Page 2693 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 28 June 2011
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about this appropriation, the $6 million is divided between five ministers to the tune of $1.238 million per minister. That says a great deal about the lavishness of the ACT executive budget compared to the budget for the rest of this Assembly. It is interesting to note that requests or suggestions over a long period of time that perhaps the executive should limit their business class travel have been ignored. For instance, on short hauls perhaps they should not use business class travel because most of our constituents do not use business class travel. This is the general approach of committees where we have agreed that on short-haul travel we will not use business class travel.
It is unacceptable, I think, to our electors to fly out of this airport to Sydney, Melbourne or even Brisbane in business class when the people who pay our wages are down the back. I think that most of the non-executive members have taken that to heart. It would be another challenge for the new Chief Minister because when this was last raised, the Chief Minister at the time, Mr Stanhope, said, “It is our entitlement and we will use it.” I do not think that that is an appropriate approach. Even if it is our entitlement, and it is our entitlement to travel business class to Sydney if we are on committee duties, it is not appropriate. I think we should see the ACT executive following the lead of the non-executive members of the Assembly in relation to short-haul trips, for example, and see some economy here.
It is interesting to see the amount of money that is being spent on behalf of individual ministers for large numbers of staff and access to considerably better IT than our staff are entitled to. If we want to up the IT for our staff, it has to be paid for out of our DOA, usually at quite high costs. For instance, it is axiomatic that ministerial staff will receive a Blackberry with all the bells and whistles. It will be paid for out of the executive budget. But if our senior staff wanted to do that, they would have to do that at their own expense.
Even members, if they want to have a synchronised Blackberry, have to pay through the IT system provided to the ACT government at extraordinary cost. It is a much higher cost than you would get from a commercial arrangement. This is all on the basis that they have to guarantee the security. As a result, non-executive members of the Legislative Assembly cannot easily receive Legislative Assembly emails outside the building through their Blackberries or other approved systems.
I am not talking about iPhones here, which have real problems. In addition, the staff of non-executive members cannot receive the same sorts of entitlements to do their job that executive members’ staff do. I think that there is a mismatch between what is provided to executive members and their staff and what is provided to non-executive members. Also, we see that the reporting of this expenditure by the executive is much less rigorous and much less often than is the case for non-executive members. When we are considering that $1.238 million of ACT taxpayers’ money per minister is spent every year these are matters that should be considered quite closely.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Convenor, ACT Greens) (5.11): As we are all aware, we entrust an enormous range of discretionary and decision-making powers in the executive and we expect that they will implement the intention of parliament and ensure that law is applied consistently with the intention of this place throughout the community. Additionally, there is an enormous range of day-to-day
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