Following the controversy of Bronwyn Bishop’s helicopter journey in 2015, the government decided to reform the reporting of politicians’ expenses.
We created an independent organisation to assess the expenses and provided funding to move to a realtime reporting system.
A new IT system was meant to provide for this and was costed at $38m.
More than seven years later, and $30m over budget, the system is slowly starting to publish the expenditure of politicians.
That’s led to a surge this week in reporting on how much politicians spend on travel.
Some of the figures do seem high but I am going to have a go at the unenviable task of defending the overall cost of sending our politicians around the country.
This week I have travelled to the town of Tom Price, in the heart of the Pilbara in north Western Australia.
I have come here as chair of the Rural Affairs Committee and we held a senate hearing on the impacts of banks closing.
Tom Price is in the Shire of Ashburton, which produces almost 2 per cent of our nation’s GDP from just 8000 people.
In per person terms, the average Ashburtonion produces 50 times more than the average.
Despite how much wealth this region produces there is not a single bank branch left after Westpac closed its doors in late 2022.
Thanks to the senate hearing, these proud Pilbara locals got to read their stories into the official Parliamentary Hansard.
Like the small businessman who must take a suitcase full of cash to Perth every few weeks just to deposit his takings.
He is made to feel like a drug dealer because of the lack of banking services.
Or the Aboriginal woman who had been scammed and locked out of her account.
The bank made her make an over-700km round trip to the nearest bank to prove her identity.
Locals must spend upwards of $200 on fuel, and many hours on the road, just to do their banking.
Holding the committee hearing at Tom Price has cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Parliamentary staff must travel, halls must be booked and accommodation costs are covered.
I think this is money well spent because these people deserve to have their stories told.
This principle also means that those politicians that live in country areas (like me) will often spend more on travel as it normally takes us multiple, long flights to get to and from Canberra.
This must be recognised because we should not deter more senators from living among the people and not just in the inner city.
Fewer than 20 per cent of senators live in regional areas, despite a third of Australians living in the regions.
This is a failure of our Parliament to work as designed.
The Senate was meant to offset the concentration of population in the cities, which leads the House of Representatives to be a chamber of the capitals.
Of course, sometimes politicians fail to spend your money wisely.
The reporting of The Courier-Mail and Daily Telegraph is crucial to hold your elected representatives to account.
I do not know the individual circumstances of those that have copped criticism, but all politicians should welcome this scrutiny and be able to publicly justify their expenditure of taxpayers’ dollars.
We are also all human and make mistakes.
A couple of years ago I misinterpreted the rules on family travel and had to pay back one set of flights.
It was my fault and I copped it.
It would appear that the bugs in the system have been ironed out and we should now get more regular reporting of how politicians are spending your money.
In the short term that may mean more scandalous stories which will only diminish the reputation of our elected representatives.
In the longer term though, the accountability should rightly keep all politicians on their toes and lead to more careful spending of taxpayers’ dollars.
But we also need to make sure that this does not discourage your elected representatives from visiting those parts of the country that don’t normally get attention.
