Page 2619 - Week 09 - Thursday, 8 August 1991
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I question the fullness of your poll; we will not go into the details of that. Let us say, for the sake of argument, that you had a useful little poll - we all do these kinds of polls - and you have come up with certain results; but I would want to know a great deal about that. In any case, it would not surprise me that in a small selective poll a group of Australian respondents, many of them on smaller incomes than ours, would begrudge politicians a reasonable income. We all recognise that overall it could be said, as a generality, that politicians are not popular. Who knows, there may be some peculiar value in that. But I wonder whether Mr Stevenson gave the people who were involved in his poll access to a booklet describing the range of parliamentary salaries in Australia and the degree of our pay fall.
I accept the truisms in points (2), (3) and (4) of Mr Stevenson's MPI, but they are irrelevant to the subject of parliamentary salaries. Here, briefly, is the case for giving parliamentarians adequate remuneration - indeed, a better remuneration than has been determined for us. Potential parliamentarians have to be attracted to the task that we have all undertaken. Obviously, that is not the prime reason for those of us who are here taking on our present roles. This is a unique situation in this Assembly.
For some of us, there were certain causes to which we were committed; for others, it was loyalty and commitment to their parties and their parties' overall place in governments around Australia; for others, it was the excitement and fascination of being involved with a brand new parliamentary assembly. I ask us to remember that when we all stood for election we did not know what our parliamentary remuneration would be. So, it was not for that reason that we stood, and I do not think we should measure our being here in that way. For none of us was the reason the income. But the income is not irrelevant, because some people have to be able to afford it.
However, we are not in those glorious opening days; we are in the second generation of this Assembly. We have to go to the community and say to potential parliamentarians, "Please join us". I would imagine that every group here can say, "Look, we would have liked so and so, but frankly they could not really give up all that they already had to join us". Some people have made a sacrifice to do so.
Think about public servants in the Senior Executive Service: Are they going to give that up in order to try to join us? Perhaps we would not even want them to do that. What about senior academics, private enterprise businessmen, lawyers and so forth? I want to emphasise that the people of a calibre that we wish to attract are usually already in positions with security, tenure and adequate superannuation. That is often the reason we
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