BEN HARVEY: Taxpayers should not be billed for politician’s lavish holiday side-quests

Poor old Anika Wells. Our beleaguered Communications Minister is coming a cropper for wedging her snout ever-deeper into the trough of taxpayer largesse.

Not her fault! She was just following a rich tradition in politics.

Younger members of the Canberra press gallery are breathlessly excited about the travel rorts engulfing Parliament House but experienced scribes are rolling their eyes.

For them, this is Groundhog Day. MPs have been rorting their travel allowances ever since representatives from the colonies travelled for various “constitutional conventions” in the lead up to Federation.

Lord knows how many lavish meals were consumed before our founding fathers retired to opulent hotel rooms after a hard day thrashing out clauses in the new national rule book during the gold rush-filled excesses of the late 1890s.

How many drinks did taxpayers get billed for as politicians gathered with their compatriots from far-flung corners of Australia in far-flung corners of Australia?

It’s been this way since the First Fleet arrived. I’d bet you London to a brick that Arthur Phillip’s first order of business after anchoring in Botany Bay wasn’t ensuring safe harbour for his ships; it was submitting an expense claim.

Having said all that, spending close to $100,000 on a trip to New York is clearly taking the piss. Was Anika staying in the presidential suite in that hotel in Home Alone 2 or something?

As we now know, Wells was in the Big Apple to talk about the success of Australia’s social media ban for kids.

She appears to have managed to get her crystal ball through customs at JFK because she addressed the United Nations 10 weeks before the social media ban was even in place.

Air Miles Anika is now on the defensive not only for that junket but also a “work” trip to Adelaide during which she attended a Labor friend’s birthday and a bill so her family could join her at Thredbo for a Paralympics Australia event.

Unwitting taxpayers forked out so her husband could attend three AFL grand finals, three cricket matches and the Melbourne Grand Prix.

Seriously, how do I get a wife like that?

Oh, and then there was that $115,000 trip to Paris. Hubby wasn’t there for that one, but Anika still managed to spend $1000 on a dinner for three. They must have ordered the restaurant’s finest food stuffed with its second-finest food.

The Federal Opposition was on the attack all week but I don’t know if their hearts were in the stone throwing, for they know they work in one big glass house.

Hansard shows the conservatives have a particularly rich history in the field of ill-gotten flights.

Before she was Leader of the Opposition, Sussan Ley was in the brown stuff for charging taxpayers for a trip to the Gold Coast during which she coincidentally bought a $795,000 apartment.

Property hijinks on the Goldy thrust Nationals leader David Littleproud into the manure also. He repaid an expense claim after it emerged he left Parliament early in order to fly north and settle on an apartment.

Travel to Queensland was Anthony Albanese’s weakness. In 2018, he used a taxpayer-funded government car to travel to and from a Labor party fundraiser in Brisbane later repaying the cost “out of an abundance of caution”.

Liberal matriarch Bronwyn Bishop was eventually shown the door as speaker of the House after she used a helicopter for personal travel.

Former foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop charged us $2000 so she could attend a polo match.

Mathias Cormann just “happened” to wander into the AFL grand final while on government business in 2013.

Liberals Tony Abbott and George Brandis also came unstuck that year, both claiming flights to attend colleagues’ weddings.

Peter Dutton was always in the gun over his official travel diary, which had a curious ability to align itself with party fundraising events.

The misuse of public funds for personal errands is now explained away as “clerical oversights” or, at worst, “errors of judgment” but it wasn’t always treated so flippantly.

In 1998, Nationals MP Michael Cobb was given a two-year suspended jail sentence for rorting his travel expenses.

A year later, Liberal senator Bob Woods escaped with an 18-month suspended sentence for claims pertaining to an improper relationship with a staff member.

When political snouts are discovered in the public trough the accompanying headlines usually scream about entitlement. So they should, for the expense claims submitted by Wells and big-spending MPs such as Don Farrell and Fatima Payman were absurd.

They were also legal.

The travel system is so generous because it is designed to make up for the fact MPs are paid so poorly.

On face value a base salary of about $240,000 for a backbencher looks good but divide it by the number of hours worked and politicians are better off flipping burgers at McDonald’s.

And then there’s the issue of what they have to do during those long hours. It’s not all high drama in question time.

Every parent knows how excruciating it is sitting through a two-hour end-of-year school concert just to see your child on stage for three minutes. Imagine going to two dozen of those events when your kid isn’t even at the school!

That’s what politicians around Australia are doing at this time of year in a bid to ingratiate themselves with their electorate. You could double the base salary and I’d still say it’s not worth it.

No politicians will ever move a motion to boost their pay by more than CPI, so they use other entitlements as a subsidy. When a Wells-style scandal erupts they all put the mouth guards in and ride it out because if they lose the perks, the job just isn’t worth it.

If you want to end travel rorts, start paying politicians better.