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

Yes, thank you, Senator Faulkner. But here we have a document which is a pretty savage indictment of the rorting of the printing allowance by members of parliament to advantage themselves politically.

The Auditor-General is making out, if I am not misrepresenting this—I am shorthanding it—that the printing allowance is meant to help parliamentarians extend their work with their electorates and to give information which is helpful to their constituents but instead it has become more and more a facility to help MPs in election campaigning. It has become a taxpayer funded advantage which candidates who are not incumbents do not have. Therefore, it advantages incumbent members over those who contest elections. On the face of it that is patently unfair. The printing allowance should never have been allowed to do that.

In the report the Auditor-General found that the government turned down approaches in the past for something to be done about this. I am not going to go into the full gamut of the findings by the Auditor-General, but they are an indictment of misspending, self-investment, taking political advantage and misuse of taxpayers’ money. The Greens and I will be expecting that the recommendations of this report, which principally call for a set of guidelines which cannot be broken and which defend the public interest in the spending of printing allowances, be adopted. There are five recommendations and all five ought to be adopted. On behalf of the Greens, I want to propose that this parliament and this government should instigate this. But this parliament should go further. It should set up an independent arbiter to oversee the spending of the monies that come to MPs for use in their electoral work. I do not think it should just be the printing allowance but electoral and other allowances as well.

There is a double side to this. One is that the ‘parliamentary ombudsman’, if you like, would be able to arbitrate the spending of money to defend the public interest, to see that it is not rorted, not self-invested, not giving a particular electoral advantage and not being saved up—as under this printing allowance—to be spent in a run to an election. The second thing is that it will defend the interests of good parliamentarians who are worried about whether they should spend their printing allowance or other money on a particular purpose. They would be able to refer to an arbiter who makes that decision.

Ten years ago, if I wanted something printed in this place using the printing allowance, there was a Senate printing office. They would say, ‘Senator, you can’t spend it on that,’ or ‘Yes, we’ll go ahead and print that,’ or ‘If you take off the Greens logo, that’ll be okay.’ We knew where we stood. That has now been abolished and we do not know where we stand anymore. And, if you do not know where you stand, good people will try to do the right thing, but there will always be those who will try to rort the system. It is embarrassing that we have this report before the parliament but it must be taken note of. The recommendations should be implemented.

We should go further and establish a permanent watchdog, an independent arbiter, to watch over printing allowance spending and other parliamentary spending meant for electoral advantage—that is, the advantage of the people we serve, not the serving members themselves. It is an important matter. There is a pure finding by the Auditor-General of double-dipping here; printing allowances have been used for electoral advantage and then the member, or the party, has sought to get a refund for that printing through the electoral allowance. The already-publicised use of a very limited number of printers, particularly by the bigger parties, have been found to be donors to the parties. An absolute watch has to be put on that.

We must act on this Auditor-General’s report. I think we must be bold and come up with stronger recommendations than the recommendations of the Auditor-General. This is an indictment of misspending of the public’s money in the self-interest of the parliamentarians. We have got to put an end to it. It is simply not right that we put this report on the shelf and do nothing about it. The executive is the agency that must implement these findings. Without the executive, without Prime Minister Rudd taking action on this, it will not happen. I challenge the Prime Minister, the Hon. Kevin Rudd, to not only implement the findings of this Auditor-General’s report this year, but to also go one step further and set up an independent watchdog in the public interest and in the interest of those parliamentarians who want to do the right thing.