Personal Explanation

Members, Accommodation Allowances

The Hon. T.J. STEPHENS (15:21): I seek leave to make a personal explanation.

Leave granted.

The Hon. T.J. STEPHENS: I make a statement to this place concerning news reporting about me and my claim for the country members' accommodation allowance, published by the ABC earlier this week on television, radio and online. I made a personal explanation to the Legislative Council on 30 June 2020 in which I stated that:

Since 2011, I have lived in an apartment at Victor Harbor. From 2011 to 2017, I lived in an apartment that I owned and from 2017 to the current day, I live in an apartment I lease in the same complex…

As would be apparent, the apartments have the same street address as they are in the same building.

My nomination form for the 2018 state election provided an option for my address to be disclosed or not. Because my family also lives in and visits our home in that building, I marked the box that my address not be made public. The nomination form I completed contains the correct address, but inadvertently the wrong unit number: number 10, when it should have been number 13.

When the ABC made an application for my nomination form under freedom of information laws for the purposes of publicising the information in the form, the Ombudsman determined that my street address was a personal affair, that it would be unreasonable to disclose it and it was therefore not to be released. The concern that I then raised, given the form contains the correct street address, was that it would be straightforward for anyone interested to locate my family at our home in that building.

On a review of that decision, the South Australian Civil and Administrative Tribunal took a different view. It decided that although my address was a personal affair, it would not be unreasonable to disclose it, in part because I am a politician. I instructed my lawyers to lodge an appeal in support of the decision of the Ombudsman. I have in the meantime been considering the issue and discussing its impact with my family.

The ABC has now published in print, on radio and electronically their claims that my address on the nomination form sat at odds with the address I had used to submit monthly claims for my country members' allowance from May 2017 onwards.

The implication is apparently that, because the address in the view of the ABC is different, I had no entitlement to make a claim for the allowance. That is wrong. All that is different is the apartment number in the same building—the same place—in Victor Harbor. That fact has not been given any prominence by the reporting. The difference is not material.

The reporting accordingly misleads the reader to assume that the nomination form demonstrates that I have acknowledged I was living at an address that gave rise to no entitlement for the country members' accommodation allowance from 2017 to 2020. This is not so. So that this can be clearly seen, I seek leave to table my nomination form.

Leave granted.

The Hon. T.J. STEPHENS: It has also been widely reported by the ABC that while undertaking my parliamentary duties in Adelaide I stay at an address at Norwood. I make it clear that this address is not on the form. The form offers no support for the ABC story. My error does not affect my eligibility to claim the allowance, nor does it constitute a breach of the Electoral Act.

As a result of the reporting which discloses the substance of the matters I sought to keep private and which is being used by the ABC to insinuate that I had no entitlement to the allowance, there is no longer any purpose in continuing with an appeal and I have instructed my solicitors to withdraw it. By the way, I am looking at the form and I cannot believe it but I have actually also made a mistake with my email address as well.