2015-08-20
Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — I will be continuing with my amendment 3 to clause 14, which I believe is also a test of amendment 4, and my amendment 5 to clause 33.
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Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — These amendments pick up almost the same issues that the Greens raised in our original amendments — that is, our amendments 1 and 6. Since the government has the privilege of going first, we are happy to support the government's amendments. There will be no need for me to move my amendments in those areas.
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Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — The Greens will support this amendment.
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Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — I move:
3. Clause 14, line 13, omit “delivery.” and insert “delivery; or”.
The section of the bill we are dealing with relates to the qualifications of people appointed by the minister to take on the very important task of developing ongoing plans for infrastructure. Throughout the bill we will find reference to the triple bottom line — that is, the social or community, economic and environmental costs and benefits of various pieces of infrastructure; however, will the people appointed to this board have the qualifications to know exactly what those things are and what they mean?
The government has been willing to support the proposition from the Liberals that these Infrastructure Victoria people should have private sector experience. We know from a series of Auditor-General's reports that there is almost no infrastructure experience left inside the public sector and that the first thing the public sector people have to do when they get a new project is go out and find private sector people and insource them back into the major projects department to tell the people there how to do things.
At the moment the government is running an infrastructure program of somewhere between $49 billion and $52 billion of total estimated investment, and this year it will be around $6.5 billion. It is interesting that a number of speakers from the opposition side got up and said, 'This government has no infrastructure program', or even that the government has not initiated any new infrastructure projects since it has come in. That is perhaps because people over on that side think that for something to be infrastructure it has to be a great big tunnel or some sort of hole in the ground or a coal-fired power station.
In fact the government's program of $6.5 billion this year includes all sorts of infrastructure, some of which is community infrastructure. A neighbourhood house can be infrastructure; it is social infrastructure. Investments in maintaining parks and maintaining biodiversity are forms of capital investment in absolutely essential infrastructure — the infrastructure that is the life support system for everything on earth, including us humans. You can see from the way the debate has gone here today, however, that some people do not think that is real infrastructure, because it is not big, it is not made out of concrete and it does not produce any sort of pollution.
If we are going to have this body take on the very important task of telling us what our infrastructure needs are in the next 30 years and measuring those against social, economic and environmental criteria, it would be very helpful to know that the people who will be doing that job have qualifications in the area. It is for that reason that the Greens have drafted amendments 3 and 4.
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Mr Barber — I am incapable of being offended.
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Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — I move:
5. Clause 33, line 26, after “land use plans,” insert “transport modelling that contains an assessment of the social, economic and environmental costs and benefits of public and active transport options compared to private road vehicle and road freight transport options,”.
Clause 33 and its associated division lay out in quite a bit of detail for us the 30-year infrastructure strategy, and they outline the content requirements. There is a whole series of objectives that need to be written up. There is an assessment of the current state of infrastructure. There is the identification of short, medium and long-term needs and also an assessment of options available to meet the identified infrastructure needs and priorities.
Options are what it is all about. If we just stop a minute and look at the recent history of transport infrastructure development here, what we see over the last five or six years is just a series of proposed and later aborted toll road, mega-tunnel projects. If at any stage a project for a new road had been compared to a project for a public transport system that would do the same job, that probably would have stopped those toll roads in their tracks fairly quickly. In fact as long ago as 2008, the last time Labor was in charge of this, the then government was assessing a rail project, the regional rail link, and a road project, WestLink, which became the east–west link, that were going to do the same job in the same corridor but actually were being measured by completely different criteria. If both had been built, they would have in fact competed with each other.
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Mr BARBER — Mr Finn is a big fan of competition, he says in my right earhole, but in fact when it comes to public transport or transport development we do not want redundant, competing and highly expensive infrastructure running side by side; we want the best option. With Mr Finn that is always a road, but with almost the remainder of the entire planet it is increasingly public transport, bicycles, walking and active transportation.
We have this horrible term that has been floating around now for the last 20 years, and it is 'integrated transport plan'. In fact there is nothing integrated about it. It is simply saying that if rail gets anything at all, road is going to want something as well, so we better do both. There is no integration at any planning level between roads and public transport here in Victoria. In fact roads just simply gobble up the money, and we continually ask ourselves why it is that there is not enough money left over to build the kind of public transport system we all aspire to because we have seen the way the system increasingly operates in other countries around the world.
It is for that reason that we have sought to give another specific instruction to the committee, along with all the others the government wants to give, and that is that the options that should be considered contain 'an assessment of the social, economic and environmental costs and benefits of public and active transport options compared to private road vehicle and road freight transport options'. On the question of the transport modelling that Infrastructure Victoria ought to be assessing, the modelling itself has become a subject of controversy in all these different road projects and has really become another tool for the government of the day to pump up whichever road project the RACV or some other stakeholder has told it it had better get on with building. We ought to take that capacity out of the government of the day's hands and put it into the hands of Infrastructure Victoria. That is what this government says the bill is all about. For that reason we have proposed this amendment.
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Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — Just three quick points: one, I am not trying to write Shakespeare; two, you have just got to work the commas and punctuation, as is so often the case in legislation; and three, Mr Jennings appears to be missing the essential element, and that is the requirement for the comparison of options. Mr Jennings says that that is all included in his list. In fact that has been the theme all along' Don't worry about it. It's all included'. But as I said, the very recent history, which is painful for Mr Jennings, that we have been through over the question of infrastructure suggests that it is going to be pretty handy to have in here a requirement for a comparison of public transport versus road options.
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Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — No. I believe Mr Jennings's amendment 2 picked it up in a similar format in an earlier clause.
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Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — This is quite a serious undertaking that the government has inserted into its bill. Governments, both Labor and Liberal, have come into this chamber in my time and claimed this mysterious statutory secrecy which appears to wipe away all the powers of the Parliament to seek documents and other things and even in some cases to compel persons to come and give evidence to the Parliament. Basically what the government argues is that if Parliament passes a bill that requires a minister or even another person to keep something secret, that is Parliament in fact cutting away another aspect of its own privilege.
There is a section of the constitution that says we inherit the powers, privileges and immunities of the House of Commons of 1855 until such time as we seek to codify those privileges. If we are codifying privileges, I think we should be doing that in quite a deliberate and explicit way, not just putting things about secrecy into this act, that act and the other act, waiting there as traps for ourselves possibly decades into the future.
Therefore first of all I do not accept the government's argument that a statutory secrecy provision somehow overrides the Parliament, nor would I agree to insert into a piece of legislation something that purported to do that. Unless every single time a secrecy provision is included in a bill we sit here and decide whether we are or are not limiting our own privilege, then the government's argument has to be put to one side and we have to go back to the fact that Parliament — and in fact both houses separately, by necessity — must have the ability to scrutinise all aspects of government. Otherwise we would very quickly be in a morass.
On another theme, it is not at all clear how this would relate to freedom of information. I would be pretty confident that I would be using the usual procedures of freedom of information and that nothing here has necessarily created a new class of exemption under FOI, but that may be seen as time goes on. The confidential advice that Infrastructure Victoria gives is to be made public but not the actual content of the advice itself. It will not be long before someone seeks to request everything on the list under FOI just to test out this clause. It is for this reason that the Greens are voting to have this provision removed from the bill.