Senator IAN CAMPBELL (Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasurer)(6.17 p.m.) —The coalition believes that this amendment is ultra vires the intent of this piece of legislation. If you use Senator Murray's argument, which is that we should be judging a government's performance against its own election promises, this amendment would force us to break an election commitment because our election commitment was very much, as Senator Margetts alluded to, to have a charter of budget honesty that was quite specifically to look at our performance against a budget and a fiscal strategy. Political commitments in election campaigns and prior to them and in policies and manifestos cover a range of issues, some of which have fiscal impacts and some of which do not. I guess you would argue that for the ones that do not have fiscal impact you would just have `no fiscal impact' on the line.

You are tending to make the charter of budget honesty legislation so broad as to lose what we regard as its important central focus, and that is the government's performance against its fiscal strategy, and how that is achieved, and also to assess those other matters—risks and so forth—that we debated earlier. We think that is important. We also think that, for political debate, there is very good accountability in each of the portfolio areas that are dealt with in government. There are a range of interest groups and media specialists who analyse whether a government is performing against certain goals.

I know that in the policies I wrote in the areas of administrative services—Senator Kemp and I wrote that policy—property rationalisation, youth, and sport and recreation prior to the last election there are detailed points against which any of the people interested in those policies can go back and judge our performance. You will be able to see which specific policy commitments have been delivered, which are in the process of being delivered and others which have not been delivered at all. Senator Cook makes the point that there are areas where governments do not deliver the promises they make in opposition or prior to the election, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons. Sometimes you realise there are better ways to achieve the same sort of outcome.

The point I make is that in political debate, and with the assistance of an ever watchful electronic and printed media, there are very good ways of assessing whether or not a government is keeping its promises in a range of portfolio areas. We believe that to burden this piece of legislation with a requirement to report on a range of matters that do not necessarily have any sort of relationship to the fiscal or economic performance of the government, which is the focus of this legislation, would destroy the important focus of this legislation. So we urge honourable senators to vote against this clearly well intentioned but flawed amendment.