Vikki Campion: ALP plays hide and seek with expenses

Anthony Albanese claimed expenses of almost $160k — plus private jet travel — to attend the Queen’s funeral. But thanks to the ALP’s changes to expenses reporting, we’ll never how that money was spent, writes Vikki Campion.

At the same time as news of Bruce Lehrmann’s receipts for hookers and cocaine landed, so did a couple of RAAF jets at Scone in the Upper Hunter.

As a caravan of chauffeur-driven politicians made their way down the New England Highway to announce solar panels, what is an average night on Sydney’s eastern beaches for some media elites began to be revealed.

Shockingly, people were shocked. Forget Channel 7 funding sex work — you fund it under the NDIS. As for the drug use, spare us the quelle horreur from media elites in a city so juiced you could get high off its wastewater.

But never one to let a good crisis go to waste, the Albanese government quickly took out the trash.

While everyone was frothing over the case, questions in a Telegraph FOI about why Brittany Higgins received a $3m payout went virtually unanswered.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese — pictured helping open a playground in 2009 — insisted on transparency in Opposition but is playing a different game in government.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen escaped heavy criticism over catching two corporate jets for an emissions photo op, thumbing their noses at their own carbon narrative and the cost-of-living crisis their carbon policies created.

Their actions clearly show emissions aren’t the existential crisis they pretend they are — otherwise, why did they dispatch two private jets to Scone when one plane to Newcastle could have sufficed, and the team could have driven to Liddell like so many coal workers do each day?

Oh, the inconvenience of being in the traffic with the common clay.

We have more chance of discerning what happened on the Mary Celeste than on the two VIP jets to Scone on the taxpayers’ ticket, only revealed by radio king Ben Fordham and certainly not the ministry’s media team.

Under the old disclosures — which were insufficient when Labor resided in the virtue of Opposition — the VIP flight manifest listed the minister, the names of every staff member on the plane, the location of takeoff and landing, and the cost to the taxpayer of each leg of the journey.

That was apparently lacking, so Labor has replaced it with just an aggregate cost for a three-month period.

Transparency has arrived in the same file as the $275 power bill reduction.

The media focus on allegations about Bruce Lehrmann obscured reports about political expenses data. Picture: David Swift

Under the cover of the deafening gnawing of Sydney’s media eating each other on Thursday, political expenses from January to March 2023 were quietly uploaded, revealing Albanese’s trip to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II’s State Funeral cost $159,088 — more than $22,000 a day — not including the VIP jet.

We know he spent 62.4 hours on the VIP jet internationally, at an aggregate cost of $875,987 for the same three months. Any other cost breakdown has been scrapped in the name of transparency.

Under the new Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA) reporting system brought in by this government, we have more detail from a Channel 7 credit card bill for sex work than we do for Albo’s $5989.31 overseas bill for “incidentals” at the Queen’s funeral.

Forget worrying about what two prostitutes did for $10,000; what on earth required the Prime Minister spending $6000 on incidentals when his accommodation and food bill was $124,417.23 for seven days, and his ground transport was $28,681.51?

His bill to attend a funeral — for a monarchy he doesn’t believe in — cost more than most family incomes for a year.

And for all Albo’s spruiking of EVs, he was still charging the taxpayers for fuel on his combustion engine vehicle up to last March.

IPEA reports under the old system revealed each flight on each date, even down to how much politicians spent on their Daily Telegraph subscriptions, phone bills, office consumables, printing, flags, toner and COMCARs.

This is now a thing of the past.

Old IPEA investigations, including my own, remain published on the website as a stark reminder of the transparency Labor demanded when it was not in government — compared with the aggregate data now it is.

Inside members’ offices, staff still must reconcile every single cent and clarify every listing, but the breakdowns going to the public domain are more secret than ever.

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Originally published as Vikki Campion: ALP plays hide and seek with expenses