Larvatus Prodeo

I sometimes think that if it weren’t for the Senate Estimates Committees we would hardly know anything about our government at all in this country that didn’t come from a press release or a well-timed leak, given that Question Time has largely become a farce. I imagine that the senior public servants and Government Ministers who get grilled don’t enjoy them much though.

The Senators are currently uncovering undisclosed, or at least unpublicised, aspects to many government programs. Of course, the heady whiff of grandstanding is undeniable, but that doesn’t mean that the questions asked are necessarily discredited entirely because they are informed by a partisan agenda. The scrutiny also offers the chance to show how certain plans may be unbalanced in the composition of their beneficiaries or unreliable in delivering the promised benefits at all.

One plan which appears to be unbalanced in its beneficiaries is the Murray-Darling re-adjustment plan: all the money to go to irrigators, none to the towns affected by the flight of farming families?

There is a great deal of concern from Liberal Senators about the economic stimulus package and the unrestricted bank deposits guarantee, and through the committees we discover that there was no formal modelling of the stimulus package, and that there may have not been full consultation with all the regulatory bodies before the plan was announced.

Finally, the plan which appears to not only be unbalanced in its proposed beneficiaries but also questionable about offering benefits at all, while penalising broad swathes of the population at the same time: the Government’s proposed internet filtering plan. Continue reading ‘Scrutiny in the Senate: water, markets and censorship’