Tuesday, 12 May 2026

 Ryan BATCHELOR (Southern Metropolitan) (13:31): Pursuant to section 35 of the Parliamentary Committees Act 2003, I table a report on the inquiry into the adequacy of the annual budget of the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission, the Victorian Ombudsman and Integrity Oversight Victoria, including an appendix, from the Integrity and Oversight Committee. I move:

That the report be published.

Motion agreed to.

Ryan BATCHELOR: I move:

That the Council take note of the report.

The Integrity and Oversight Committee received a referral from this chamber in March to undertake this inquiry into the adequacy of the annual budget of three of the integrity agencies that we have here in the state of Victoria. The committee undertook that inquiry as requested and gave some careful and I think thorough and thoughtful consideration to some of the matters that are presented to us. Obviously integrity agencies in the state of Victoria, since reforms in 2019, have been appropriated directly from the Parliament – so not from departments. Ministers are no longer the gatekeepers of budget bids from integrity agencies; they go directly into the Department of Treasury and Finance. However, the committee did make a series of recommendations about the way that the transparency of some of this process could be improved so that the Integrity and Oversight Committee, on behalf of the Parliament, has greater insight into some of the matters relating to the formulation of uplift to budgets at these agencies from a procedural point of view. The committee also recognised that the integrity agencies here in Victoria are not subject to efficiency dividends and made some recommendations about ensuring that that exemption is legislated to protect them from any future government that has a different view about whether these integrity agencies should be subject to efficiency dividends.

The committee also had a look, within the timeframe that was available to it, at the funding that has been provided to integrity agencies. For example, the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission’s funding was $42.3 million in 2020–21 and rose to $66.9 million in 2024–25. Across the board, so for IBAC in particular, that growth in funding has been equivalent to the growth of the general government sector. All of the integrity agencies’ examined funding has increased, some quite substantially over that period, and funding for IBAC, Integrity Oversight Victoria and the Victorian Ombudsman has been consistently between 0.08 per cent and 0.1 per cent of total general government expenditure over the last 10 years. An important point to note is that as the general government sector itself has grown and this government has been doing more things, essentially what the committee found is that the funding to these agencies has kept pace with that growth.

There have been some issues – and there were some issues raised, particularly by the Ombudsman – about the way that the legislative framework that exists around the operation of the Ombudsman’s office has required the prioritisation of Ombudsman resources on its investigations to meet its legislative requirements, particularly in relation to public interest disclosures.

That has meant that it has been unable, because of the legislative framework, to undertake some of its own-motion investigations, and we think that there should be some amendments there.

On the question of the performance of the agencies, the committee is of the view that the performance benchmarking and reporting metrics that exist as part of the annual budget cycle need to be improved. We do not think that the current set of performance indicators that are reported in the budget is sufficient to let the Parliament understand the complexity of the matters that are before the integrity agencies, and we feel that the performance reporting could be improved and also that the best way to undertake an analysis of the adequacy of the funding should be through a series of regular base funding reviews.

I want to acknowledge the committee secretariat for their enormous work in preparing this report in a very tight timeframe, particularly the committee manager Sean Coley; Chloё Duncan, the senior research officer; Tom Hvala, the research officer; and Whitny Kapa, Emma Daniel, Maria Marasco and Bernadette Pendergast. I also thank Kathleen Hurley from the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee secretariat for her assistance in preparing this report. I commend the report to the house.

Motion agreed to.