Stop taking NSW taxpayers for a ride! Greens call for greater transparency in ministerial driver use

In light of the recent ministerial driver scandal, Abigail supported a call in parliament for the release of documents detailing all driver and car logbooks used by the Premier and Ministers of the Minns Government, advocating for greater transparency in the use of taxpayer-funded services.

Abigail said:

I contribute to the debate to indicate that The Greens will support the motion and the Government amendment. The Greens are proud of its stance on always asking for accountability over expenditure of public money. We will continue to do that. It is fair that we look back another parliamentary term to get a comparison. Whenever revelations come out and we do exercises like this, it is important to look at what we have learnt and how we go forward. In addition to finding out exactly what has gone on in the past, I would hope that, in addition to what I have seen to be the tightening of rules around the use of drivers, there is more open and transparent communication about what the rules are. Perhaps the rules could be tightened further. People have busy lives. There would be reasonable, incidental personal uses of a driver, but let us make it clear to all members, particularly Ministers, what that means, when it is okay and when it is not. Otherwise, similar things will keep happening.

The Greens would also like to see an improvement in future transparency. There is a lot of secrecy over driver use. It is not always warranted. There would be circumstances where members do not want personal circumstances to be revealed. A Minister might be going to a doctor's appointment and getting dropped off halfway between two ministerial appointments. They might do that on their lunch break and not want people to know that they have gone to the doctor. That is a perfectly reasonable piece of information that a person would not want disclosed. But it would not necessarily be appropriate, after going to a ministerial appointment, to then be taking the driver somewhere far away for a personal reason. Let us tighten that up and see what it looks like. Let us think about what future transparency of those records looks like.

The other thing that came out of the recent stories is the potential impact of exploitation of drivers. From a work health and safety perspective, it is important that this Parliament has oversight of how many hours workers are working and how much notice they are receiving before they are required to do a shift. We often talk about workers who are reluctant to rock the boat and, for fear of losing their job, may not want to push back on driving on a particular day. That is an incredibly serious issue and I would like to see that addressed.

The motion to release documents relating to ministerial vehicle logbooks was agreed to.

Read the full debate in Hansard here.

19 February 2025

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