Transparency coming to Parliament?

Following the Greens' decision to release their Parliamentary expenses, Speaker Lockwood Smith has convened a committee, and decided in principle to follow suit:

“The committee was conscious of the public interest in this issue and agreed to develop a disclosure regime to release information about the expenses of members of Parliament paid through the Parliamentary Service,” Dr Smith said.

“Members of the cross-party committee will take the ideas discussed at today’s meeting back to their respective parties.”

This is good news, but at the same time I am suspicious that parliament will come up with some sort of "grace and favour" scheme, in which MPs "voluntarily" release their expenses but are under no obligation to do so. And that is simply not good enough. "Grace and favour" has no place in a democracy; what democratic citizens need is a legal right to obtain this information, enforceable by either the courts or the Ombudsmen. We have exactly such a system already, in the form of the Official Information Act. All we need to do is bring the Parliamentary Service under it.