Tony Abbott on Sunday announced he would instigate a “root and branch” review of the parliamentary entitlements system, following the resignation of embattled speaker Bronwyn Bishop.
It will be the second review of the entitlements system in five years. The 2010 review, led by Barbara Belcher, made 39 recommendations, fewer than half of which were adopted by the then Labor government.
Parliamentarians and public servants alike have already put forward suggestions for the new review:
Real-time reporting of donations and entitlements claims
Independent senator Nick Xenophon will introduce legislation that compels parliamentarians to report expenses claims within one month of lodging them. Currently, they have to do so in writing within six months of lodging claims.
Xenophon said: “In an era of mass surveillance embraced by both major parties, why not crowdsource some of the investigations to long-suffering taxpayers at large?”
Allan Fels, the former head of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission who was part of Belcher review, agreed that real-time reporting was a good idea.
“They should be pretty immediate. A month is a reasonable period,” Fels told ABC Radio on Monday.
The communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, has gone a step further, saying that entitlements reporting requirements should keep up with the times.
“There should be a 21st century way. I should be logging my expenses on my iPhone so they’re uploaded – through the NBN, I might add – immediately into the Department of Finance database rather than filling in paper forms as though we were still somewhere in the last century,” Turnbull said.
In late July, Labor adopted a set of reforms of the political donation system during its national conference. One of the reforms it adopted was the real-time reporting of all political donations.
Greater transparency
Some public servants have recommended politicians issue written explanations for all travel claims.
The former deputy secretary of the Department of Finance, Stephen Bartos, said forcing parliamentarians to log their expenses online in real time, with an accompanying justification for the travel, would “instantly lead to a reduction in the amount of travel”.
The Belcher review recommended that all parliamentarians should link claims made to the Department of Finance off their personal websites. This recommendation was not adopted by the government in 2010.
Fels said transparency was “the single most effective restraining measure on parliamentary entitlements excess”.
“Transparence and openness is the best antidote to wrongful claims,” he said.
The shadow finance minister, Tony Burke, said the internet was already providing for greater transparency.
“Effectively, a lot of us do that as we go through social media anyway,” Burke told ABC Radio, referring to the fact that constituents know more about what their member is doing now than in the past.
Independent oversight
One of the strongest criticisms of the current system is that it requires politicians to self-report, and the finance department to step in and investigate if allegations of misuse emerge.
Fels said there should be a new authority created to set up tighter rules on entitlements and enforce penalties if those rules are not followed.
“A key idea is that there should now be an independent body set up to run the whole thing,” he said. “I know that’s costly, but that seems necessary now if we are to restore trust [with the entitlements system].”
Burke said voters did not have confidence in the current process. “The one thing that I don’t want to get to is a system where politicians are now sitting down, writing it [the rules] for ourselves,” he said.
Having an independent authority on entitlements would allow parliamentarians to seek advice before putting in claims, something that does not happen often now.
Labor’s spokesman on waste, Pat Conroy, told ABC Radio: “I think a bigger issue is the lack of opportunity to obtain authoritative advice. The Department of Finance can’t really do that effectively, so a review to establish the best system of providing advice to MPs and looking at entitlements is, I think, a good thing.”
Bartos said the creation of an independent authority would benefit public servants, too. “It’s hard for public servants to actually overrule somebody who might next week be sitting on the other side of the table at a Senate estimates hearing, grilling them,” he said. “Or in some cases if they’re a minister, it’s an incredibly difficult position to put the public servants in.”
But he warned the establishment of an independent authority is not without its pitfalls, particularly the onerous red tape demands on politicians’ time.
“The advantage is it takes it out of the hands of the public servants and makes it clear that the political parties are accountable,” he said. “The disadvantage is you don’t want a prime minister spending most of his or her time signing off on travel expenses.”
He said expenses claims could fall into the wrong hands if the body was politically affiliated.
“If you digressed it to someone else, you can imagine the use that would be made of that for political patronage. You could [attack] your factional enemies to your heart’s content and that would be a dangerous system.”
Simplification of the complex system with stronger definitions
The opacity of the current entitlements system often leads to politicians knowingly or unknowingly exploiting the grey areas.
Fels said: “It is really messy. There is a huge number of laws, regulations, rules, practices, conventions and so on, which are extremely hard to interpret. Sometimes inconsistent, sometimes contradictory.”
Bartos said the Department of Finance employs 244 people to administer the entitlements system. “There’s probably 50 to 100 more than there need be just because of the complexity and obscurity of the system,” he estimated.
“There’s over-complexity in the number of allowances they [politicians] have, even for simple things like running their office,” Bartos said. “They even have an allowance of $1,800 for stamps for goodness sake and this is meant to be the internet era.”
Turnbull agreed the system needed to be simplified. “There is a very large staff in the Department of Finance administering it. There are a lot of savings that could be made by streamlining it,” he said.
Part of the complexity of the system is the vagueness of the definitions employed in the guidelines.
Former Speaker of the House, Peter Slipper, had his conviction on dishonesty struck out after magistrate John Burns found that the definition of parliamentary business was broad enough to cast doubt on claims that his trips to Canberra vineyards were used purely for personal reasons.
But Fels said that, despite the tough rhetoric from both major political parties, enacting reforms of the system would take time.
“We have generally detected a lack of really serious intent on both sides of the house in making the system work really well,” he said.
