Wednesday, 15 November 2023

Public Accounts and Estimates Committee

Appointment of the Parliamentary Budget Officer

Iwan WALTERS (Greenvale) (11:25): It is a pleasure to rise to speak this morning on the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee’s (PAEC) recent report into the appointment of the Parliamentary Budget Officer (PBO). I am not a member of the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee, but I do want to thank all of the members, particularly the chair, the member for Laverton, in this house and the other place for the, I think, really important work that they do in representing the Parliament as a whole and in turn each of the constituents and citizens who we represent to ensure that the executive is held to account for the expenditure of public money. It is a really important role.

Other members have commented on the recent report into the estimates process that has recently concluded, but I wish to, as I say, speak on the Appointment of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, the excellent report that has been completed by the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee. The reason I do this is because I think that the Parliamentary Budget Officer is an incredibly important position, and it is a position that was created by this government, by the Allan–Andrews Labor government, in 2017 in recognition of those facts that I just set out – that having independent external scrutiny of government and of executive decision-making is a good thing for the robustness of democracy and the strength of the institutions that we all serve and that we are members of here in this place. I believe the Treasurer at the time – and indeed the Treasurer to this day – at the point where the Parliamentary Budget Office was established, remarked that it was:

… a great advance in terms of the way that our parliamentary democracy operates.

I could not agree more with the Treasurer on that point. The PBO has now been in operation for 5½ years and has delivered a series of authoritative and independent policy costings and advisory services to members of Parliament and, crucially, to members of Parliament from different political parties. I have had the pleasure of working with the PBO in this place but also the Parliamentary Budget Office in the federal Parliament. As members of the opposition and as advisers to members of the opposition, the work that the PBO in the federal Parliament undertakes is extraordinarily important for providing robust analysis, costings and research into disparate topics – work that enables opposition, government and crossbench MPs to do their job to the greatest extent and the most effective extent possible. So I do commend PAEC for the work that they have done in summarising the exhaustive and really diligent process that has led to the appointment of the new Victorian Parliamentary Budget Officer.

I will come to that in a moment, but I was just reminded that a number of colleagues from the opposition recently attended a bit of a conservative jamboree in the UK. I believe it is called the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, and I am not sure what they discussed there, whether it was how to shrink the franchise and link it back to land ownership or how to get rid of some kind of universal suffrage in other ways. The mind boggles as to what could have been discussed. I understand it was chaired by Jordan Peterson. But the reason I float that idea is that it would have brought them into contact, presumably, with Westminster politicians, who could have perhaps begun to understand the work that the Truss government did last year, that sterling 49-day period of calamitous chaos where we got a live lesson in the flaws and the pitfalls of indulging in Reaganomics when you do not have the world’s reserve currency to back you up. But the reason I talk about this is that one of the reasons that budget and that government collapsed in flames is because they sought to marginalise the Office for Budget Responsibility, the UK’s equivalent of the Parliamentary Budget Officer, and they did so at their peril. So I just draw their attention to the importance of respecting institutions like the Parliamentary Budget Office and Parliamentary Budget Officer.

As a former chair of the Scrutiny of Acts and Regulations Committee I believe strongly in the important independent oversight that a body not just like PAEC but like the Parliamentary Budget Officer themselves can provide. I congratulate the recent appointee to the role of Parliamentary Budget Officer Mr Xavier Rimmer. I wish him really well in his role and in his tenure because it is an important job that he is fulfilling on behalf of the Parliament and on behalf of the people of Victoria. As this report so adeptly and clearly points out, it was an exhaustive process that led to his appointment. So I thank PAEC for clarifying that, for bringing it to the Parliament and for enabling us all to see the scrutiny that was brought to bear in the recruitment and selection process, and I wish the PBO and his team very well.