The faux rage is spreading after the Sussan Ley scandal stays on the front page while bigger issues, like the grubby handling of the disadvantaged by Centrelink are pushed to page three.
From the ABC, where Greens leader Richard Di Natale is calling for an overhaul of the entitlement system:
Senator Di Natale called for the introduction of a national anti-corruption watchdog whose role would include auditing entitlements claims and providing advice to politicians on expenses.
He told the ABC without reform, he has “fear for the future of the country”.
“While we have a system that allows this to happen, it will continue to happen. Most pollies will do the right thing, some won’t,” he said.
“We’ve got to fix up the system and there’s an easy way of doing that — you overhaul it, you have a national anti-corruption watchdog in place, you provide an added layer of scrutiny there and you make it harder for individual MPs to make these calls.
Fellow crossbench senator Nick Xenophon will reintroduce a bill next month that would mean harsher penalties for breaches of politicians’ entitlement rules.
Senator Xenophon’s push to tighten the system was rejected by the Coalition and Labor in 2015.
In a digital age, even with the handicapped NBN system, surely a lot of this toing and froing can be done online?
Or maybe we can get rid of representatives all together, since they really only represent a party line and not an electorate?
This is more than just travel allowances and stupendously generous post-career (let alone retirement) pensions but also post-career private employment in Ministers purview needs quarantining even further. The stench of corruption and one hand feeds the other is endemic in the swamp in Canberra.
Meanwhile, the government is on the backfoot regarding its crackdown on the real entitlements that need winding back, like Disability Pensions and student loans, so they’ve cooked up an ad campaign to explain their actions: