Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

Given the shortage of time and the idea that we should move on to discuss some other departments as well this evening, I will confine my questions and remarks to two areas of Prime Minister and Cabinet activity. Budget Paper No. 2 says, on page 314:

Additional funding will also be provided to support PM&C in providing the secretariat to COAG and its work on the National Water and Living Murray initiatives.

The government announced in 2004, in what was described as a first step, that under the Living Murray program some 500 gigalitres in environmental flows would be returned to the Murray River by 2009. My question is: how are we going regarding this target? Is it correct, as has been said to me, that no additional gigalitres have been delivered to the River Murray through the Living Murray program? My follow-up question is: how do you see this target being met? Do you think that the target will be met? In addition, is it the case, as I have also heard, that the government is not planning to buy any water from willing sellers? If you do not intend to buy water from willing sellers, how do you intend to meet the first-step target? That is the first set of questions I wanted to ask.

The second set of questions arises from page 312 of Budget Paper No. 2, under ‘Auditing—increased activity’, where it indicates that an additional $3½ million will be provided over four years to enable the Audit Office to, amongst other things, increase auditing of the Department of Defence. My first question is: what is the reason for the increased auditing of the Department of Defence? Behind that, why are the Department of Defence’s audit reports so poor? Further, what is the government doing to implement the Auditor’s recommendations so we do not keep coming back to this situation of poor and unsatisfactory audit reports for Defence? I will confine my remarks to those questions and seek a response to them.

See this speech in context