Senator BARTLETT (Leader of the Australian Democrats) (5:48 PM) —I would also like to speak briefly on this disallowance motion. I think my colleague Senator Murray has covered the details extremely well and, as is usually the case with the Democrats, in as objective a way as possible in trying to rise above some of the obvious temptations for political mud throwing, backwards and forwardsing, finger pointing and point scoring. It highlights the risks of raising an issue like this, and I think everybody would acknowledge that it is almost an unfortunate disincentive to start pointing to one particular entitlement, because it automatically begs the sort of response that we got today from the minister. He will say, `You don't like this one, so we're going to threaten to take these ones off you,' or, `If you do that then we're going to make public things that are going to embarrass you about your inappropriate expenditure in other areas.' So develops a convention where, if everybody just shuts up and keeps their head down, we can keep increasing entitlements wherever we feel like it without having any sort of scrutiny about whether that increase is appropriate.

I also do not have a problem with increases where they are justifiable or appropriate. I think most in the broader regulations are appropriate. I must say I do not know what a few of them will mean, including the ones that the minister was trying to disallow relating to mobile phone services for the personal staff of the leader of a minority party, which would be me. I thought I already had some mobile phones for my personal staff, so I am not quite sure what difference this one will make. As far as I know, I did not make any representations to bring it in, but it may have been brought up prior to my taking on this role. I take the minister at his word, which may be a risky activity. Presumably it might mean some extra costs to the taxpayer. I think they would be justifiable costs, given the incredible importance of basic communication for people in some of those key roles, and I would be quite willing to argue that case if necessary. Again, I think the increase in the transparency of processes is important.

There is another provision in these regulations that puts in place what it says is a longstanding convention that the official postal entitlements of officeholders, including people such as me, should not be used for mass mail-outs. It still has the flaw of not defining precisely what a `mass mail-out' is, but I guess it is always better to have a convention in writing and out in the open rather than just acknowledged privately. As the minister would know, I previously approached him to seek some clarification about that. I do think that, whilst it is obviously easy to start going around saying, `So and so from this party spent this much on that,' we should refrain from doing so. The basic point here is, quite frankly, that I am of the view, as is my party, that this increase is not justifiable. We do not oppose many entitlements. Sometimes we advocate increased entitlements in various areas where we think they are inadequate and see if we can counterbalance those with savings in other areas. It would be good to try and have those sorts of debates without the potential undercurrent of finger pointing, outing offenders, point scoring and the like. Usually we can do that reasonably well, but obviously sometimes the temptation is a bit too great for some people.

I did not hear all of the minister's contribution—I was on the phone a couple of times—but as far as I am aware he spent a lot of time attacking everybody else in the chamber for what he alleged was our keeping benefits that suited us and trying to take away benefits that might be perceived to inordinately or unequally assist the Liberal Party members of the House of Representatives. I think that is some of the understandable political point scoring. I do not know if he actually spent any time justifying why this increase was needed, which I would have found more useful, but I will go back—

Opposition senators interjecting—

Senator BARTLETT —Two minutes out of the 20? Okay. Senator Murray and, I think, Senator Ray have referred to the Audit Office report, and I should again pay tribute to Senator Murray for playing a key role in this very significant audit of parliamentary entitlements. As he said, the average of members' use of printing allowance three or four years ago was $37,000. Quite why $125,000 was picked I do not know. It seems excessive to me based on what the average expenditure was a couple of years earlier. But looking at the explanation that was given in the official explanatory memorandum did not fill me with any greater confidence. The only justification given in there for increasing the limit from $125,000 to $150,000 was, `Experience has shown that a slight relaxation in the arrangement is appropriate by an increase in the limit.' I am not quite sure how an increase in the limit by $25,000 equates to a relaxation in the arrangement. It does not actually say what the experience is that highlights why it needs to be increased by what is a pretty significant hike on top of what is already a pretty significant figure.

There are always opportunities to look at some of these entitlements and regulations that come through here. If we were just doing this for political point scoring, I am sure that there are others that we could have found that technically would have been politically beneficial for us to deny to others. Almost by basic logic, any entitlement that is available to all parliamentarians inordinately benefits the larger parties more than it does the smaller parties because there is more of you lot to use the extra entitlements that are there than there are of us. So if we were going to be political about it we would deny increases in entitlements across the board to try and keep that gap from getting bigger. But we do not do that because we recognise that entitlements are not there to gain political advantage; they are there to do a job. It is a job that does cost a lot of money. The support services that are required are important and very complex. They are detailed jobs that need to be done well for the interests of the people of Australia.

I would make the point that if there is spare money going around, rather than some of the other things that possibly are in here, I would be quite happy for that to go into—not so much security—extra staff for the Department of the Senate and some of the support services there. Without any doubt at all they could do with some extra people. But again those are points that we can raise in other circumstances. The bottom line with this is that this particular entitlement, because of the size of it, is inordinate. Most of the parliamentary entitlements we do not criticise. The Democrats are not prone to doing a lot of finger pointing about the size of the Prime Minister's travel bill or those sorts of things—apart from the occasional what seems to be highly excessive hotel bill—because we recognise that that is pretty much unavoidable and it goes with the job. Whilst it might be a cheap shot, it cheapens the whole process to get into that sort of stuff.

We do, I must say, have a lot of problems with the parliamentary superannuation scheme, and we will continue to try and change that to make it what we believe would be more equitable. There are possibly one of two other entitlements that we would look at, but across the board we are not out there every day doing the holier than thou, snouts in the trough, everybody except us type of approach. We recognise that most of them are acceptable, but we believe in this case that it is not acceptable. The case has not been made for such a significant increase, particularly given the much lower average expenditure that was clearly shown to be the case just a few years ago.