Sussan Ley travel rorts controversy a triumph of idiocy, entitlement
9 January 2017
Chris Kenny
It is the apparent idiocy of Sussan Ley’s travel rorts controversy that is most alarming for voters, let alone the astonishing sense of entitlement.
The Health Minister has become one of a long line of politicians who have placed an important job, promising career and substantial salary at risk by dipping into the public purse for reasonably modest expenses they could easily have covered themselves.
Already, Ms Ley has admitted error and promised to repay accommodation, airfares and Comcar claims from four separate trips, all to the Gold Coast, where, as it happens, her husband owns a business and — on a taxpayer-funded trip — she purchased an investment property.
Now the Prime Minister has had to intervene. Malcolm Turnbull has stood Ley aside while his departmental chief investigates her travel claims.
Let’s see what that inquiry uncovers but at the outset, on the facts we know, Ley will have difficulty holding onto her job.
This is where the silliness of all this becomes infuriating for taxpayers, who need competent ministers to get across their portfolios, focus on their jobs and stay in them long enough to effect meaningful reform.
Ley has been encouragingly effective as she has tackled one of the parliament’s toughest jobs. In a government that is light on for senior and talented women, her career has looked promising.
Yet she has imperilled it all for a few hundred dollars here, a convenient New Year’s Eve booking there and a night or two on the taxpayer when she should have dipped into her own pocket.
What to Ley might have seemed like convenient melding of professional duties and private interests or work expenses and private benefits, screams loudly of other things to the rest of us.
Her claims of a “spontaneous” $795,000 investment decision and that a series of dubious claims were all “within the rules” are anything but reassuring to voters.
They are to our ears like fingernails on chalkboards; they rub salt into the wounds of travel rorts past; they just make it worse.
Contrition and penance are what is required, not defiance and self-justification.
Here are the crucial facts that stand out and create abysmal optics.
The country is mired in debt, the budget is stuck deep in deficit, the government is cutting back on pensioner entitlements, it is axing programs, it has frozen the Medicare rebate, it has sent more than a 169,000 letters to welfare recipients who might have over-claimed and it argues (rightly) that more spending restraint is needed.
Yet a Minister billed taxpayers for a side-trip to the Gold Coast where she attended an auction and made a “spontaneous” $795,000 real estate purchase (for a property that, no doubt, she will negatively gear under rules Labor portrays as a tax dodge but the government wants to keep in place).
Then we learn her husband has a business on the Gold Coast, she has travelled there at taxpayer expense at least 16 times over the past few years, including for two New Year’s Eves. Most Australians dream of Gold Coast holidays — or save for years to take one.
This is the sort of double standard upon which political outsiders like Pauline Hanson and Donald Trump have built their careers.
There is a cautionary lesson from Gold Coast history — in order to build the real estate and entertainment developments that make this area so attractive for tourists and investors, they first had to drain the swamps.