarkably, in response to a request for information from this Senate—an order for the production of documents relating to Operation Sovereign Borders—we got a public interest immunity claim: 'Sorry, we cannot provide you with that information. All we can do is provide you with private briefings on matters that have been discussed in press conferences.' We are not interested in that. We are not interested in a few short paragraphs that tell us that something is an operational matter or an on-water matter.

It goes further. Freedom of information requests have been made more difficult. The media is no longer able to access ministers on critical issues. We get told that things are cabinet-in-confidence, that they are protected by public interest immunity or that they are operational matters. These terms are thrown around like confetti. It is an old ploy. It is a ploy you use when you want to bury information. The promise of open, honest and transparent government has not been delivered.

I refer this government that is so intent on maximising freedom to a passage from a 1966 work, Freedom in Australia,by Campbell and Whitmore. It says:

The most pernicious of official attitudes is secrecy. Ministers and officials have developed a firm attitude that the general public are not entitled to know anything about what they are doing—even if their actions vitally affect the rights of citizens both individually and collectively.

Yet here we are—with the government that promised to maximise individual freedoms missing in action.

In 2010, Senator Cormann, now the Minister for Finance, who was then intent on getting information from the then government, made the following accusation about that government:

… this is an arrogant, secretive government which has repeatedly refused to answer questions and which has not taken seriously orders of the Senate.

This is hypocrisy writ large.

We have senators who have sought access to information in relation to a specific matter for months now and the government has declined to provide that information

We think the release of that information is critical. I do not understand why the government is treating this as if it is a national security related state secret, given the words from Mr Cormann, the very person who has made the public interest immunity claim that is the subject of today's debate.

The Commission of Audit is a critical piece of information. It is the most important piece of work done in many years. It will inform the federal budget, and we already know from the commissioners themselves that everything is on the table. The issue of Medicare co-payments has already been floated, so that now there will be a six-dollar fee when someone goes to see their GP. It will be the end of bulk-billing. We have seen huge cuts to the public sector being floated. We have seen cuts to the Disability Support Pension. We have heard that the privatisation of Australia Post is on the table, and so on, and so on. These are significant changes, and they are worthy of public debate.

We do not shy away from the idea of a debate on these matters, and a Commission of Audit may, indeed, be a good idea. An honest debate—one that Senator Mason wants to have—about spending and revenue is a good thing, because we have some major challenges and we need to start planning for the future. But, instead, the process we have is a black box. We have the commissioners being hand-picked. We have the terms of reference biased to get a particular outcome. Submissions are not being made public. That is why we have had to set up an inquiry into this process, so that we at least inject some transparency into what is going to be one of the most important documents considered by a federal government in decades.

What has emerged through that inquiry is that contrary to Senator Mason's assertions we have a very efficient public sector. Public spending is not out of control; it has been stable for two decades and, compared with most other countries, we do very well when it comes to the spend of public moneys. Of course we can do better. But we do much, much better than most other countries on that measure. When it comes to our health system, far from being unsustainable, we have one of the most efficient and one of the fairest health systems anywhere in the world. We get value for money because of the fact that we have a single public insurer that allows us to drive down costs through the delivery of health care services. Far from being unsustainable, our health system delivers value for money.

We know that this is a country that is a low-taxing country, and we are taxing at a much lower rate, as a proportion of GDP, then we taxed during the Howard era, for example. They are some facts that need to be ventilated through this debate. Our tax take, as a proportion of GDP, has decreased significantly since the Howard era and is much lower than that of most other OECD countries. We have a revenue problem, not a spending problem. We have heard a lot about corporate welfare through the inquiry that we have run, and we have heard Joe Hockey talk about the age of entitlement. Well, let's start talking about the huge corporate welfare that flows to the mining sector. Let's talk about the huge subsidies and tax concessions that are given to other sectors of the economy, like the private health insurance industry. And let's start talking about some sacred cows like negative gearing and the huge concessions that are given through superannuation.

You see, what we have at the moment is an ideological debate. We have a government that believes that we should tax at a lower rate. Well, if you are going to tax at a lower rate than the one at which we are currently taxing, then what are we going to cut? What sort of society do we want to live in? Do we want a health system like in the US, where there are 50 million people uninsured and where the biggest cause of personal bankruptcy is people not being able to pay their health insurance bills? That is the recipe from this government, and it is not one that the Australian people want. We are heading towards a dog-eat-dog world under this government—a less caring society where it is everyone for themselves. If we are going to have a debate, we should have it. We should do it publicly. The government should release the findings of the Commission of Audit, instead of providing this as political cover for a government that wants to implement their agenda.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on this matter of public importance: the failure of the Abbott government to release the interim report of the Commission of Audit. Labor said, prior to the 2013 federal election, that the coalition had a secret cuts agenda, and that has been proven to be true. It is an agenda that was hidden to avoid a backlash against the Liberals and Nationals at the Tasmanian and South Australian elections held last weekend. It is an agenda that remains hidden to avoid a backlash at the Western Australian Senate election. The Prime Minister, Mr Abbott, did his utmost before the election to reassure Australians. He promised a government of no surprises. Yet, since the election of an Abbott coalition government, there have been nasty surprises at every turn, and the Australian people are coming to realise that the government we have now is not the government they thought they were voting for.

You see, Mr Abbott is one of Australia's most talented magicians. I do not often have very nice things to say about Mr Abbott, but I will give him this: he is one of Australia's most talented magicians. If you speak to a professional magician, they will tell you that the art of magic is distraction. It is encouraging your audience to focus on some colour and movement elsewhere while the trick is performed away from the gaze. Mr Abbott's magic trick was to announce a few cuts here and there—the Schoolkids Bonus, foreign aid, tax concessions for small business—while hoping his audience would be distracted from the deeper cuts that were to follow. The initial cuts were the distraction; the Commission of Audit was the sleight of hand. The commission was Mr Abbott's way of hiding the more severe cuts until after the election. It is a trick we have seen practised before with great skill.

Premier Campbell Newman, in Queensland, also announced a Commission of Audit, but he did not reveal his plans to sack 20,000 public servants until after the Queensland election. If you think the Newman government's cuts are savage, they are just the warm-up act, whereas the Abbott government's cuts are the main show. But the Abbott government are not ready to reveal their plans just yet, and that is why they are refusing to release the Commission of Audit's interim report. They were worried about how revealing their secret cuts agenda would affect their performance in last year's federal election. They were worried about how their secret-cuts agenda might impact on their state colleagues in the Tasmania and South Australia elections. Now they are worried about how their secret-cuts agenda will impact on the Senate election in Western Australia.

It has been revealed time and again that the modus operandi of this Abbott coalition government is to wait until people have voted before they reveal their true plans. Here is a case in point. On SBS news, the day before the election, Mr Abbott promised no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS. Yet at a doorstop in Perth, only six days ago, he said that—apart from Defence—health and medical research was the only area of government funding quarantined from savings pre-election. After ruling out cuts to education, pensions and Australia's public broadcaster, Mr Abbott has backflipped spectacularly on all these areas. We know that a belated attempt was made by the Abbott government to walk away from its commitment to the first four years of Better Schools or Gonski funding, and now that Mr Abbott has let slip that cuts to education are on the cards I have no doubt that this issue will rear its ugly head again.

We know this government backed away from the full fibre-to-the-premises rollout of the National Broadband Network in Tasmania, despite promising before the election to honour all existing contracts. We also see the government announcing an efficiency review of the ABC—suspiciously the day after Mr Abbott accused the public broadcaster of being un-Australian—and they have not ruled out cuts to the ABC's funding, following that review. While the government did reveal, prior to the election, plans to scrap the instant asset write-off for small business, they did not publicise the limited time businesses have to claim the concession. I suppose they were hoping they could pinch a few more pennies by having business make as few claims as possible. This is from a government that claims to care about and support small business.

Those opposite also scrapped the climate change commission and attempted to close down the Climate Change Authority and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. They made the pathetic excuse that these moves would lead to the removal of the carbon price. I and other senators who spoke previously in this place outlined very clearly why these bodies play such an important role in climate change advice and clean energy development, with or without a carbon price. The Abbott government's list of casualties from its cuts so far includes the Home Energy Saver Scheme, which provides energy savings to low-income households—quite hypocritical, given what the government has had to say about electricity prices; the AusAID graduate program, at a cost of 38 jobs; Indigenous legal services and domestic-violence support services; the 46-year-old Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia; and 600 jobs at the CSIRO, including some of Australia's best scientists.

The recent change of name of the National Disability Insurance Scheme's 'launch' site to a 'trial' site has led to the disability sector wondering whether the axe might fall on disability support. When those opposite try to justify their harsh cuts, we will hear them wax lyrical—they will put on theatre, like Senator Mason did earlier. They will yell, as life is so stressful on that side, and get all uptight and have to take their blood pressure tablets. They will talk about debt and deficit and the government having to live within its means, and they will try to tell Australians that savage cuts are necessary because the previous government was wasteful and inefficient.

Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In the previous six years; I agree. There's more debt now.

Catryna Bilyk (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is absolutely predictable rhetoric from government senators who stick their fingers in their ears and sing 'la, la, la' or try to interject whenever someone mentions the biggest global economic downturn since the Great Depression. It is not only predictable but also the height of hypocrisy from a government that sought permission from the parliament for a 67 per cent increase in government debt—and then sought permission for unlimited debt. It is hypocritical coming from a government that has, this financial year, added $17 billion to the budget deficit. And it is hypocritical coming from a government that is telling pensioners, school children and families they will have to make sacrifices so that millionaires can get paid $75,000 to have children, so the same millionaires can get a tax break on their superannuation; so the government can hand over $8 billion to the Reserve Bank, against the advice of Treasury; so the government can subsidise polluters through its inefficient and expensive Direct Action Plan; so the government can tell polluters they do not have to pay for their pollution; and so the government can cut taxes for billionaire miners who make superprofits.

Those pensioners, families and school children who are now making sacrifices will have to wait to find out the worst of these cuts. The commission's report is kept hidden, because the government does not want Australians to know what it has in store. They refuse to reveal how much funding they will cut to schools, how much they will cut pensions and how much they will slash the budget of the ABC—all to fund tax breaks and parental leave for millionaires and billionaires. This government has its priorities very wrong. Schools, pensions and disability care are not waste. Tax breaks and subsidies for millionaires are.

It is time for those opposite to come clean and reveal to the Australian public where the axe will fall. They did not tell Australians before the weekend's state elections. They should at least tell Western Australians before they go to the polls to elect six senators. Western Australians have the right to know—before they vote—whether the Abbott axe will fall on their pensions, schools or essential public services. If they do not know the Liberal-National coalition's secret-cuts agenda, if they do not know how it will affect them, then they should not vote for them. It is time for voters in Western Australia, South Australia and Tasmania, and across the country, to be treated with honesty and with some integrity by this government. Honesty is in short supply when it comes to those opposite and their coalition colleagues in the House.

Despite the deficit of honesty on the other side, I will give Mr Abbott credit for telling the truth about one thing. He said before the election that he wanted to lead a government that will 'under promise, and over deliver'. When it comes to Mr Abbott's agenda of savage cuts, he has achieved exactly that. He has delivered far more cuts than he promised. And there are more to come.

Dean Smith (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to rise to speak today on this matter of public importance. It is indeed a matter of very significant public importance. By listening to the contribution of other senators many might think that there was not a problem facing the Australian economy and that there was not a problem facing the budget position of the new, coalition government.

It was interesting to read, last week, that prominent Australian chief executives of some of our leading corporations had travelled all the way to London to talk about the Australian economic experience and some of the challenges facing the new government. I was surprised that they travelled all the way to London to talk about some of the challenges, because if they had stayed in Melbourne last week they would have seen the work of the National Commission of Audit and they would have understood my concern that, unfortunately, Labor and Greens senators have been too quick to abandon or to criticise the work of the National Commission of Audit. They have been too quick to ignore the very serious budget problem that faces our country.

I want to reflect on that problem for a moment, because I do not think I have yet heard other senators in this debate talk about the serious economic challenges facing our country—and, more importantly, the government—as we proceed towards the budget in May. Let me just give you a sense of the enormity of the challenge. Eight billion dollars a year is being spent on interest payments alone to meet the debt of the former government. That is $8 billion that could be used for education or to support regional communities like those that Senator Back represents. That $8 billion could be used to support more efficient health delivery. In addition to that, I have not heard Labor senators—or Greens senators, for that matter—talk about the increasing rate at which government expenditure is occurring. I am happy to stand corrected but, if my recollection serves me correctly, 3.5 per cent is the rate at which government spending has been increasing over the last five years. Into the medium term that is expected to increase to 3.7 per cent, at a time when our nation's revenue base is diminishing.

If we looked specifically at expenditure in health, we would know that health expenditure has been increasing at a rate of almost 4.5 per cent. Clearly, we have a challenge. What is different about this government's approach from the previous government's approach—the challenge was there prior to 7 September last year—is that this government has decided that it will tackle, address, amend and correct the budget emergency that the former government has left us with.

We hear a lot about Senate obstructionism and about the games that Labor and Greens senators play. Often senators on this side—government senators—are keen to draw the community's attention to the delay and obfuscation of senators opposite but it was interesting to note what Dr Chris Roberts said last week in London. Chris Roberts is the CEO of Cochlear. He said to an English audience that the Greens, who are economically and scientifically illiterate, were a great concern. He said that it was as if they wanted us all to be subsistence farmers and that they fundamentally do not understand how the world works. What Dr Roberts was saying was that it is very important that senators in this place understand and come to appreciate the enormity of the budget challenge that this government has inherited and has decided to address.

In addition to that it is important to note that we have had, I think, four hearings of the Senate inquiry into the National Commission of Audit so far. It is fair to say that they started with great gusto. I think that Labor and Greens senators were hoping to find a mass of information that they could use to go to the community to scare the community into believing that the government might adopt some ill-conceived or ill-thought-out recommendations. But we know that the National Commission of Audit is conducting its work to provide advice to government about the sorts of things that the government may choose to include in its budget in May next year.

We know that the government may decide to accept some of those recommendations. We know that the government may decide to reject some of those recommendations. Indeed, the government might decide to amend some of those recommendations. So, what we have here, in my humble assessment, is a very astute way in which to address the budget crisis or the budget emergency.

So, when Labor senators try to tell you, 'This is terrible; expect cuts. This is terrible; we are all doomed,' perhaps we should reflect on what former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said when he came to office. What words did he use when he was talking about addressing some of the budget issues that he thought were worthy of addressing? In the Rudd government's first 100 days it bragged that it had set up a razor gang 'to comprehensively review each Commonwealth government department and cut wasteful spending'. Those were Kevin Rudd's words.

What changed? Why was it okay for the former Prime Minister, on coming to government, to conduct a review of government expenditure but, lo and behold, it is not appropriate now? What changed? All that changed was the narrow perspective of Labor senators, aided and abetted by their Greens partners. I could go on and talk about the IMF and other contributions but I will leave it for another time. (Time expired)

Sue Lines (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on today's matter of public importance. I speak from the perspective of being one of the many hundreds of thousands of Australians who took to the streets of our cities and communities, yesterday, to protest about the Abbott government. For the government simply to ignore all of us—families, young and old, students, young people, pensioners—who took to the streets to voice our concerns about a government that has only been a government for six months is extraordinary. Our Prime Minister has said that the only rally he noticed yesterday was in relation to St Patrick's Day, yet we had protests by tens of thousands of people in our major cities, and similar numbers throughout the regional areas of Australia

This was not a small group; this was not a particular part of the Australian community; this was Australians of all walks of life saying to the Abbott government, 'We've had enough already.'

From day 1, the government started with an agenda of secrecy. The Commission of Audit fits into that agenda. It is a secret, so it did not prepare a paper for discussion. It has held hearings, but they have been in secret. So the Australian public know absolutely nothing about what the Commission of Audit is undertaking. What we know about the Commission of Audit is that it is largely comprised of members of the business community, and we do know what is on the business community's agenda. It is in our newspapers every day. They want to be taxed less. They want to be able to make profits, which, foolishly, the government seems to think will turn into jobs, and yet they have not been able to demonstrate any time in our history where, when you free business up, it invests in jobs. Business invests in profits for its shareholders. That is what business does. Business wants to see less corporate tax. Certainly the business community, the AiG and others have talked about broadening the GST and increasing the GST, and all of that hurts ordinary Australians and makes it much more difficult for ordinary working Australians to balance their budgets. Nevertheless, the Commission of Audit continues along in secret.

The only hint we have had is when the Senate set up a committee, which I sit on. Mr Shepherd, the chair of the Commission of Audit, told us that nothing was ruled in and nothing was ruled out. That runs contrary to the promises that the Prime Minister was giving us in the lead-up to the election and post the election, although now many of those promises have gone, as we have seen, and we are now going to get some kind of tax—a big, fat tax, as the government likes to call these taxes—on Medicare. When you visit a doctor, you will be charged an additional fee. That seems to be widely supported by the government. It again shows how out of touch the government is with ordinary working Australians who already pay when they go to a doctor, and the government wants to slug them again with a big, new fat tax on Medicare.

In addition to that, Mr Abbott has been forced by the opposition to say he will at some point release the Commission of Audit document, but all of the political commentators in this country say that it will not be released before the WA half-Senate election because the government knows it has bad news and it is not in its interests to do that. So it will not be before April. That gives us about four weeks to look at the document when all of the deals, all of the argy-bargy and all of the cutting will have already taken place for the May budget.

This is a dishonest government. It is a government that is hell-bent on trying to say that we live in an economic community and not a community made up of families and individuals. It is a government that, quite frankly, does not care what happens to ordinary Australians. It does not care and it demonstrates that by ignoring the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets yesterday, along with myself and my grandchildren, to protest about what the Abbott government is doing. You cannot say that those people are not concerned. We have a government absolutely committed to silence. It is time to come clean and put the Commission of Audit document out there.

Sean Edwards (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There is a lot of material to work with. I must say that I am deeply appreciative that this is not being broadcast, because Senator Lines has vilified business as the villains of everything that is bad and evil in this country when the reality is that they are the employers of all the people that she represented in her former life as a trade unionist. It would be a great day when we come into this place and see those former trade unionists in their majority on the other side take off their hats and start to be objective, because in the circle of life they represent only about 40 per cent.

We have had a number of contentions put, but let's reframe this motion because the Greens and the Labor Party have sought to politicise what is a very credible and responsible instrument of government. They have sought to politicise it for their own gain prior to two state elections, to seek the champion of fearmongering, bringing it out into the electorate, and still try to claim this position for the Perth Senate election on 5 April. So we have all this bleating. Let's reframe it, shall we, and just say that it is a political stunt from the other side.

It is absolutely and thoroughly reasonable for a government, having assumed government, to have an audit of the books. I see Senator Polley over there shaking her head. I guess she would agree with me that you need to do an audit after such an incompetent reign of Treasury by the frontbenchers of the previous Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments. Let me talk about why this is credible. Those on the other side might want to know that, in January this year, former prime ministers Hawke and Keating drew comparisons between the budget challenges faced by the current government—that is, your period in government, your reign—and equivalent fiscal challenges they had faced in office. Mr Hawke, who was one of the most progressive, reformist Labor prime ministers and arguably had one of the more successful reigns of Labor prime ministers in this country, said:

You've got to have a prime minister and treasurer, and a competent ministry which understands the issue and is prepared to make hard decisions.

So it is the same challenge. That is what Mr Hawke said.

Mr Keating was more pointed about the need to make tough choices. He said:

We had to cut spending across the board—social welfare, business welfare, everywhere.

He also said:

Sleazy, underhand politics and policies—of not offending anybody—was what got the country into trouble in the first place.

There you have it. You sit here and try to politicise this for your electoral gain. You want the opportunity to come out and beat this ideological position of cutting things. The reality was that, after the 7 September election, this government inherited a legacy of $123 billion in accumulated budget deficits from the Labor-Greens alliance in their reign and $667 billion in accumulated debt. Well done! That is why we have a Commission of Audit.

While you are out there vilifying the business people, I note with interest that the people who have been chosen to conduct the Commission of Audit have been vilified as well. It just does not make sense to me in any way, shape or form because those people have been brought together because of their business acumen and because they are good Australians who understand that there was a budget emergency which we needed to pull back from to take stock and have a look at every sector.

I recently joined this folly—the Greens-Labor sponsored inquiry into the Commission of Audit. The reality is that, when I first went there and heard from a number of government departments, it became very clear that some of those departmental officials felt that there were areas in their departments where they could reclaim and better utilise some resources. That was the feeling throughout. They said there may be some duplication across departments. Why wouldn't a responsible government have a look at these things?

While I am referring to those hearings, I point out that some of the witnesses who appeared highlighted the importance of the work of the commission. For example, Dr Peter Burn, the Director of Public Policy at the Australian Industry Group, said the work of the commission:

… is a very important task, and it is worth emphasising that it would be important regardless of the current position of the budget. It is perhaps most important in the context of longer term public finances in view of the accumulated impacts that demographic forces and rising health expenditures could have on Australia's public finances over coming decades.

That is not an emotional statement. That is from somebody out there who understands the drivers of this economy. He says that it is thoroughly appropriate to have a Commission of Audit. Yet we see those on the other side, in their usual form, wanting to rush these things out there. They want to beat their drum. That is not the way good governments run themselves. They have a look at the effects of these things. They do not put them in silos. They cannot put health in a silo, education in a silo and industry in a silo. They cannot do that. You have to embrace all aspects of the economy and ensure that they are represented properly if there is going to be some proven fiscal management. You must try to understand that.

This whole debate was further politicised when Senator Di Natale spoke with confected outrage about Senator Cormann calling for the release of information from the former government. That was in 2010. At that stage our economy had spiralled into a complete abyss and there was no way out. I know that Senator Cormann is now working with other coalition members. I will try to continue to expose this motion for the sham that it is.

Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! The time for the discussion has expired.