Matters relating to misuse of electorate office staffing entitlements

2018-08-23

Ms PENNICUIK (Southern Metropolitan) (By leave) (10:21:50) — I just wanted to reiterate comments made by Ms Springle, the deputy chair of the committee, that the motion to refer this matter to the Privileges Committee was entirely a Greens decision. Whether or not the Labor Party supported that decision was a matter for them. It was our decision and our judgement that the Privileges Committee was the only available mechanism that we could use to investigate this particular issue in the absence of an independent commissioner for standards. The Greens have put that motion to this Parliament for the Procedure Committee to look at, along the lines of the independent Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards in the United Kingdom, where that particular office not only provides advice to members of Parliament but also enforces the standards and investigates breaches of the standards. If breaches are found, that commissioner can refer people to either internal parliamentary committees such as the Privileges Committee or external agencies such as the police.

We do not have anything like that in the Victorian Parliament. As Ms Springle said in her contribution, there are a lot of grey areas, and even with the most recent guidelines issued to MPs I do not think there has been a lot of improvement in some of those grey areas. Also, as Ms Springle has pointed out in her minority report, the way the standards and rules have been implemented across my time in the Parliament has not been done in a fair and balanced way for all parties, and some parties had arrangements that were allowed by the Department of Parliamentary Services that other parties knew nothing about. So there is a lot of room for improvement here.

I would just like to finish by saying thank you to the committee and the committee staff. I think the report is a good one that everybody should familiarise themselves with.