Woods Megan: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 02 July 2013. Volume:691;Page:11640. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):It is my pleasure to take my first call that I have on the State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill in its Committee stage. I am in particular very happy to speak to Part 2 of this legislation the part of the bill that deals with the amendments to the Public Finance Act 1989 and to look at some of those. As my colleagues have canvassed at great length Labour has made a decision to support this bill with reservations. My colleague Sue Moroney pointed out that we have talked in some detail about our views on this bill but there is still plenty more that needs to be canvassed in the course of this debate on this piece of legislation.Although we opposed this bill at its first reading the changes that did eventuate at the select committee process that were worked through with Labour and the State sector unions by and large have really made this a better piece of legislation that has come back to the House at the Committee stage. We are very happy to be able to say that we can offer it our support but we do still have some of those lingering reservations. It was heavily amended at the Finance and Expenditure Committee consideration and I think that that as a process is something that this Committee should applaud. That select committee consideration was allowed to work fully and really fulfil its function in making legislation better.As I said in terms of Part 2 “Amendments to Public Finance Act 1989” which we are talking about one of the issues that I really want to pick up there is the information requirements for appropriations that come under this part of the legislation. The intent of the bill is that all appropriations should be traceable and accountable from year toyear: “Traceability must be explicit where an appropriation or categories within an appropriation have changed including where a multi-category appropriation is used.” My colleague Sue Moroney has touched on a very current example of where this has been brought into relief. This legislation has meaning for every member in this House. There is no member in this House who has an interest in a portfolio either on the Government benches or on the Opposition benches who does not have to deal with the issues that are covered by this bill. For those of us who have been covering appropriations that have been brought under the umbrella of the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment the “Ministry of Everything” it actually has been a real challenge to follow those appropriations through.My colleague Sue Moroney talked about trying to follow through ACC budget lines from years before the Department of Labour was absorbed into the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. I myself in the area of research science and innovation have been trying to cover through budget lines and trying to track how it is that our funding of things like postdoctoral fellowships has gone from when we had an independent Ministry of Science and Innovation and how that has gone when it was absorbed into the much larger Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment. I think that any change to the legislation like we are seeing in this is to be applauded because I think that the purpose of the House the purpose of our select committees and the purpose of members of this House is to make sure that we are scrutinising those appropriations. Members of the public also need to be able to have clear and transparent ways of scrutinising what is happening with public money. That is what we are talking about. We are talking about the use of public money here and anything we can do to make that more accessible and more transparent is something that we can support.Other changes that we think are important under this part of the bill include making it clear that other departments as well as the one administering an appropriation can incur expenses against that appropriation. Increasingly we are seeing that in the way in which Governments are run. We are having the idea of issues and themes starting to cluster around and appropriations occurring in other departments and I think it is really important that the legislation that administers the way in which we follow through our public money in our State sector recognises the changes that are happening around governance and the way in which we govern our country. It is in changing the information required in the estimates and supporting information—it is a pleasure to conclude some of my statements around this—that the focus moves more closely on to what is intended to be and what has been achieved with each appropriation. It is increasingly and incredibly important that we do have that. It is important that we can make sure that we know what it is that a Minister sets out to do with a sum of public money what it is that they want to achieve and most important what has been achieved so that at the end of each financial year we can go back and we can have a look at whether or not the money that was set aside for something was actually used for what was intended. The bill is changing the requirements for information about departments’ strategic intentions including the frequency of the provision.My colleague David Parker touched very briefly on the idea around the departments’ statements of strategic intents. These are incredibly important documents for members of the public for parliamentarians and for society at large really to know what it is that a public organisation is wanting to achieve. Allowing the annual reports of more than one department to be presented together in one document again speaks to the much more clustered way we are thinking of doing Government the way in which we need to bring things together. This does provide much more meaningful information about the department’s performance and achievements and this is what we are all looking to achieve. We are all looking to see that we can have meaningful and real information thatcan be there to show how it is that a Government department has spent Government money.So we are very happy to be able to say that we can support the State Sector and Public Finance Reform Bill at this stage because of the incredibly good work that the Finance and Expenditure Committee did and I would like to congratulate members of the committee from all sides of the Chamber on the work that they have put in. I think that it shows what this Parliament in its committees and in its House can achieve when people put their minds to addressing a piece of legislation trying to make it the best piece of legislation that it can be and working with the submitters and listening to the submitters when they come to the committee to see how these changes can be made for the better. Thank you.