Wednesday, 26 August 2026

 Danny PEARSON (Essendon) (10:25): What a joy it is to be able to break the spine of a new PAEC report. I have got to say this is riveting reading, and I would say to anyone who is a candidate in the upcoming election and finds themselves in this place: if you get the chance, come on, do yourselves a favour and get on PAEC. It is just a ride. It is so much fun. But I have got to say life is about progression and advancement, and I have got to congratulate the member for Laverton. She has done an excellent job as chair – far better than me. I refer the house’s attention to, for example, page ‍101 of this report. One of the great challenges, I think, when you are a member of the legislative branch as opposed to the executive branch is tracking and mapping machinery of government changes. What the member for Laverton has done –

Steve Dimopoulos: You were the best chair of PAEC.

Danny PEARSON: I yield to the minister at the table. And I yield to the member for Laverton when it comes to looking at the way in which a departmental structure is broken down. If you look at the way in which she has got total output funding, funding by output, there is a discussion about the capital program and then it talks about the output initiatives. Why is this important? This harks back to Jan Tschichold, who was the doyen of typographical modernism. Not only did Jan create the modern typeface Sabon – and, like me, he would have loathed Times New Roman – but he was an artist and he was trained in calligraphy. If you think about it, you pick up some of the older books, some of those antiquarian books, and they are not particularly aesthetically pleasing. They are somewhat musty. They do embrace Times New Roman –

John Mullahy interjected.

Danny PEARSON: I just think from the point of view of educating members of the legislative branch of the importance of the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee’s work, the fact that the lessons of Jan Tschichold have been brought to bear so eloquently by the member for Laverton in relation to the way in which the budget is dissected and used to educate our members is an outstanding contribution by the current PAEC team and a vast improvement on the endeavours of the 57th ‍Parliament, of which I was a member.

Page 36 talks about the Silver review. I do want to place on the record my heartfelt thanks to Helen Silver. Helen is an outstanding public servant. She was given the task of trying to work out what is the right and appropriate way in which you structure the public service. How do you try to make sure that you rightsize the public service and ensure that you have got the ability for the public service to be fit and equipped for modern times, particularly in a time post COVID, because as members would recall, we had a significant increase in relation to the size of the public service? Partly that was health related, and partly that was to try and be a bit of a shock absorber for the state’s economy when we were dealing with the greatest economic hit to the state’s economy since the Great Depression. What Helen has done is provide a pathway forward on how you try to rightsize the public service. I think that the quality of her work will be shown in future budgets and will be demonstrated by how we more efficiently and how we more effectively look at structuring the public service.

I also want to acknowledge that page 107 talks about the fact that the government released the AI mission statement in January 2026, something that I drafted and wrote in a very analogue way. I was in a car on a 3-hour car trip, and I used my laptop to write out on a piece of paper that action plan. It is something I worked on very closely for a number of months before it was released. The reality is that I think that what the mission statement will do is find ways in which we can use AI to play to our competitive strengths. We are very good when it comes to food and fibre, med tech and pharmaceuticals and indeed transnational education, and the way in which we can embrace AI in a thoughtful and considered way to play to our competitive advantages I think will play a really important role in underpinning the prosperity of this state in the decades to come.

Again, as always, I have an abiding affection for the work of the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee. I do want to thank the committee for the way in which it has gone about helpfully demonstrating to members of the Parliament the way in which you can eloquently and appropriately dissect what can be quite heavy and dense reading. Finally, I have got to say: budget paper 5 – do yourselves a favour and get on it. It is a ripper.