Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Which sort of fuel he puts in his car, exactly. We know all of that. There is another Kerry O’Brien who is paid from the same source, and yet we know nothing about him. I do not want this to be personal to Kerry O’Brien, the announcer, so let me remove him. It came up this way because of the story of the two Kerry O’Briens. But let me not talk about the ABC Kerry O’Brien. Let me talk about all of the high profile ABC presenters. What do they get paid? I think we are entitled to know. Are they on half a million dollars a year? Are they on $600,000 a year? Are they on $1 million a year? Do we get good value for the $600,000 a year we might pay them? I do not know what we pay them because they refuse to tell us. Do they travel business class, or do they travel down the back? Do they travel on Virgin or do they travel on Qantas? What do they get when they go away? Do they stay at flash hotels or very modest hotels? You know that about all of my colleagues on both sides of the chamber. But do we know it about these journalists who never seem to worry about attacking parliamentarians for their ‘huge’ salaries and their ‘great’ allowances. They can fly on aeroplanes—well, sorry, this is where we work and this is where we have to get to. But when you ask the ABC what their journalists are paid they refuse to tell us.

Do they have a clause in their contracts that says, because of their high profile that they get from taxpayer-funded appearances on the national TV, they are able to earn additional salaries because they are high profile faces? If they do, what extra salaries do they get by way of private appearances? I do not know. Perhaps their contracts prohibit them from doing that. Why wouldn’t the ABC make those contracts available? I do not want the names written down. They can cross out all the names before they give us the contracts. I am not interested in the individual person. What I am interested in is whether the ABC is spending taxpayers’ money appropriately and diligently. We know it for every other element of government expenditure. We know what the Secretary of the Department of Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water gets as a salary. We know where he stays. We know how much he gets as TA, but do we know it about the ABC high profile people? Of course we do not because the ABC refuses to say. The sooner this Senate insists that the ABC answers these questions the better we will be.