Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That Schedules 1 and 3 to the Parliamentary Entitlements Amendment Regulations 2006 (No. 1), as contained in Select Legislative Instrument 2006 No. 211 and made under the Parliamentary Entitlements Act 1990, be disallowed.

What an outrage this particular hike in expenditure is! Here we have a regulation being put forward by the government in the pre-election year to increase spending on printing for incumbent MPs by millions of dollars. Of course, we have to recognise that this was last tried in the run to the last election in 2004 and was blocked by the Senate when I moved a similar disallowance motion. It was blocked by the Senate for good reason: it was an outrageous hand in the pockets of the Australian taxpayers in the run to an election to advantage incumbents against those other people who would stand for election.

The biggest problem with the regulations is that they hike the amount of printing that members of the House of Representatives can have by an extra $25,000 a year, from $125,000 to $150,000. Moreover, there is rollover provision so that, if that money is not spent in the year running to an election, in the year of the election that spending can go up to between $180,000 and $200,000 for the year for each member in every electorate right across the country. Who does this advantage most? The party with the most members in the House of Representatives—the government. This is a prime ministerial decision to advantage the government against the opposition but in particular against all other comers in the electorate.

The Greens of course oppose the changes to these printing entitlements, but we should note that, as far as the Senate is concerned, it is not going to make one difference. The entitlements have not been increased for the Senate. The formula has been changed to disadvantage the Greens, and we will live with that. You can see the government and the Prime Minister’s office think, think, thinking: ‘How are we going to improve our election capability as against people elsewhere in the political spectrum that we are opposed to?’ Have a listen to these figures. The 86 coalition MPs will receive an extra $12.9 million in the coming year in printing allowance and the coalition senators an extra $780,000—total, $13.7 million.

If you put that into perspective, and you work it out at a generous 5c a printed sheet, this gives government MPs enough money to print 258 million flyers in the run to the next election. That is equivalent to 25 pieces of junk mail in every Australian household letterbox. It is just outrageous. It is well known that the Howard government injects tens of millions of dollars into advertising on television and elsewhere in the run to an election to advantage itself. This is a more direct largesse going to every MP to advantage themselves. The government has got over $13 million out of the taxpayers’ pockets in extra money—and we are not talking about what else is being done elsewhere in the political spectrum. I remember some years ago it was a $50,000 a year advantage to incumbents. It has now moved to well over $100,000 a year.

In America there are figures showing that 90 per cent of incumbents get returned because everything is loaded so much by the sitting members of Congress against those who would take them on at the hustings. That is the process that is occurring here. So much of what is wrong with the American system is being imported under the Howard government. They have an opportunity here now that the government has got the control of the Senate, now that the brake is off and the Senate’s role is simply to be able to talk about the issue and not to act on it, to go for the money. We have to deplore it. We have to debate it and defy it as best we can. We have to draw public attention to it. In my view the expenditure of public money in this way simply to advantage sitting MPs against other candidates for election is quite wrong. It is just simply ethically wrong. It is morally wrong. It is undemocratic and we need a big check on that.

The best check on that of course has been the Senate. But the government has now got control of the Senate. The Prime Minister said that he would not show hubris and would not abuse that control. It is being abused here today. This is an effort to get what the Senate refused to give the government just three years ago, and it is wrong. So the three parties on this side of the chamber are moving to disallow this regulation. The money being spent through this regulation would be much better spent on hospitals, on schools, on the entitlements of poor people and on the 1.8 million pensioners who were totally ignored in the last budget. If the government has a slush fund for things like this it should be thinking of those citizens who could use this money instead of thinking about how to disadvantage and abuse the electoral system on the way to the next election.