Desalination at Kilcunda - water should be transparent

GATEWAY REVIEW: PRODUCTION OF DOCUMENTS

Mr BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) -- I congratulate Mr Davis on moving this motion requesting the business case from the Gateway Review of the desalination plant, but I predict that he has Buckley's chance of getting it. Why would members of the government want to reveal to Victorian taxpayers the basic business case explaining how they are going spend $2.3 billion of their money?

Mr Viney alleges that this is the way all governments do business and that he is just swimming with the tide. If that is the case, then the tide in the commercial sector -- the sector he reckons he is trying to protect -- is going the other way. The amount of information you now need to put in a product disclosure statement to simply meet the regulatory requirements for information disclosure is amazing. But would government members not want to do it anyway? In that case they would be asking investors to put their money into a project voluntarily.

There was a great big product disclosure statement for the EastLink project. All the assumptions were in there and people thought they knew what they were getting into. It turned out that some of the assumptions were dead wrong, but investors were risking private money with the anticipation of making a profit. The one thing the government will not release for any of its major projects -- including bay dredging, the north-south pipeline, the desalination plant and irrigation renewal -- is the basic business case. But the business case is the basis on which the government, on our behalf, makes the investment decision.

Mr Viney can say, 'We are meeting the legal requirements in what we would like to release', but what the government would like to release is not the same as what the government can release. That is like saying, 'We are great guys because we comply with the minimal legal requirements'. But the measure is not that you obey the law, it is how much extra you are prepared to do above and beyond what the law says you have to do. On that measure the government is failing.

It is failing on transparency, on taking the public into its trust and on explaining its key decisions. Only the voters can make that final judgement, but unfortunately they only get to do it every four years. The Greens will support this motion.