Today in Parliament, Abigail contributed to a debate in support of the Parliamentary Budget Officer Amendment Bill 2026 as a modest step toward restoring the original 2010 vision of an independent, accessible costing office, while calling out its failure to measure social and environmental impacts alongside fiscal ones and challenging the Labor Government's blind reliance on GDP as a marker of success while living standards fall and billionaires grow richer.
Abigail said:
As The Greens Treasury spokesperson, I indicate that we support the Parliamentary Budget Officer Amendment Bill 2026. The Parliamentary Budget Office [PBO] was established following legislation passed in late 2010. At the time, the late Dr John Kaye put on the record that The Greens supported the concept of an independent office to cost election promises. He stated that "if appropriately regulated and resourced", it would improve our democratic process and enable voters to more readily determine whether public statements made by politicians during an election were realistic, and that the additional information being made available might go some way to restoring trust in politics. He raised the very valid point that an independent PBO would help redress the drift of power away from Parliament to the Executive that occurs when it has access to all the government bureaucracy's information and capacity for analysis, which those not in government are unable to access.
As John said at the time, although The Greens are a small party—and not a rich one, given we do not take large or corporate donations—in the past we have tried to realistically cost our core proposals where we can. It is incredibly difficult, though, when we do not have access to the resources of the major parties. We welcomed the version of the PBO put forward by the then Labor Government in 2010, in its death throes before losing the 2011 election. In that initial 2010 Act, the PBO was made available to minor parties, who were allowed to request costings outside of election times. It was going to function a little bit like the Parliamentary Library does for research at the moment, in that any member or backbencher of a party could at any time go and speak with the PBO and get a costing for any proposal. I love that idea. It would have been fantastic if it had ever come to fruition.
At the time, Dr John Kaye warned that not all parties were agreeing to the legislation with the same good intentions and hopes for it. He expressed concerns that the PBO process might be misused by the major parties in their efforts to score cheap political points over one another in the heat of an election campaign. I often look back at the contributions of the late John Kaye in this place and smile to myself. I recommend members look at the debate on the Parliamentary Budget Officer Bill 2010 and the Parliamentary Budget Officer Amendment Bill 2013.
I love reading the banter in Hansard. There were a lot of very familiar-sounding comments about the Shooters and Fishers Party at the time, the Christian Democratic Party and The Greens. There were little comments about people's suits in 2013 thrown in by the Hon. Jeremy Buckingham. I recommend members read it for themselves. It was a lively debate. Reading John Kaye's contribution from 2010, I was initially worried that he did not share my concerns that the worth of a policy proposal should not be confined to its impacts based on a narrow set of budgetary or economic impacts. I was pleased to read his full contribution, in which he went on to say:
The Greens have some concerns about this legislation. One of our key concerns is that the analysis of policy is restricted purely to straight financial aspects. Surely we have moved beyond the idea that economics is purely about the financial budget bottom line. There are other bottom lines. Most corporations are now beginning to understand that it is not just the financial bottom line; it is also the social bottom line and the ecological bottom line.
He went on to say:
The deficiency in this bill is that every policy is measured against its fiscal impact rather than being measured against other crucial determinants—the quality of the outcome of people's lives, what impact it will have on the quality of our communities and their capacity to thrive, and what impact it will have on the sustainability of the environment in which New South Wales operates. Without those other two determinants this is a one-legged stool. Any costing of this policy will be deficient and it will be telling only one‑third of the story—what impact these policies will have on citizens' lives and on the lives of their children.
He went on to say:
At best, anything that comes out of the Parliamentary Budget Office is one-third of the story, and at worst it is likely to be much less. It does not analyse the environmental or social impacts. Without those other two analyses we are looking at only a narrow projection of the full impact of such a policy.
It is particularly interesting to read those words now that we have made some modest steps towards embracing the idea of wellbeing indices and a wellbeing budget, something The Greens have been campaigning for since those days when Dr John Kaye was our Treasury spokesperson. It is disappointing that the Government, having taken the positive step of including a performance and wellbeing statement in its budget papers, could not take the next logical step of enabling those social and environmental impacts to be considered alongside the strict fiscal impacts costed by the PBO in this bill. It is a telling omission.
Its omission is perhaps unsurprising, however, when we consider the conservative economic ideology that the Labor Party brings in this legislation. This week we have seen the inordinate emphasis being placed upon hopelessly outdated economic indicators like GDP as the markers of success and sound economic management. The Treasurer has been running around breathlessly extolling the virtues of the AI data centre industry, which is currently pumping torrents of private capital into data centre investments in Australia. It is that private data centre investment that kept Australia's economy out of technical recession in the March quarter. This is being touted as an unalloyed good. But this same fortnight we received two damning reports from Greenpeace and the Climate Council that found these same data centres will push up power prices, prolong the use of polluting coal power stations, increase gas generation and derail progress towards our climate goals.
Let us also not forget that the point of these AI data centres is to not employ people, and to reduce human work in other industries. As Greg Jericho so pithily put it today, "Destroying the climate while destroying jobs—but hey, at least GDP is rising!" That is before we even mention the fact that the Reserve Bank of Australia found that this same data centre investment is a cause of the inflationary moment we are experiencing in the economy, the same inflation that is causing the Reserve Bank to smash household living standards with its interest rate rises, reducing real per capita household disposable income by 0.7 per cent this quarter.
GDP fixation, State budgets in hock to the bond markets, and obsessions with so-called balanced budgets will always fail to address the real material needs and desires of the people. They are bad measures that produce distorted metrics and, therefore, distorted incentives. Over-reliance on GDP, a rough measure of productivity invented during wartime, produces some absurd results. GDP and gross State domestic product [GSDP] measure only the monetary value of goods and services, and do not measure domestic and unpaid work or other non-market transactions. For example, GDP and GSDP are positively impacted by sales of formula milk but not by an infant being breastfed. GDP is positively impacted when you pay someone to clean your house but not when you clean your house yourself. It is the same with payments made to someone to look after your child, whereas the work of looking after your own child is overlooked by GDP. If crime goes up and we spend more on policing, that positively impacts GDP, as do the expenses of cleaning up an oil spill.
Consider that the sale of wood from a felled tree will be captured within GDP, but not the social and ecological values of a tree left unfelled. Quite simply, GDP not only cannot properly measure broader indicators of economic prosperity like individual wellbeing, but it is not even a good measure of economic productivity. Yet traditional economic indicators like GDP are relied on by governments, mainstream economists and rating agencies alike. The blind pursuit of growth at all costs is an intellectually shallow and socially corrosive fixation shared across the mainstream political parties. It is an ideology that continues to fail the people of this country, permitting living standards to continue to slide, while the 1 per cent and billionaire elites enrich themselves on the products of our collective labour.
We knew this back in 2010, when Dr John Kaye moved The Greens' amendments to the PBO bill to ask that these costings also consider the costs and benefits of policy initiatives to broader society and the planet, rather than focus on narrow fiscal considerations. Back in 2010, he listed quite a few of the things referred to in the Government's new performance and wellbeing statement included in its budget papers, something which it tells us it apparently cares about in addition to raw measures such as GDP. He predicted correctly that the Parliament at the time would be far too economically conservative to pass those amendments. It is also the case today. The version of the PBO we voted for in 2010 was quickly eroded by the Coalition when it came into Government.
In 2013 the PBO function was gutted and made into an election-only vehicle to be used only by the major parties, and forced the Opposition of the day to have its entire platform costed as a political weapon. As John commented at the time, the 2013 changes took the concept of the PBO away from something that could be used to enrich public debate and instead made it into something that would be used simply to prosecute major party election campaigns. The bill that we have before us today goes some small way to taking us back to that original 2010 version by at least enabling a token number of proposals of minor parties and Independents to be costed by the PBO.
It is curious, though, that a party of seven members is restricted to the same number of costing requests as an Independent member. As the Hon. Mark Latham pointed out, for a party like The Greens, which takes a comprehensive suite of policy initiatives to each election, it would be a near impossible task to pick just two of those to have costed. And then what will happen when the Government and the Opposition, each entitled to an unlimited number of costings, turn around and criticise The Greens for the two we chose and the countless others we chose not to be officially costed in light of whatever cheap political game they have chosen to play that day of the election campaign? That said, we will take the token gesture as the first step in the long road back to a version of the PBO model from 2010 that gave the late Dr John Kaye such hope for democracy. We support the bill.
Read the debate in Hansard here.
4 June 2026