2015-08-05
Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — The Greens will support this motion. I believe the issues and questions Mr Rich-Phillips has put in paragraphs 1(a) through to 1(g) are the relevant questions the house ought to consider in deciding its position on the Delivering Victorian Infrastructure (Port of Melbourne Lease Transaction) Bill 2015. I believe also that members of the Labor Party never thought for one minute that any of those questions would be asked and aired publicly. They thought they had a lock on this thing. They had the whole plan worked out when they were in opposition, when the money men from the superannuation funds and the merchant bankers came to see them, saying, 'We need another transaction to keep our customers happy'. Since that time, the coalition appeared intent on selling the thing in their own time, and they never imagined we would be here.
The more questions we ask about this sale, the more extra questions we start to generate. There has been little debate about the future freight needs of Victoria, there has been little debate about the relevant pro-competitive regulations that need to be in place, there has been little debate about how to boost rail's share of freight, and there has been very little debate about why the money is going into a particular list of level crossing removals and what are the purported benefits of those relative to the cost.
Now all of those questions are about to be asked. We need to hear from Treasury on this question; we need to hear from the department of transport on this question; we need to hear from the port of Melbourne on this question. By invitation, we might even hear from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, which will no doubt be involved in some sort of regulatory sign-off of this project, as may be the Foreign Investment Review Board, depending on who the ultimate buyer is.
We would like to hear from academics who have conducted studies of Victoria's freight needs, particularly the various options for the port. We would like to hear from port users, not just freight companies and tenants of the port but those who try to compete in an export market by shipping their goods via the port of Melbourne. We need to hear about the competitive pressures that are on them and the impact on them of any cost increases.
To do all of that in seven weeks is going to be a mighty task. It is becoming routine in this place for bills to be scrutinised by parliamentary committees. Some of them are so small that by agreement they do not need to go there. Some small but important bills in the last six months have been scrutinised with a few weeks turnaround by one of the parliamentary committees, chaired by various members of this house. But this one, anyone would agree, needs some serious debate and consideration and the gathering of evidence so that we can make a solid recommendation back to the house. I intend to be the person who is nominated from the Greens onto this committee.
The government MPs — a string of speakers — will jump in a moment and start to try to lambast anybody who is standing in the way of their brilliant idea of flogging off what is really one of the last remaining floggable private assets in Victoria. Mr Rich-Phillips says that we need to learn from past privatisations. Since this is basically the last thing that can be flogged off, it is not like those lessons will ever be used in the future, because once you have sold the port the only things left to sell are the water boards.
I note that Victoria's water boards are actually included on Joe Hockey's list of assets that he believes are up there for recycling. It is in his report, if you want to read it. The first thing they had to do was drop the word 'privatisation' because they knew that was a stinker, so now they call it 'asset recycling', but it points out that in Victoria the port and the water boards are really the only significant assets left to be sold or leased. That I think makes it even more important that this last purely publicly owned strategic economic asset in the form of the port needs a decent amount of scrutiny and consideration before we even further debate the bill that proposes its long-term lease. For that reason the Greens will be supporting the motion.