Robert Ray (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

And suspicious. I do not know what they do. It may have an innocent outcome; it may not. But I would like to know why they have suddenly appointed, after 10 years, two senior media advisers.

Then we come to probably one of the more interesting changes of late. That is what I call the Boswell rort. In July last year the Prime Minister approved a staffing establishment for Senator Boswell of 10 staff. This does not include his three electorate staff or his relief budget. Senator Boswell gets 10 extra staff. He gets one senior adviser, three advisers, five assistant advisers and one secretary. I wonder what in heaven’s name these people do. Surely they do not prepare speeches for Senator Boswell—those meandering dirges that slide uphill and downhill in this chamber. You could not find these 10 people responsible for that. Are they de facto National Party campaign workers? I do not know because there has never been an explanation. Are they working full time on Senator Boswell’s preselection? I have no idea. I do not know what they do. We deserve an explanation.

Look at the relativities. You have five Nationals in this chamber and four Democrats. The four Democrats get five assistant advisers; Senator Boswell gets five assistant advisers. The Democrats do not get a senior adviser; Senator Boswell does. The Democrats do not get an adviser; Senator Boswell gets three. The Democrats do not get a secretary; Senator Boswell does. Where is the justice and relativity there? The Greens get five assistant advisers; Senator Boswell gets five assistant advisers. The Greens do not get a senior adviser; Senator Boswell does. Senator Boswell gets three advisers; the Greens get none. Senator Boswell gets a secretary; the Greens get none. In other words, he is doubly staffed compared with the two largest minority opposition parties in this Senate.

Where is the justice in that? Why was the decision made to give the Nationals an extra 10 staff seven days after the coalition got the majority in this chamber? It does not compute. At the very time Senator Joyce is threatening to rat on this and that piece of legislation and there are rumblings from the National Party, suddenly they get these 10 staff members. I say it is very suspicious. I do not see where the output and the justice are here. I hope those 10 staffers are not assisting the National Party to torpedo their Liberal colleagues in Queensland. I do not think that would be a very fair reward to the Prime Minister, who allocated those extra 10 staff.

Then you have the rather strange case of Mr Andrew Robb, a parliamentary secretary. I look to his staffing situation. As a parliamentary secretary he gets two DLOs, two senior advisers, three advisers, one assistant adviser, one office manager, one secretary/admin officer plus three electorate staff. That is better staffing than I had as Minister for Defence for six years with a budget of $10 billion a year. I only ever had one senior adviser and one DLO.

Why is it? My first suspicion is there is yet another secret campaign unit being set up, but the minister at least said, no, he thought the explanation was that Mr Robb was doing a minister’s job. Why not make him a minister? The contrast between the staffing of Mr Andrew Robb and that of every other parliamentary secretary is stark. There is an absolutely amazing difference in the staffing levels. If he is expected to do a ministerial job, remove one of the logs here and put him in. But do not have a parliamentary secretary being a de facto minister with such massive staffing if the explanation that the minister has given is honest.

Look at the staff costs, Mr President: well over $1 million a year on Mr Robb’s staff—a parliamentary secretary’s staff. It is unheard of. It is more staff than anyone on the opposition side has other than the Leader of the Opposition, far more than in Senator Evans’s office, and all for a parliamentary secretary. You do not get equality in politics if you fund in that particular way.

The person who has to take responsibility for these massive staff number blow-outs is the Prime Minister. I cannot understand why sole responsibility for these staff increases is left with the Prime Minister. He must approve all extra staff and their allocation. He has to approve all payments outside the band. He has to approve all new personal classifications. It is very hard for a Prime Minister to personally supervise these particular areas. But if anything goes wrong he is held responsible. Basically, we are now paying at least an extra $15 million a year for these extra staffers over and above those reported in September 1996. Between the estimates committee hearings on 13 February and 1 May we had a new government staffer appointed every five days. Is that going to continue for the next two years? That is about $1.5 million in extra staff costs, not just salaries but also the on-costs that go with them, in just that brief period.

What I find amazing is this: why does Senator Abetz get an extra 3.6 staff when he is doing exactly the same job as Senator Ian Macdonald before him? Is Senator Macdonald so intellectually superior that he did not require those staff or do the extra staff just happen to be doing some other duties in Tasmania? There is no explanation as to why Senator Abetz gets an extra 3.6 staff over and above his predecessor’s staff for doing exactly the same job. We do not know why there are two extra media advisers in the cabinet policy unit. We deserve an explanation.

I personally think that, if you pointed to any other area of government with such a massive staff blow-out with such massive costs, the Auditor-General would need to know why, and I would urge the Auditor-General to look at this particular area. I think we have to change the framework institutionally. I do not think it is good enough for sole responsibility to lie with the Prime Minister. He could not possibly supervise this.

It has been a long while since I read Franz Kafka’s Amerika, but I still remember that perceptive chapter he wrote about the ever-increasing circus that just grows and grows. Having read it 30 or 40 years ago, I am now suffering from a sense of deja vu about ministerial staff that just grows and grows and grows. Every time I think of the government staffing situation, I think: very Kafkaesque indeed.