Greens’ Sarah Hanson-Young took year to repay taxpayers’ $20,000

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young left a $20,000 debt to taxpayers unpaid for almost a year.

Australian Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young left a $20,000 debt to taxpayers unpaid for almost a year. Picture: AAP

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young left a $20,000 debt to taxpayers unpaid for almost a year, even ignoring an official payment request made on the very day she was in parliament trying to block budget savings measures.

Senator Hanson-Young, the minor party’s finance spokeswoman with a decade of political experience, proclaims on her website that, “Parliament is for all, not just the rich and powerful”.

But documents obtained under Freedom of Information suggest Senator Hanson-Young has not demonstrated the same level of care with public funds that she expects of other elected representatives.

The Australian has previously revealed that Senator Hanson-Young had to negotiate a rare payment plan for $15,186 she owed the Department of Finance — and taxpayers — after blowing her staff travel budget by almost a third in an election year.

The South Australian senator then built up another big bill, this time for $20,460.76, which a spokeswoman in June this year put down to errors in travel bookings “leading to an overspend that has since been repaid”.

However, newly released FOI documents show the department first invoiced Senator Hanson-Young for that amount on April 20 last year and she held out paying until April 10 this year.

The $20,460.76 debt was for staff travel, this time in 2014-15 — the second consecutive year her office spent more than it was entitled to. The documents suggest the department sent interim travel expenditure reports to Senator Hanson-Young’s office, yet even the following year it was struggling to come to terms with the rules. In November 2015, someone in Senator Hanson-Young’s office asked the department if the budget “will allow for an overspend or will it cut off once the limit has been reached?”

In March 2016, the department advised Senator Hanson-Young of the $20,460.76 travel overspend in 2014-15 and asked for staff ­travel records to be reviewed.

Her office initially suggested one flight, of only several hundred dollars, was misreported, however that appears to have been wrong.

Finally, on April 20 last year, the department issued Senator Hanson-Young with an invoice for the $20,460.76 she owed taxpayers. Her office later claimed not to have received the invoice and it had to be resent the following month.

The invoice had 30-day payment terms but, with no money forthcoming, despite monthly reminders, the department wrote to Senator Hanson-Young again on September 15 last year regarding “RECOVERY OF OUTSTANDING DEBT”.

“As this debt is now overdue, I appreciate your immediate attention to settlement,” the department official wrote in an email and separate letter.

That night, coincidentally, Senator Hanson-Young was in parliament fighting the government’s budget savings measures. She accused the Coalition of offering Christmas bonuses to the rich, called Labor leader “Blinky Bill” Shorten weak, and urged Malcolm Turnbull to “seriously, grow a spine”.

The $20,460.76 bill was paid after The Australian applied under FOI laws for details of members and senators with outstanding debts to the department.