and from the Age editorial...
Culture of entitlement exposes rank hypocrisy Date October 8, 2013
Now the Coalition is in government, it hasn't taken long for the skeletons in its cupboard to come out. Senior figures, including Prime Minister Tony Abbott, have been exposed for claiming expenses for attending friends' or acquaintances' weddings as ''official business''. No opposition ran harder on themes of waste, excessive spending and rorts than did Mr Abbott's Coalition. It's a standard game plan: identify areas of dubious government spending and fan the public outrage. Now the Coalition has been hoist by its own petard.
The excuses are many and varied. Agriculture Minister Barnaby Joyce struggled for consistency in the one sentence, saying: ''These things obviously happened years ago, not that that's an excuse.'' Exactly. Mr Abbott claimed expenses for attending the 2006 weddings of colleagues Sophie Mirabella and Peter Slipper, of all people. Only now, after media inquiries, has he repaid $1705, ''for the avoidance of any doubt''. When Mr Abbott repaid nearly $9400 claimed in 2009 while promoting his own book, his chief of staff said flights were ''inadvertently booked as official travel''. Another minister at the time who attended the Mirabella wedding, Brownyn Bishop, had the good judgment not to claim costs.
Julie Bishop, now Foreign Minister, MP Teresa Gambaro and Mr Joyce also claimed about $12,000 in expenses after going to a 2011 wedding in India as guests of billionaire Gina Rinehart. Despite citing business and study as their primary purposes, would they have gone if there had been no wedding? Mr Joyce and Attorney-General George Brandis have repaid $2300 in claims related to a radio host's 2011 wedding.
The amounts may be petty cash in a $400 billion budget, but taxpayers rightly object to politicians who insist every cent of spending must be justified while dipping so freely into the public purse. No ordinary person would think attending a friend's wedding could be a work-related duty. If grey areas remain despite recent reforms, they must be cleared up.
Mr Brandis, who led Coalition attacks on Peter Slipper and Craig Thomson over their expenses, still insists he did nothing wrong,
but he and his colleagues are guilty of breathtaking hypocrisy. The political stench will linger. Only by observing a higher standard of conduct can the government start to redeem itself.
Read more:
http://www.theage.com.au/comment/the-age-editorial/culture-of-entitlement-exposes-rank-hypocrisy-20131007-2v4nj.html#ixzz2h5pySmxP
