Hansard debates

Mr McGUIRE (Broadmeadows) (10:08:55): I refer to the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee inquiry into the appointment of a person to conduct the financial audit of the Victorian Auditor-General’s Office. The importance of who audits the Auditor-General is a response to the age-old issue of who watches the watchers. The critical responsibilities are about scrutiny, accountability and compliance. The role is to establish the facts without fear or favour. This is significant, particularly at a time of hyper-partisanship and hyper-factionalism, and it is most important to have independent people to interrogate value, particularly the value of major projects and investments. This is the issue I want to refer to now—the pursuit of value. This is what we need to do to drive economic and cultural change. We have seen all over the front pages of the newspapers today the IMF and other organisations talking about the growth coming off internationally and what we need to do in the Australian economy. This is really important. This is a critical time of change that we actually need to address, so the pursuit of value is right at the heart of the matter if you look at it in a number of ways. I want to refer to how we can do this and the opportunities that we have, and one of them is the mechanism of City Deals. I have campaigned long and hard to try and achieve this. The Australian government is now actually saying that it made an election commitment to a city deal for Melbourne’s north and west and a city deal for the south-east. Here is the opportunity to go into the areas to reinvest, and here is how we can actually look at affordable housing and how we can better manage population growth. We put the investment where we have the infrastructure, where we have affordable housing, and we unlock the value of that. I know as the member for Broadmeadows that there are about 2000 housing commission homes that were built in the 1950s, so here is a chance that we can actually have to unlock that value and create better opportunities for public-private social housing. We have got a great model. The Minister for Housing has just come in. He was part of this under the Brumby government when there was a fantastic turnaround in a particular area called The Mews, which became Valley Park. It has totally changed people’s lives. So the pursuit of value—how we address that in housing, in housing affordability, in the investment of new industries and jobs—is the proposition for Australia. Are we just going to be a quarry, a mine and a beach? What are we going to make and sell to the world and how do we do it? It is about advanced manufacturing, it is about niche markets, it is about targeted approaches, and this is what is happening through Europe and other places as well in a time of incredible change in the world, a time that is unpredictable. World economies are now looking at how you actually look at a third way out of Europe. That is what they are trying to do. Australia is looking at a free trade agreement with Europe. That is important as well to open up to these markets. You can look at, say, companies in Germany like Siemens, who have come to Broadmeadows—they came to the economic and cultural development conference that I hosted with the Business Council of Australia—and their strong Australian campaign last year. This is important in how we get collaboration, so this is really where we are looking for the value. We do not want a silo mentality, turf wars, institutional ego or bureaucratic inertia in a political cycle to stymie this opportunity. It is about how we target the areas that have the infrastructure, that have the opportunity and that have proximity to the centre—Broadmeadows, particularly, is only 16 kilometres from the heart of the city. I am putting up as the value proposition that this is the time to actually bring these themes together to examine also the social determinants of life. What are they? We are talking about health, we are talking about lifelong learning and we are talking about opportunity. It is about how we can bring these three propositions together using technology now in a way that we did not have as a tool in the past and how we can actually look at analysing this for individuals, families and communities to give them a better chance. These are the propositions that I think are really important to find value. This is a way beyond the old structures that we now need to address. We need to look at place-based disadvantage but turn it into an advantage, aggregate our assets, create better opportunity, look internationally and nationally and get the Australian government to see this picture as well and to invest, to be a partner not a bystander, because that unfortunately has been the story for too long, particularly in Melbourne’s north. This is the opportunity, this is the value proposition and this is why we need to, as a government, be focusing on it, and then the Auditor-General can weigh and measure its value to the community. Public Accounts and Estimates Committee