2016-06-21
MR BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — I was waiting to hear the government's view on this, but I will dive in anyway and say that the Greens will also be supporting these amendments. I have served on one joint committee, the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee, and also on a number of different upper house committees ad hoc. It has taken my three terms in Parliament to actually establish this system, which mirrors the system of the Senate, and get it up and running.
One of the things that these committees have been doing is scrutinising various bits of government legislation, some of which were hugely impactful and actually quite detailed. We do not know what piece of legislation the government is going to throw up next. Therefore we have to make sure that the committees are well provided for, because the next major move by the government, along the lines of the privatisation of the port, could be coming around the corner. Therefore we need to make sure not that the committees are running out of money but in fact that they are well provided with money.
The other thing that these committees have done since the election is they have in a broad sense scrutinised the activities of government. We did not know that V/Line was going to go belly up earlier this year, but it did, and in my view when it did it required a response from the Legislative Council to act quickly and to thoroughly review what was going on there by calling all the relevant witnesses.
Likewise you do not always know with a particular reference or a particular job of work that the Council votes to give these committees how much the public is going to get involved. There will be some issues on which the public will have minimal involvement. It will mainly be a discussion around technical and expert issues. But there will be other things, such as end-of-life choices or the current bill about better safety for bicycles on the roads, where you can have a huge level of community engagement. For that reason you just cannot have committees limping along on the basic requirements of simply the paid staff. You need the ability to travel around the state; you need the ability to make provision for witnesses and different types of testimony. Sometimes you need to go out and gather evidence, and in the case of the end-of-life choices I think most people here have agreed that it was a worthwhile exercise taking some MPs off to different jurisdictions to scrutinise the issues in detail.
Having sat on one of the joint committees I can tell you their budgets are very well provided. In fact just the travel budgets of some of those committees are more than some of our upper house staff would dream of having at their disposal. I think the upper house committees are doing good work.
The other issue I would raise is that, as was noted, the government is not actually putting its bill through committee of the whole in the lower house. Sometimes those bills are coming to this house with problems. Some of the work of those committees is actually fixing the government's own legislation or negotiating out the kind of issues that the government should have already dealt with through its own external processes, which it has almost unlimited resources to do. It can refer things to the Victorian Law Reform Commission. It can conduct its own public consultations. We have got an inquiry underway into Uber and ridesharing, and yet the government's processes on that issue so far have been almost completely secret. We would not have to do that if the government had actually done its own public process. As long as the government continues to act in that vein these committees are going to need the resources to do things that in my view really should be done by the government before it brings the bills here.
So for all those reasons it is important to have a proper allocation of funds made available up-front. The upper house needs to be free to refer matters whenever it needs to to those committees rather than first having to check whether that is all right with the government and ask 'Do we have enough money to do so?'. For that reason Mr Rich-Phillips's quite proportionate amendment, simply topping up a similar amount to that which we know has been used in the current financial year, is an appropriate move. I hope that the Legislative Assembly, when it receives this suggested amendment, sees it the same way we do.
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