Tuesday, 2 May 2023

Parliamentary Budget Officer

David DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan) (17:57): (168) My adjournment matter is for the attention of the Treasurer, and it concerns the recent very concerning developments at the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee where the Treasurer seems to have intervened either directly or indirectly to ensure that Mr Anthony Close, the Parliamentary Budget Officer, is not reappointed. This is a very sad development because he not only put the Parliamentary Budget Office on a very firm footing, but he was able through his high level of integrity and his great capacity to ensure that the PBO became a reliable source of information.

What seems to have irritated the Treasurer specifically are the matters surrounding the Suburban Rail Loop, where the careful, methodical work done by the PBO was able to expose a likely $125 billion base cost for the first two stages – noting that the government had indicated repeatedly that $50 billion would see the development of all three stages of the Suburban Rail Loop only to have the independent Parliamentary Budget Office cost the first two stages at $125 billion. You can do the calculations as to what it might cost for the third stage, and the likely cost is approaching $200 billion for the whole circle, as it were. Also, the debt figures that the Parliamentary Budget Office exposed, the work they did on the state’s burgeoning debt, the serious debt position, were at clear odds with where the Treasurer was proposing that the state would land.

For all of these reasons we have seen a fractiousness between the government and the Parliamentary Budget Office, and my concern is that it is another independent officer who has got it in the neck because of the government’s hatred of any criticism and the government’s vicious response and determination to rub them out.

I am very concerned that the Treasurer’s office and the Treasurer’s staff have been involved in briefing people and pushing hard against the Parliamentary Budget Office to ensure that Mr Anthony Close is not reappointed. I would ask as a request in this adjournment for the Treasurer to step back and reconsider this, to release all of his correspondence, all of the correspondence that he may have had, from his office to members of the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee, including Labor members and the chair, and make those public, and to recant, to reverse his position and support the reappointment for a full four years of the Parliamentary Budget Officer Mr Anthony Close. He is a person of integrity and intelligence.