Snouts at the trough – again
High-ranking Liberal politicians who lecture the rest of us on the need to tighten our belts have been swanning around the country, buying investment properties, attending polo matches, dining in five-star restaurants, and watching the AFL grand final from the comfort of corporate boxes, all at our expense.
These self-same swine are at the same time driving welfare recipients to the brink of suicide with intimidating letters, phone calls and text messages from Centrelink and bully-boy debt collectors demanding payment of money they don’t owe.
If ever there was a picture of the appalling corruption of the Australian political system, this is it. It’s a system that channels millions of dollars to wealthy politicians while grinding the poor into the dust.
The sheer brazenness of the politicians tells us all about their culture of entitlement. Is there a line they will not cross? Is there some expense that they will not claim because, somehow, just possibly, it might breach expected standards of honesty and probity? Do they ever stop to consider how grasping and unscrupulous they appear? How much is too much for these people?
Not only do the pollies get their entry into the big sporting matches, dining and champagne free of charge courtesy of business sponsors, they then have the hide to charge us for the airfares to get to these events. And nothing less than business class, thank you very much.
If you’re Sussan Ley you even get the taxpayer to fund your own bloody flights in your rented charter plane just so you can keep your commercial pilot’s licence. For her, it’s no problem that this little indulgence cost us $83,000 in just five months in 2015. “It’s not an extravagant form of transport”, she claimed. The nerve. And when she was finally dragged kicking and screaming from her position as health minister, no admission of wrongdoing, not a word of apology, no attempt to atone for her greed. Her replacement? Arthur Bloody Sinodinos – named by ICAC in 2014 for his dealings with a NSW Labor crook, Eddie Obeid, sentenced to a five year jail term just before Christmas. Truly, you couldn’t make this stuff up.
Meanwhile, those doing it tough – the single parents, the factory workers laid off in their 50s, the unemployed youth, those with cancer, the youngsters with autism, the Aboriginal elders – have got the full force of the state after them. Nearly a quarter of a million welfare recipients have been caught in a dragnet designed by the government not to catch those supposedly defrauding Centrelink, but to generate enough money to help them look “tough” on the budget deficit. The government intends to recoup $4 billion from welfare recipients over the next four years, and the poor are going to be squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until they pay up, just so that the credit rating agencies are kept happy.
No matter if those targeted don’t actually owe a cent. No matter the mental turmoil and anguish that this process is causing. No matter the missed meals, the evictions, the sports events missed out on by the kids.
Far from backing down in the face of the tragic stories of people being pushed to breaking point, the minister for human services, Alan Tudge, is pressing ahead. The new automated system is generating 20,000 “compliance notices” a week and Tudge aims to serve notice on 1.7 million welfare recipients over three years.
The contrast in treatment with the politicians is stark. There will be no debt collectors banging on Sussan Ley’s door at 2am, no police interrogation, no threatening letters from Centrelink, no garnishing of her wages, no fraud proceedings commenced.
The same is true with business tax evaders. One third of all large business pay no tax. And while businesses may, in the rare situation when they’re sprung, have to pay a modest penalty for defrauding the ATO of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes, things are altogether more severe for those falling foul of Centrelink. Tudge’s message to them is: “We’ll find you, we’ll track you down and you will have to repay those debts and you may end up in prison”. There’s no nice “amnesty” for them, just the stick and then more stick.
And while treasurer Scott Morrison and his colleagues in Human Services are pursuing the poor and vulnerable for $4 billion, the government plans to ram through $50 billion in tax cuts for business.
One law for the rich, one for the poor.
Having sat on a report recommending various ways to tighten up politician entitlements for nearly a year without doing anything, the prime minister has now announced the establishment of a new parliamentary expenses body with responsibility for compliance, reporting, monitoring and adjudicating all claims by MPs, senators and ministers, to ensure they are within the rules.
But this is a joke. It’ll be mates looking after mates. The body, if it ever gets set up, will apparently be governed by an independent board, but they will all be part of the same select club – an auditor, “a person with wide experience in remuneration matters”, the president of the remuneration tribunal – you know, the one who waves through the politicians’ frequent and handsome pay rises – a former judicial officer and, of course, a former MP. Let’s face it, whether it’s the Coalition or the Labor Party, those who enter the charmed circle of federal politics know not to upset the applecart.
And what does “within the rules” mean anyway? The “rules” say that expenses are legitimate if they are related to “official ministerial (or parliamentary) business”. Possibly such a body will query the most egregious claims like Sussan Ley’s taxpayer-funded trips to the Gold Coast to pick up a nice collection of investment units.
But this body would still presumably wave through things like Peter Dutton’s claim for $27,800 in business class airfares and another $9,000 in hotel bills and other expenses for a three-day visit to the US last year. Dutton took with him Immigration Department secretary Mike Pezzullo, who claimed another $17,000.
While asylum seekers are dying on Manus Island and Nauru for want of basic medical care, this kind of outlay on well-fed politicians and senior public servants, already on salaries of hundreds of thousands of dollars, is obscene.
But immoral though Dutton’s claims may be, they do conceivably fall within the definition of “ministerial business”. For example, his 10 guests at a five-star working dinner at Washington’s flashest hotel included a former acting commissioner of the US Customs and Border Protection, a former Homeland Security secretary, a representative of one of the US’s leading right wing think tanks, the Cato Institute, and a number of other “migration experts”.
The problem, then, is not just the money spent but the purpose of the trip. Persecuting asylum seekers is by its very nature an international job in which the minister works with sadists from every country. And you can’t expect to have a chin-wag with world-leading sadists and torturers at Macca’s.
Steve Ciobo, minister for trade, put it very simply. When challenged about his $1,000 flight to attend the 2013 AFL grand final in Melbourne, despite the National Australia Bank already having paid for his ticket and hospitality, Ciobo explained that it was a “work-related expense”. That’s because the purpose of attending the grand final, Ciobo said, was to provide his sponsors with “the opportunity to showcase themselves there, to take the time to have a conversation in relation to important matters”. In other words, the taxpayer paid his airfare in order to allow the NAB and other financial shysters to lobby him in person for more corporate handouts.
So too with Sussan Ley claiming thousands of dollars to attend New Year’s Eve parties thrown by Gold Coast businesswoman Sarina Russo, a regular Liberal Party donor who has grown wealthy off government education contracts. And so too Julie Bishop’s $11,000 in travel claims to attend the nation’s top horse races, polo at Portsea and the rugby. She “was invited and attended in her official capacity as minister for foreign affairs and deputy leader of the Liberal Party”. Of course she was, the airline company and alcohol sponsors who invited her did so not because of her scintillating repartee or keen knowledge of the race track but because they want business favours from her government.
That’s how politics in Australia works – business and the politicians scratch each other’s back. That’s “ministerial business”. Meanwhile poverty rates continue to escalate, the harassment of the unemployed by private job agencies grows year by year and the poor and vulnerable are driven ever closer to the edge by Turnbull & Co.
