Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

After three years of broken promises, the government has finally found the courage to abolish the Life Gold Pass travel perks for former politicians. The end of the gold pass scam really is a victory for the strength of public opinion. This scam has been hanging around like a bad smell for years and would still be in place had it not become untenable for MPs to be associated with what really is an elitist scheme. Whilst this is an important step and one the Greens will support, we think it should go further. We do not understand what reason there is for an exemption so that some members of parliament should still continue to get it.

More importantly, there does need to be a thorough overhaul of the so-called entitlement system. Really, members of parliament should not be expecting to get additional entitlements—allowances for work related expenses that are in the public interest, yes, but entitlements, no. We need to clean up and reform electoral funding so that big business cannot make big donations to political parties. As we are seeing at the moment in parliament, then they get to write the laws and in some instances get to rewrite the laws of this country. If we really want to restore public confidence in our democratic institutions, we need to get the big money out of politics, we need to get it out of donations during election campaigns, we need to ensure that expenses that are claimed by parliamentarians are legitimate and we need a much more thorough overhaul of the system than we are currently seeing from this government. Members of parliament, of course—it should not have to be said—use public money to do their job, and they are doing it on behalf of the public and for the public, so accountability to the public should be an integral part of any allowance scheme.

This gold pass scheme that is the subject of this bill has been a long time under our blame. It was first introduced in 1918 and originally provided unlimited domestic travel to former members of parliament, but since 2002, in response to growing public disquiet over the scheme, the reach of the gold pass has been reduced, but not always with the unanimous support of current and former MPs. In that year, the pass was changed to limit retired MPs to 25 return flights a year. In 2012, this was further reduced to 10 return flights. The Gillard government wound up the whole scheme for MPs who retired after 2012. Last year, four former federal members of parliament lost a High Court challenge that they were hoping would ensure they retained their Life Gold Passes that entitled them to free travel. In the notorious 2014 Abbott-Hockey budget, the government committed to further reduce the gold pass for all former members except prime ministers, but the changes under this plan were not due to be in place until 2026. But, even with that extended time line, the government failed to take the legislation through both houses, despite having cross-party support that would have ensured the passage of the bill.

When current Prime Minister Turnbull became Prime Minister, he continued to drag the chain, and the government was all over the place. Then, in the second half of 2016, the then Special Minister of State promised the bill would be introduced before Christmas, and that did not happen. But after a woeful summer, during which the rorting of the system was exposed for all to see, even this government was no longer able to sit on its hands and was forced into action. At the end of last year, before the scandals broke, the Prime Minister claimed that his government was too busy to deal with the gold pass legislation. When you remember that there was a period towards the end of last year where the Senate ran out of legislation to deal with, you really wonder whether the government would have done this at all had it not been for the exposure of so many scandals.

But the good news is that the government has come to its senses. It has been dragged there kicking and screaming by the public and by parties in parliament who have been calling for reform in this area for a very long time, including the Greens. The gold pass repeal is no longer on the shelf gathering dust while the government dithers. The gold pass itself is now going to be consigned to the dustbin of history, and this will be a small step in restoring public confidence in how members of parliament undertake their work.

On the question of penalties that has been raised and was going to be agitated further, and on the question of amendments that will come up in this bill and another bill, I say that, when these bills come before the Senate, the Greens will be pursuing amendments consistent with our policy that there needs to be greater scrutiny and accountability of expenses that are claimed and that there ought to be fewer perks paid to members of parliament who have retired. So we will be pursuing those amendments when we get there, and we will be having a lot more to say about the bills when the matters come before the Senate.

I will end my contribution here, but I will say more during the amendment stage. I foreshadow that here in this place I will be happily supporting the amendments moved by the member for Mayo. You will find that, when it comes to the Senate, we will argue that it should even go further, but the amendments that are to be moved by the member for Mayo here are a good step in the right direction and they deserve to be supported. But I will say that, if the government were serious and really wanted to restore faith in our institutions, we would not have to be dragged kicking and screaming and then taking the minimal action possible. What we would be saying is, 'It's time for a thorough overhaul of the relationship between money and politics,' and we would be looking around the world at how they do it elsewhere. We would be saying, 'Perhaps the answer lies in public funding of election campaigns with limits on how much can be spent.' That would be a discussion that we would have to have with the Australian people, because it would involve putting more money into elections. But, if you said to people, 'Look, you're already tipping in an enormous amount of money into elections anyway,' and if the quid pro quo of publicly-funded elections is that donations are excluded and private money has less of a sway over what happens, I think a lot of people would accept that. That happens in other countries around the world, so perhaps we ought to look at that.

We ought to look more broadly at caps being made on donations into the electoral process and, perhaps, even as they do in some states around the country, caps on how much you can spend in a particular electorate. That would level the playing field, and that would stop some of the incentives for money coming in, in the first place—if there was less that you could actually spend during the course of an election campaign.

Until we reform this system, everyone is forced to play by a set of some pretty broken rules. It is the rules that need to change. It would give the public much more confidence if we were able to have that kind of rigorous examination of the connection between money and politics, in this place. Until we fully fix that, a lot of people are going to have a lot of doubts about the integrity of this place, and that is enormously disappointing for Australia, for us and for democracy as a whole.

This bill is worthy of support. We have been calling for this for a very long time. We could have seen action on this a while ago if the governments, at the time, had supported the Greens, but, in some senses, on this bill, better late than never. But we should be amending it so it goes further.

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