2015-08-20
Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — As others have said, this is a bill to establish an advisory body that will give advice to the government. That advice for the most part will be available to members of the public, and the body will engage in a process of discussing with the community in various rounds what Victoria's infrastructure needs and plan might be for the next 30 years. For that reason I do not intend to stand here for the next 45 minutes and say what I think are the infrastructure needs of Victoria for the next 30 years, although tangential to the discussion of how this body is to be set up and the rules it will operate under it may be necessary to state the direction in which we ought be heading.
Initially what we knew about Infrastructure Victoria was based on a typically glossy, colourful and somewhat scanty government document — lots of pictures of infrastructure, a couple of pictures of the relevant minister and perhaps an overly simplistic diagram of the powers of the body, with a comparison to other states. In any case, the government has sought to put forward that this will be the most independent, transparent, widely scoped and broadly engaging infrastructure advisory body in Australia.
I will be very interested to see how Infrastructure Australia interacts with Infrastructure Victoria, because Infrastructure Australia does work on behalf of the states as well as being governed by commonwealth law. If you read the Infrastructure Australia reports, they are reports to the Council of Australian Governments. When the feds are putting money into these projects — and it is my view that they certainly should be putting in a lot more money than they currently are — then it is appropriate to have not only the members of the Council of Australian Governments working together but also a high degree of transparency and coherence between the different types of projects that different states may be putting up.
Speaking of transparency, some time back I tried to get hold of a copy of the business case for what was then called WestLink. This was in 2008. It was basically Labor's western half of the east–west link. Labor was for WestLink before the project became the east–west link. That exercise with Martin Pakula as the then Minister for Public Transport cost me about $13 000 in legal fees. It took 18 months to get a copy of the business case for WestLink, a document that had already been sent from Victoria to Infrastructure Australia for its analysis and, possibly at the end of the day, funding. People have been running round for years saying, 'Show me the business case for the east–west link', when the business case for WestLink has been out there for a very long time, but only after an extended legal battle in which the government's lawyers eventually handed me a copy of the document almost on the metaphorical courthouse steps.
Odd, is it not, that with states bidding for federal money through a body, Infrastructure Australia, which like Infrastructure Victoria is promoted to be the be-all and end-all for transparency and rigour, until I got hold of that particular document you could not get the comparative benefit-cost ratios of all the different projects that the states were putting in? In fact it is to the benefit of the taxpayer more broadly that we see the benefit-cost ratios and the quality of all the various state bids for federal funding. States should have to transparently compete against each other. No way will this bill or this body create transparency around which projects are to be supported.
Acting President, if you are following me on Twitter — and I suspect you are because you are barely ever off Twitter — you would have seen that I travelled to America to visit some of its transport authorities over the break this winter. At a meeting of Denver's transport authority — which is a democratically elected body, and its meetings are open to the public — it put up on the PowerPoint a copy of the four competing bids to construct a $200 million rail extension, with the scores that each bid had obtained and the prices of the four contractors. With 70 people in the audience, the four bids were laid out up there for all to see. We are a hell of a long way from that in Victoria. Here this sort of information is guarded like the crown jewels.
It is for that reason that we are seeking to add to the degree of transparency that this bill promises but does not necessarily deliver. It is one thing to create an entity, it is another thing to give it a mission and it is yet another thing to require it to go through certain steps, but that is still a content-free exercise. In fact, as Mr Rich-Phillips pointed out in his contribution, some aspects of this bill attempt to introduce new types of statutory secrecy in relation to the advice that might go back and forth between the minister and the body. Everybody who writes a submission to the strategy will have their submission read by the minister, but if the government were to have its way, submissions from the body to the minister would remain secret forevermore, except for the bits that get published through the official strategy that is for public consumption.
Having had that experience of the radical transparency with which certain decisions around infrastructure are made by certain authorities in other countries and other states, which for them is not very radical at all, I am making some efforts here to ask the government to lift its game even further. I have a number of amendments — amendments 1 to 8 — and I am happy for those amendments to be circulated now.
Greens amendments circulated by Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) pursuant to standing orders.
Mr BARBER — I gather these amendments were circulated at the regular get-together of all of the parties — the government business committee meeting — last Friday, and they have been the subject of some discussion between myself, the opposition and the government today.
I will not go into all of those amendments in great detail now because we will have to have further discussions about them during the committee stage. But in general terms they go to who needs to be consulted by this body; the qualifications and eligibility of the members of the body; the information that is exposed in the process of them making their decisions — that is, transport modelling; and the requirement that they assess the broadest range of options to achieve the same result — that is, public transport and active transport up against road-based transport — when they are making certain decisions. We also want to see an assessment of the potential contribution of greenhouse gases created as a result of any of these options.
This body is, after all, an empty shell. If it comes up with a set of proposals for a string of nuclear-powered desalination plants along the coast, there is nothing in this bill to stop it from doing that, but without being too prescriptive, you would want to see that this body had to do certain comparisons against something simple — more than a social, environmental and economic tick-off, which of course to this day every decision-maker pays lip-service to.
We already have a Climate Change Act 2010 here in Victoria, which is meant to determine the way other decision-makers, including ministers, make their own decisions under that act, so why not ask this body to assess the climate change implications and greenhouse gas implications up-front when it does its own report, which is meant to and will hopefully be a 30-year, long-living document?
It is highly desirable that we have a clear understanding of where we are going with infrastructure over the longer time frame. Again harking back to the United States, where I was recently, many of its cities have long-term plans that are being approved and funded year after year after year, with minimal change. That is because in places like Minneapolis and Los Angeles they have introduced specific-purpose taxes that are then tied directly to the delivery of a pre-approved infrastructure program. The job of a politician in those jurisdictions is not to come in, scrap the last plan, rewrite one in their own image and then hopefully get to cut the ribbon on some of the projects. Dreaming up a project, funding it, initiating it and cutting the ribbon on it is the dream of any short-term politician who is operating around one political cycle. Over there the job of a politician is to be a steward and a wise facilitator of a plan that has already been worked out by the people and approved by the people — in that case, through a referendum mechanism that actually established the pool of funding that is dedicated to that very plan itself.
If it is at all possible to depoliticise these sorts of decisions, it will not be through a body like Infrastructure Victoria; it will be through a process like what is being done in many of those leading US cities. Admittedly they are sprawling, car-dominated cities, but they have turned the corner towards public transport-based solutions, and that is what we need to be doing. There is nothing in the bill that guarantees that. One of my amendments at least does attempt to require that that be considered as one of the alternatives. I have also suggested in my amendments that the evidence relied on in preparing the strategy — the assumptions and the conclusions — all become transparent.
We have heard time and again from the Auditor-General, including just yesterday, that the business plans put together by the government are either not clear about the assumptions or, if they have the assumptions listed, are not clear enough about the benefits of the project, such that down the line someone can come along and see if those benefits are realised. We saw it again just yesterday in the Auditor-General's report on the Tullamarine Freeway widening. Federal and state road ministers Donnellan and Truss were out there launching it in a press release saying, 'This road will be safer for motorists when we have finished widening it'. The Auditor-General's report tabled yesterday said there was not enough evidence in the business case to actually ascertain that the road would be safer. That is exactly the type of problem I am talking about. That is why I am seeking to expand a section of the act that requires the government to show us it is working, if you like — not just to show us the conclusion and say, 'There it is', but show us how it was worked out and every input to the process.
That is the effort we have been making there. The Greens have made similar efforts at the federal level to improve the structure of Infrastructure Australia and how it operates. The government may believe its version, according to its matrix, is superior to Infrastructure Australia, but Infrastructure Australia is better because we have negotiated a number of amendments to be inserted up there at the federal level. It is the result of some of those efforts that we seek to insert through the amendments we are proposing.
Here we are, with a government that, last time it was in office, tried to build the WestLink half of the east–west link. Then eventually, in opposition, its members confirmed that they did not support it starting from the east; they were supporting it to start from the west. Then they were building the whole lot; then they were building none of it — but there was no compensation required to tear up the contract because the contract did not exist; it was a legal figment of the Liberals' imagination. Then it turned out that the contract was real, and they were going to have to get us out of it. While the members of the public were still scratching their heads about what that was all about, the government then announced a dirty, great road tunnel from the west. It is sounding like WestLink all over again.
At the same time, they are going ahead and expanding Tullamarine Freeway. It is as if this zombie of a project never wants to die and just keeps coming back like a bad horror movie. When will we finally move the way those US cities have moved and start investing our money in a public transport solution? Nothing in this bill will force governments to see sense and stop throwing their money down holes in the ground and stop looking for the political sugar fix of dreaming up a project and launching it in the same term of government. But if we are lucky — if we are very lucky — this body, Infrastructure Victoria, may just provide us with a little bit more information about the decisions the government is foisting upon the public during its short term of temporary responsibility for Victoria.