Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed! When you do the research on electorates of over 10,000 square kilometres you find that there are 33 of them: Labor has four, the Independents have three, and the government has 26. Surprise, surprise—another little advantage for government MPs! Labor opposes this little rort as well.

The increase in the printing allowance, the rollover provisions for it and the amalgamation of the charter allowance and the communications allowance are far from the only steps the government has been taking to give itself an electoral advantage at taxpayer expense. There are the government advertising campaigns. It has spent a billion dollars of taxpayers’ money on government advertising since coming to office, with notorious campaigns such as the GST ‘unchain my heart’ ads, Strengthening Medicare, and Work Choices, for which $55 million was spent. After the ‘unchain my heart’ campaign, the Auditor-General produced a set of guidelines designed to draw the line between bona fide government advertising and political advertising, which the Liberal Party ought to be paying for, not taxpayers. The government never adopted those guidelines.

And they are still at it. In this year’s budget they allocated a further $230 million for government advertising programs such as those for private health insurance, $52 million, and the smartcard, $47 million. They did not allocate anything for the sale of Telstra, but that has not stopped them. They are out there, at it again, with another $20 million of taxpayers’ dollars to talk up the Telstra sale and try to undo some of the damage they have done with their interference in the management of Telstra, particularly in seeking to impose Mr Geoffrey Cousins on the board.

And then there are the changes to election campaign disclosure laws and the increase in tax deductibility for campaign donations. Tax deductibility used to be $100; now it is $1,500. Why should campaign donations be tax deductible? Here, as with the printing entitlement, the government is seeking to use taxpayers’ funds for electoral advantage. If this were happening in East Timor or the Solomons, Australia—and particularly our patronising Minister for Foreign Affairs—would be giving them a lecture about democratic practice and culture. The abuse of taxpayers’ funds for political advantage is a blot on Australian democracy.

So the House should disallow these regulations, which increase the printing entitlement by 20 per cent, allow up to 45 per cent of it to be rolled over into an election year and extend the entitlement beyond information leaflets and letters to include magnetic calendars, postal vote applications, how-to-vote cards, certificates and Christmas cards.

When the government is not cheating, using taxpayer funded steroids, it is tampering with the ball. Back on 17 August, the Special Minister of State, who is also at the table, came into the House on the adjournment debate to speak about the issue of printing entitlements. In the course of his contribution, he set out for the House the printing expenditure of the member for Griffith, the Leader of the Opposition and the member for Prospect. In doing so, he behaved quite improperly. So too did the member for Indi, who earlier that same day purported to reveal the printing allowance expenditure of the member for Richmond.

If journalists ask for details of MPs’ printing allowance expenditure, they are told to go away. It is not public information and it will not be revealed without the consent of the MP. All members of parliament are entitled to be treated in the same way. Either all printing expenditures should be revealed or none should be. By releasing Labor MPs’ expenditure but not coalition MPs’ expenditure, the minister is guilty of partisan abuse of his office. The minister should restore some decency to this matter by now revealing the expenditure of the printing entitlement of all House of Representative members. While he is at it, he should provide details of the year-by-year total cost of MPs’ spending of their printing entitlement. He said Labor has no caps. I think we will find that the reality is that MPs’ spending on printing has risen greatly since the Liberals came to power.

The behaviour of the minister is all too reminiscent of the smear campaign conducted in 2001 against the former Labor member for Paterson Bob Horne, who was attacked for his printing allowance expenditure. Figures suddenly appeared in a newspaper regarding one member of parliament, Bob Horne, much to his political disadvantage, because the local Liberal machine campaigned successfully against him on this particular basis. He was highly criticised in the press. But when we got access to all the figures, we found that in that year Mr Horne came 14th on a league table of spenders. Who were bigger spenders than him? That would be 13 coalition members of parliament, but Bob Horne was the only one outed.

I note that in the papers today were reports that Mr Des Kelly has been acquitted of charges of leaking information in his capacity as a public servant in the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. This case is related to charges against two Herald Sun journalists, Michael Harvey and Gerard McManus, for refusing to disclose their sources. The government claims that in this case no witch hunt was involved and that Mr Harvey and Mr McManus were simply caught up in the government going through the normal process of investigating leaks. Why is it, then, that no investigation was ever launched into the leaking of Mr Horne’s printing expenditure in 2001? Could the reason be that the government knew perfectly well who had leaked that information and that the last thing it wanted was an AFP investigation? How is it that the member for Indi is apparently in possession of the member for Richmond’s printing allowance expenditure? Has the AFP been asked to do an investigation of this? I dare say it has not. That is because there is a double standard from a government which cheats. Every time it thinks it can get away with it, it cheats, and this regulation is just another classic example of that and it ought to be disallowed. The Sydney Morning Herald got it exactly right a few weeks ago when it said:

... there needs to be tighter rules on MPs’ various entitlements ... And such rules need to be policed independently. Otherwise, even the robust flower of democracy will wilt from overfeeding.

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