Departing pollies: the luckiest people in Australia

WE’RE so used to departing politicians getting plum gigs and international laps of honour, it barely even registers anymore, writes Terry Sweetman. We need to sit up and take notice.

IN 2013, brand new prime minister Tony Abbott told us the adults were back in charge.

It must have been true because, five years and three prime ministers later, the government seems to have stopped playing make believe. It no longer even pretends to be acting in the common good as it squanders the spoils of office on blatant self interest in the form of paybacks and pay-offs.

It has been an incremental process under governments of both stripes, but the current administration has polished it into an art form. Perhaps emboldened by the comparative muted response to some of its more egregious pieces of patronage and preferment (and the example of its Labor predecessor), it has just powered ahead.

Maybe we have been so bedazzled by the brazenness of such appointments as first Alexander Downer and then George Brandis to the Court of St James and the extraordinarily comfortable exile of Joe Hockey to our embassy in Washington that we barely notice the routine disbursement of favours.

The out-and-out cynicism of using the jewels of our diplomatic service to reward or to banish ministers who have worn out their welcome really sticks in the craw.

The new Australian High Commissioner George Brandis settles in at the Australian High Commission in London, UK. Picture: Ben Stevens/i-Images

When the Canberra scuttlebutt was that Brandis, then Abbott and then Brandis again was the pick for London, barely an eyebrow was raised because we are pretty well inured to such wheeling and dealing.

Further down the food chain there can hardly be a statutory authority, a board, a tribunal or even a choir that isn’t sprinkled with political discards, apparatchiki, friends, camp followers or praise singers from left or right.

And many of these little heralded and rarely examined gigs are the exceedingly well paid appointments of ministers whose portfolio tentacles reach into the far corners of the quasi government bureaucracy. One organisation that seems to have a particular spot in the heart of political gift givers in the Australian Administrative Appeals Tribunal, formerly managed with much generosity by the recently departed Brandis.

The last list of ministerial appointments he made last year included an AAAT gig for two former Liberal senators, one former Liberal MP and his former chief of staff. There they joined such luminaries as defeated Tasmanian MP Andrew Nikolic, unloved former NSW Liberal MP Russell Matheson, former Labor speaker Former Labor speaker Anna Burke and retired South Australian Labor senator Linda Kirk.

Being in Washington improved Joe Hockey’s selfie game.

All were qualified for the posts, which are handsomely rewarded. A “senior member” (say Nikolic) reportedly can earn somewhere between $300,000 and $360,000 a year and a “full-time member” (say Burke) between $170,000 and $230,000. So sweet are these posts for some they are given tenure of seven years, far beyond the expected political life expectancy of their patrons. For example, Nikolic is effectively guaranteed a job until January 2024, which would give him tenure more than twice as long as he actually served in parliament. In a parallel universe where the abnormal is the normal, it is hardly surprising that the government would think nothing of dangling a three-month posting to the United Nations before troublesome backbencher Ann Sudmalis and soon-to-be-out-to-pasture Labor icon Jenny Macklin.

Sudmalis has been Member for Gilmore since 2013, turning it into the most marginal seat in NSW at the last election, and remembered for little more than such idiocy as declaring that savage cuts to penalty rates were a “gift” to young people, the very ones who suffered the most.

More politically pertinent is that she caused embarrassment to the government by claiming she had been the victim of “bullying, betrayal and backstabbing” in the NSW Liberal Party. It is difficult not to suspect the trip to New York was offered as a way to placate her, costing the taxpayeran estimated $100,000.

Ann Sudmalis is going to New York on a taxpayer-funded trip, despite the fact she’s departing at the next election. Picture: Kym Smith

Macklin has infinitely more runs on the board, having represented her seat of Jagajaga since 1996, and been a good and constructive minister in various portfolios, including disabilities, families and indigenous affairs. She will be remembered for such innovations as the National Disability Insurance and Scheme and paid parental leave.

Two different women, two different politicians, with one thing in common: They will not be in parliament after the next election.

They will bring back from New York nothing of use to the parliament or the nation. It will be a waste of, maybe, $200,000 to get rid of one troublesome woman and to give another a lap of honour.

After two terms, Sudmalis has done nothing to deserve this and promises nothing to repay it in kind.

Macklin deserves our thanks but, frankly, 22 years of service doesn’t even merit a gold watch in most jobs.

However, I think most of us woke up to what’s going on long before governments stopped even pretending.

Terry Sweetman is a Courier-Mail columnist.

@Terrytoo69