Bill: Financial Management Legislation Amendment Bill 2025: Council Amendment

BILL:

FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT LEGISLATION AMENDMENT BILL 2025: COUNCIL AMENDMENT.

Tuesday, 14 August 2025.

James NEWBURY (Brighton) (14:57):

I will start by acknowledging that these Amendments were ready to be dealt with by the House yesterday, but the Government could not find a Minister that could deal with the Amendments yesterday and so the House, for the first time that I am aware of, could not deal with the Amendments on the day they were ready to be dealt with by this Chamber. The Minister, as I think I heard him say, yesterday was working from Home.

Danny Pearson interjected.

James NEWBURY: Oh, he was in Darwin, sorry. Not even in the State.

The SPEAKER: Order! I would ask the Member for Brighton to come back to the Council’s Amendments.

James NEWBURY: I understand, and I do acknowledge that the former speaker sledged the Opposition and of course that was not on the Amendments either, Speaker.

The SPEAKER: Order! Member for Brighton, come back to the Council’s Amendments.

James NEWBURY: On these Council Amendments, which were listed on the Notice Paper yesterday, the reason they were not dealt with by this House yesterday when they were listed on the Notice Paper is because the Government could not find a Minister to deal with them. So that is why we are dealing with them today. They were on the Notice Paper yesterday and were not dealt with.

In relation to the Bill, what this Bill does is it reduces financial transparency. In general terms, it reduces financial transparency. That does not mean there are not Amendments in the Bill, which I spoke to in the debate initially, that are meritorious. There are, but what this Bill does is it reduces financial transparency. It reduces the number of financial reports that will now be provided to the Victorian community, full stop. The net number of reports that are provided to the community will be reduced, in one part because the Department claimed that it was difficult to work hard around an election.

Well, we said in relation to the instances where elections have occurred while this act has been in place ‘Has there ever been a problem?’ and they said ‘No.’ So one does have to wonder whether it was an administrative decision or a political decision. I suspect, like everything with this Government, hiding is always the first choice, and the reason why there has been a reduction in financial transparency is because the Government does not want it.

In relation to the Amendments, what these Amendments seek to do is meritorious. The Greens and the Government and the Opposition have had discussions about the issues that the Greens have raised through these Amendments. They were very good, fair and reasonable discussions about the issues that were raised. That is why I suspect that in the Council the Government accepted those Amendments, because they were aware that the Greens, who had put them forward, and the Coalition was supportive of them in principle. It does not mean to say that they are perfect, and please, I would not want the House or the Members that moved them to take that as a reflection on what has been moved, other than to say it is something, but it is not perfect. I suspect the reason we have not got to a point of perfection is because the Government would not have agreed to it.

We have two Amendments, the first dealing with Treasurer’s advances and the reporting of Treasurer’s advances, which improves the current system. Integrity experts have spoken about Victoria’s giant slush fund and how Victoria’s use of Treasurer’s advances is way out of pace with any other state and the Commonwealth combined and said there needed to be greater transparency around Treasurer’s advances. I do note the new Treasurer, when she came into the job, said that she did have concerns around Treasurer’s advances but has done nothing about it. I understand that a review was put in place early on of some nature around Treasurer’s advances, but like the Silver review, it has gone nowhere, and clearly it was not a rapid review, as the Member for Evelyn rightly said. The Treasurer’s advances are one great big slush fund for this Government that are not accountable.

At the end of the day, we are talking about Victorians’ money, and so there should not be off-the-books spending that is dealt with separately, that is only accounted for publicly previously once a year and now with this Amendment twice a year. Twice a year is actually not good enough. It should be more, and there were conversations about whether there could be accountability measures put in place to ensure reporting was monthly or monthly from points of spend, but the Government made it clear that it would be too difficult and perhaps too transparent for it to be greater than once every six months. This Amendment improves the current system – there is no doubt about it. I would not want the members that have moved this Amendment to think that we believe otherwise. We do think it improves the system, but as I said earlier, it is not perfect. When it comes to the tabling of reports, which is the second set of Amendments, it again improves the system but, again, not as perfectly as could be the case. We know that the Government times annual reports for a particular day so that we see mountains of annual reports tabled in a way that no-one can meaningfully go through them. The information overload is such that it is difficult to fully understand the level of spend, the level of misspend, of this Government. These Amendments seek to deal with that by putting stricter timelines around the tabling of those reports.

I do note that an additional measure that was considered as part of the discussions was around the Minister for Finance’s ability to exempt the tabling of reports. Many Members of this Chamber will remember the extremely long list on the last annual tabling day where the Minister exempted multiple pages of a very small font list of reports. From memory, hundreds of reports were exempted – well over a hundred were exempted from memory – from being tabled within the adequate timeline.

This Amendment does not fully deal with some of those probity issues. Tightening the timeframes and providing transparency around when the reports are tabled is important. But as I have just raised, there are loopholes, which I suspect the Minister for Finance, who is at the table, knows all too well, because he has used the loophole before and I suspect will use that loophole again in a way that works around the intent of these Amendments, and it is disappointing that that will be the case when it occurs.

On both of these Amendments, we support them in principle. We think that there are loopholes that could have been closed in a more fulsome way; however, we
support the principle of the Amendments as they are. I will finish by circling back to the Bill in principle and say the Government with this Bill has claimed to improve financial transparency, but what they have done in fact is reduce financial transparency. This Bill was not supported for that reason, but these Amendments will be supported by the Coalition today.