John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In relation to item 13(d) on the red, tabling of documents by the Clerk, I seek leave to make a statement about printing entitlements.

Leave granted.

I thank the Senate for the opportunity to speak on this important issue. I do so because, today, regulations have been tabled to reduce the printing allowance for members of parliament from $150,000 a year to $100,000 a year. These regulations bring into effect three changes which the government believes will strengthen our democratic processes by removing some of the more egregious abuses of incumbency. As well as cutting the printing allowance for members of parliament by one-third in these regulations, the government will abolish the option for members of parliament to roll over 45 per cent of their entitlements to the following year. These regulations also cut the printing allowances for senators from $20,000 per annum to $16,667.

It is undeniable that in recent years the Howard government increased parliamentarians’ printing allowances to inappropriate levels. Prior to the last election, with members of parliament having a printing allowance of $150,000 per annum and being able to roll over 45 per cent of that allowance to the next year, more than $240,000 could be spent by a single member of parliament in a single year—in a single election year. This cannot be justified as appropriate spending. The combination of the rollover and the increased level of the entitlement allowed members of parliament to build a war chest for election spending out of moneys originally designed for communicating with constituents and the community. This, of course, is taxpayers’ money.

It is worth taking a brief look at the history of the printing allowance. This entitlement was originally uncapped. The Auditor-General’s report on parliamentarians’ entitlements in Audit report No. 5 of 2001-02 found that there was an excessive use of printing entitlements by some members of parliament. The report found that, although the average spend by a parliamentarian on printing over a year was $37,000, some members of parliament—from both sides—were spending more, far more. The then government indicated that they would review the entitlement but did not move on the issue before the 2001 election. In 2002—after the election—the then government capped the allowance at $125,000 a year but provided for a rollover component of 35 per cent. In 2006, after a review of the entitlement and just in time for the 2007 election, the cap was upped to $150,000, with the rollover component raised to 45 per cent.

Members of parliament and senators, in my view, do have legitimate reasons to communicate with their electors. Electors have a right to know what their members and senators are doing on their behalf. Newsletters and electoral bulletins are a legitimate way of communicating the work that the government—and the opposition—is involved in. Not all Australians are regular readers of the Notice Papers and the bills list. For many, it may only be through the work of their elected representatives that they find out about proposed legislation, regulations and policies that have a direct impact on their local areas and their lives.

The government has no objection to these genuine and justifiable uses of the printing allowance. As the Australian National Audit Office said in a review of parliamentarians’ entitlements in 2001:

The role of Federal Parliamentarians is demanding and multifaceted … arrangements for the support provided to Parliamentarians need to facilitate the outcomes required of them in the conduct of their official, parliamentary and electorate business. To serve the public, Parliamentarians require the appropriate level of support both in terms of resources and services.

However, we also believe that all members of parliament but most particularly the government, which takes responsibility for the wise use of taxpayers’ money, must bear in mind that the printing allowance comes from public funding, and it must be used in the public interest and must be of an appropriate level. I want to go on the record as saying that the government considers the state of affairs under the previous government to be an abuse of taxpayer funded entitlements that should never have developed and should never be allowed to recur. The government has a view—I have a view—that $100,000 a year is a reasonable maximum expenditure of public money on printing allowances, allowing parliamentarians to reach large numbers of people in their electorate.

The changes contained in these regulations will save Australian taxpayers up to $22 million over the life of each parliament. They will undoubtedly also save untold numbers of double-sided colour leaflets from the recycling bins of Australia. And they will go a fair way towards preventing our federal system from becoming so heavily weighted towards incumbency that the contest of ideas comes a poor second to the battle of taxpayer funded promotion. I commend these regulations to the Senate.

Andrew Murray (WA, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I move:

That the Senate take note of the statement.

I want to indicate from the outset that the Australian Democrats warmly welcome these regulations and support the minister’s outline of the content of these regulations. This is action that needed to be taken early in the life of this government; the government have stayed true to their promise and have delivered what is a significant restoration of accountability and propriety.

I would confirm the view expressed by the Special Minister of State that there were two major problems with the printing allowances that were made available before. One was in terms of quantum—it was just excessive, overgenerous; and the other, of course, was that it was cumulative—it was allowed to be rolled over.

Any member or senator holding a seat benefits from incumbency, even more so if they are in a safe seat or they hold high office. The incumbent has a natural advantage over any challenger when an election is contested. However, when that incumbency advantage is artificially boosted so that it becomes much more expensive or difficult for a challenger to contest the seat, it becomes a real problem. Despite our democratic system being a plural one in which numbers of political parties and Independents can contest elections, there has been a strong tendency towards dualism and oligopoly. So incumbency advantages further boosted the prospects of the two largest beneficiaries of our system—namely, the Liberal and Labor parties. What the government has, in my view, commendably done is improve the contestability and affordability of elections, by reducing the incumbency advantage of individuals who are already in either the House of Representatives or the Senate.

Parliamentarians have a wide range of responsibilities: party, political, parliamentary, legislative, representative and portfolio. They do need modern, efficient office resources to carry out these responsibilities effectively. However, care should be taken that their office resources are not ahead of reasonable community standards and expectations. Proper independent determination and audit is needed, and reporting and disclosure must be full, regular and transparent.

Incumbent members or senators have an in-built advantage over challengers for their seat. Their staffing and office provisions; modern phone, fax and electronic communications; fast franking and Risograph machines; and colour printers and advanced computer facilities all help give them this advantage. Since 1996, office entitlements have expanded to provide enhanced parking and travel allowances for parliamentarians and their staff; broadband web access; significant computer, electronic and mechanical office enhancements; two phone lines, two mobile phones, a digital organiser and increased subscriptions. What the Howard government did was radically extend the natural in-built advantages of incumbency. Most obscene of all was the misuse of government advertising to advantage the incumbent government, and a huge increase in the number of ministerial staffers and members of the secretive government members secretariat.

At the individual parliamentarian level, the Howard government lifted the number of staff members per parliamentarian from three to four and doubled the relief staff provision—neither of which resulted from thorough, independent, publicly available assessments of whether members of parliament’s work demands warranted it. They hugely increased printing and postage allowances and allowed these allowances to be used for purposes never contemplated before. How-to-vote cards used to be at the cost of a political party; they were able to be funded by taxpayers at the last election, through the Howard government’s largesse. The public purse is now funding transport and telecommunication costs, mail and printing costs, the running of websites, the maintenance of electoral databases—all trappings of political incumbency and all worth many millions of dollars in each political cycle.

In 1996, six large electorates could have a second electorate office and an extra staffer; now there are 20 such electorates. Members serving large constituencies could now aggregate their communications and charter allowances, and money allocated for travel to distant parts of the constituency could now be used for mail. At the time this came through, the then Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Senator Evans, estimated that each of the 33 members in large constituencies could now accumulate, with other entitlements, as he described it, ‘a whopping $393,500 of taxpayer funds for their re-election’.

In August 2006, the Howard government displayed its determination to stay in office by tying amendments to parliamentary entitlement regulations which, because it had control of the Senate, could not be overturned. They were vigorously opposed by the non-government parties. Although introduced under the guise of servicing the electorate, many were clearly about boosting electioneering activity by incumbent members. Printing entitlements for members of the House of Representatives increased from $125,000 to $150,000. With 150 members, that entitlement amounted to $22.5 million each year.

There were no such allowances until Labor introduced them in the early 1990s, and they have grown ever since. There is at present a provision to carry forward 45 per cent of unused benefits into the following year that the minister will end through his announcement of this new regulation. This means that there was the potential for members to access printing entitlements of up to $217,500 during an election year, which was a grossly unfair advantage to incumbents over other candidates in an election. Members could use their printing entitlements for postal vote applications and how-to-vote cards for their seats or other seats in their respective states or territories. By comparison, members contesting the 1996 election could not use this entitlement for party based material. Figures released by the minister indicated that printing costs escalated for government members from $15,414 in 1996 to $94,511 in 2006 and for opposition members from $18,357 to $71,848. On the other hand, the printing costs for Independent members rose to only $35,214 over the same period.

Since 2004, sitting members and senators have been able to use their postal, printing and communications allowances for election campaigns. Members could spend those on parts of adjoining seats subject to redistribution. Senators could divert their allowances to help party colleagues. In sum, while the advantage of publicly funded expenses does go to all sitting members, that advantage compounded for a government where its electoral ascendancy was most pronounced.

I am not so naive as to believe that every single member of the then government supported such largesse from a moral perspective, nor am I so naive as to believe that every member of the opposition at the time opposed it from a moral perspective. There is a vast amount of self-interest attached to this. What the Rudd Labor government and Minister John Faulkner have now done—and here I want to pay respect to the Special Minister of State; this has been a long campaign for accountability and integrity on his part—is reduce the largesse, minimise the rort, restrict the advantage of incumbency and restore some contestability. I hope this is one of many steps that will be taken to make our democracy something that we can be more proud of than we were in the final years of the Howard government. I assure you that the Australian Democrats will strongly support the regulations that have been put before us.

Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to put on the public record that, while the minister was gracious in the great bulk of his remarks, he did regrettably stray into some partisan politics about two-thirds of the way through. Putting that to one side, I therefore need to correct the record in relation to some of these matters.

The first thing I would say is that the opposition does support these changes. We have some concerns about the potential differential between the Senate and the other place in relation to these entitlements. We certainly do not want the ability of senators to communicate to be at a different level to those of members in the other place. I think there is some inherent risk in these regulations for that to occur. Nevertheless, we will not be opposing these changes.

I do, however, want to make it quite clear that it was the Howard government which actually put a cap on printing. Up until 2002, initially under the Hawke government and then in the early years of the Howard government, there was actually no cap. In 2002, we moved to put a cap on this. So we can assure you, Madam Acting Deputy President, that we come to this debate with very clean hands indeed because we were the ones who put the cap in place.

I think there was some unfortunate reflection in the minister’s comments on the changes in 2005-06 along the lines of, ‘We must never return to these dark days.’ We made sure in 2002 that there would be a cap and that those dark days were gone. I think that, with the greatest respect for the minister, even he would be aware that there has been a dramatic growth in the number of electors in most lower house seats these days. Our view at that time was that it was quite reasonable for all members of the House of Representatives, irrespective of their political party, to communicate according to that growth in the number of electors. So we are not going to be pilloried in relation to that slight increase, particularly when we were the ones who first introduced the cap.

John Faulkner (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Faulkner interjecting—

Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I did not interrupt you, Senator Faulkner. We will support this, but I will again place on the record that I hope the minister has not put members of this chamber, on both sides, in a different position to those in the other place. Quite frankly, from the view of the requirement of the democracy that we are privileged to have to correspond with our very large constituencies, we do not want to see that diminished by a reduction in the rights of senators to communicate with their electors. We will support this, but we will not hear any politicking in relation to the matter because, as I said before, we were the first ones to put in the cap. We genuinely believed when we brought in the increase in 2005-06 that it was to address the needs of particularly those lower house members who had significantly increased constituencies.

Question agreed to.