Peta Credlin: New government rules allow ‘open slather’ on politician expense claims
Ministers splurge hundreds of thousands on luxury holidays while most Australians worry about affording Christmas, exposing a devastating lack of character in Canberra, writes Peta Credlin.
In politics as in life, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.
Running offices as a chief of staff, I routinely asked staff with an entitlement to fly business class not to use it for short trips because there was no way I thought slugging taxpayers $1000 for the Canberra-Sydney hop was reasonable.
Respecting taxpayer money was also the reason why Tony Abbott banned first class travel for MPs and public servants, and stopped them employing their immediate family members. His belt-tightening made him enemies, and it was why two of his own disgruntled backbenchers moved the infamous “empty chair” spill against him in 2015.
A decade on, you’ve got to wonder why we even bothered because not only has Anthony Albanese reversed Abbott’s changes, he has brought in new rules to allow open slather on spending that even the term “snouts in the trough” can’t adequately describe.
Coverage of the travel rorts now engulfing the Albanese government has so far missed two really important points.
The first is that the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority’s (IPEA) official reference guide says that “simply stating that a parliamentarian’s use of expenses … was consistent with the rules, may not be enough to meet the obligations of the framework”. So much for the PM’s defence of his indulgent ministers that it was all “within the entitlements”.
And secondly, the Albanese government recently changed the regulations to specifically allow taxpayer resources to be spent on a whole raft of party-political activities that were once prohibited, including travel to party fundraisers and campaigning work, including in campaign headquarters.
These changes were made just weeks before Albanese called the May federal election which exposes his lie – repeated all week – that the rules have nothing to do with him. Sure, it might be an independent tribunal that administers the rules, but it is the Prime Minister who makes them.
Although how “independent” this body really is deserves scrutiny given that the new head of IPEA has come from the PM’s own department. And the rules are so elastic, even before the latest pre-election changes, that perhaps they’d clearly cover the hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent on luxury ski holidays and trips to the tennis?
At the time when most Australians are worried about trying to juggle the cost of Christmas and making their own modest plans for a break in January, the daily headlines about taxpayer-funded extravagance are incredibly damaging. Grand final tickets, business class flights, fancy dinners in Paris – all of these examples will be remembered by voters in a way that billions wasted on infrastructure cost blowouts will not.
And the insistence that politicians have nothing to do with the creation of the rules, when they are either made by legislation (which they vote for) or via a regulation (that a minister signs into law), is arrogant and insulting.
When originally put in place in 2017, these Turnbull-era spending rules that brought in family reunion trips were designed to be reviewed every two years to ensure that they stayed in line with community expectations.
Would it surprise you then to learn that not only has Albanese greatly widened their scope but he’s also tried to bury any opportunity to scrutinise them by delaying the required statutory review until 2027?
It’s disappointing the Opposition has been so slow off the mark to demand reform in this area. Yes, Sussan Ley is compromised given she was forced to resign from the frontbench over travel issues in the past but that should not stop her party from doing what they must know is the right thing, namely to wind back this taxpayer-funded largesse.
Why shouldn’t all of these family reunion schemes be scrapped and politicians be told to fund any travel for their family from their wage as most Australians do? It is true that MPs are in Canberra for around 20 weeks a year but, at a maximum, parliament only sits Monday to Thursday.
Politicians’ supposed need for funded family reunion hardly compares with that of our ADF personnel who can be away on an overseas deployment for eight months or more, 24/7, with their lives on the line. They don’t get anything like these sort of “family reunion” provisions, so where is the fairness?
What this latest entitlement saga has exposed is the lack of character in Canberra, with MPs far too ready to splurge your money on themselves despite the fact that most minsters earn salaries around $400k.
It’s also exposed the Prime Minister as dishonourable, trying to pretend the rules have nothing to do with him when, in fact, he makes them. Let’s just see how much Albo charges you over summer as he ditches The Lodge for his $4m beachfront mansion.
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Originally published as Peta Credlin: New government rules allow ‘open slather’ on politician expense claims
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