Following a new audit report claiming that Labor’s National Broadband Network (NBN) was “rushed and chaotic”, communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has endorsed stringent new requirements for taxpayer-funded infrastructure projects worth more than $1 billion. From The Australian:
The Minister endorsed a proposal for large public-sector projects costing more than $1bn to be subject to a cost-benefit analysis and that the results be made public before the project starts
“I think it is a very good argument that … cost-benefit analyses should be (made) public and that’s something that I think we should all recognise,” Mr Turnbull told Sky News.
“There will be actually some very commercially sensitive material that you may not want to make public but the guts of it, the bulk of it, should be made public so that the public understand what the government is doing with their money.
“One of the important factors behind open government is that is makes people more accountable and responsible. You know it’s one thing to write a report if you think no one’s going to read it in the public, but if you know it’s going to be out there and it’s going to be subject to scrutiny … then that will I think get a higher standard of professionalism and diligence.”
This is commonsense policy by Turnbull and echoes recommendations from the Productivity Commission’s latest report into the provision of public infrastructure, which presented a scathing assessment of the governance, selection and execution processes by Australia’s governments, and recommended that governments build a “credible and efficient governance and institutional framework for project selection”, that includes “properly conducted cost–benefit studies of large projects, and their disclosure to the public”.
The logical question that follows is: will the Abbott Government submit all of its road infrastructure projects for assessment, make the results public, and withdraw from projects that do not pass scrutiny?
