Greens offer way on budget office

It's a matter of levelling and being honest with the electorate ... Greens Leader Senator Bob Brown.

“It’s a matter of levelling and being honest with the electorate” … Greens Leader Senator Bob Brown. Photo: Andrew Meares

THE Greens have offered to amend legislation setting up a parliamentary budget office to avoid a boycott threatened by the Coalition when it failed to secure changes in the lower house.

The shadow treasurer, Joe Hockey, said this week he would not submit his policies to the new office or to the departments of treasury and finance under the ”charter of budget honesty” provisions set up by the Howard government.

Instead, after he failed in a bid to change the operating rules of the proposed independent budget office, he said he would ask private sector accountants to check his costings.

Labor accused Mr Hockey of seeking to hide a costings ”black hole”, pointing to leaked documents suggesting a Coalition government would need to cut at least $70 billion from spending in its first four years – a figure Mr Hockey disputes.

”The idea that the Coalition will go through another campaign hiding their costings yet again reinforces why this is the least qualified economic team ever presented to the country,” said the Finance Minister, Penny Wong.

But the Greens leader, Bob Brown, offered to negotiate an amendment to achieve Mr Hockey’s main aim – the continued ability to have confidential dealings with the office during an election campaign, so long as all parties were required to release the costings for any policy worth more than $100 million. ”It’s a matter of levelling and being honest with the electorate,” he said.

The Greens also said they were ”seriously considering” a proposal from the former NSW auditor-general Tony Harris that parties which refused to have their policies costed could lose their public funding.

A spokesman for Mr Hockey welcomed Senator Brown’s offer and said the Coalition would discuss it further.

During the last election campaign the Coalition refused to submit policies to Treasury and instead had them ”costed” by the accounting firm WHK Horwath, portraying the exercise as an ”audit” when in fact the firm had not tested any of the Coalition’s assumptions.

A subsequent analysis by Treasury during the post-election negotiations with the independent MPs found an $11 billion shortfall, due to errors and differing assumptions. The independents have said the finding was a main reason they chose to form government with Labor.

A University of Sydney accountancy professor, Bob Walker, who complained to the Institute of Chartered Accountants that the accounting firm’s work had been portrayed as an ”audit”, was described by Mr Hockey this week as ”a mouthpiece for the Labor Party”.

Professor Walker responded angrily, saying Mr Hockey “should either put up or shut up, but I doubt he is big enough to apologise”.

“I am not, and have never been, a member of the Labor Party. From time to time I have criticised misrepresentations from both sides of politics.

“My complaint to the institute followed Coalition claims their costings had been ‘audited’, when that was totally false. I provided the institute with a detailed, technical analysis. It should have been able to assess the validity of my complaint within an hour, not allow more than a year pass.”

The institute’s chief executive, Graham Meyer, told the Herald he was following an orderly process of investigation, attempting to apply the rules of natural justice.

You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Leave a Reply

Powered by WordPress | Designed by: Premium WordPress Themes | Thanks to Themes Gallery, Bromoney and Wordpress Themes