2018-06-08
Ms PENNICUIK — Minister, I would like to take this opportunity to thank the staff of the Parliament that the parliamentary appropriation bill funds, including the clerks and their staff, the IT unit upon whom we all rely weekly and daily, the staff of the library, the staff of Hansard, the security staff, the parliamentary attendants, our electorate officers, the Department of Parliamentary Services including accounts and training, and the properties division.
I have spoken on these bills many times. One thing that does come to light if you look back over the past is that there is an increase in the budget for the parliamentary appropriation this year to $154 million from $144 million in the last financial year — $10 million more. I am a member of the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee, and if you look at the budget pressures on the Parliament as a whole that the Speaker, the President and the clerks presented to the committee, these include increased electorate office rentals at a rate higher than the funding increase. There was a graph presented to us by the Presiding Officers and the clerks at the committee hearing, and particularly in the last three to four years the rental on properties has shown a steep increase, and that has an effect if leases expire et cetera on where MPs and their staff can be located.
The Presiding Officers and clerks also pointed out an increased information and communication technology cost driven by growing data usage, which I am sure we are all aware of and are responsible for to some degree; a continued increase in cybersecurity costs; more frequent security patching, which has to be compressed into non-sitting weeks; and vendor patch volumes increasing.
The Presiding Officers also mentioned that there is increasing web streaming of the Parliament, which is a good thing, and increased numbers of weekly attacks on the parliamentary website, which I think members who have not necessarily gone to the detail of what was presented by the Presiding Officers and the clerks in PAEC would be interested in. There are large numbers of hacking attempts on the Parliament, and interestingly around 39 per cent of them are coming from the United States; around 20 per cent of them are coming from Japan, which seems strange; around 9 per cent are coming internally from Australia; and the rest are made up of different countries.
Given these increasing pressures and the relatively flatlining budget over the last few years, and following on from the points made by Mr Rich-Phillips regarding the independence of Parliament to determine its own budget, my question is: in terms of these increasing costs which the Presiding Officers draw to our attention every year in the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee hearings, what is the criteria that the Treasurer and the department use to keep up and make sure that these budget pressures are accounted for in the parliamentary appropriation budget?