Corruption swamps Scummo Government

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Tony Wright sums of the death of our Westminster system of government today:

With fast-gathering regularity, ministerial responsibility appears to have all but decayed to no responsibility.

Daily now the nation is assaulted by revelations of conduct that would get the cold shoulder in a shearer’s pub.

It is as if Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s homespun motto, “have a go and you’ll get a go”, has transformed in the hands of some of his team to “let’s have a go at having a lend of the mugs”.

To wit, Mattias Cormann and Joe Hockey at Domain:

Labor is demanding an investigation into senior Liberals with links to travel business Helloworld in a dispute over whether the Australian ambassador to the US, Joe Hockey, used his position to help the company.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison defended Mr Hockey in Parliament on Wednesday by insisting the ambassador did not tell staff to set up a meeting with the company in Washington DC, months before it bid for a lucrative government contract.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age revealed on Monday that Finance Minister Mathias Cormann and his family received free flights from Helloworld in 2017, months before the company won a contract with the Finance Department.

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Peter Dutton at the AFR:

Papua New Guinea Prime Minister Peter O’Neill has urged Australia to investigate the awarding of a $423 million Manus Island security contract to the “inexperienced and unknown” Paladin Group.

…”The department’s answers to questions during Senate estimates were completely unsatisfactory, and Minister [Peter] Dutton can no longer turn a blind eye.”

Michaela Cash at The Guardian:

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Michaelia Cash has been accused of showing “no shame” for refusing to speak to police about the leak to media from her office of raids on the Australian Workers’ Union headquarters.

The Labor senator Penny Wong made the accusation after two gruelling Senate estimates sessions on Tuesday and Wednesday revealed that Cash’s legal representation in the AWU’s federal court case has cost taxpayers $289,000 while the Registered Organisations Commission has incurred $550,000.

…On 25 October 2017 Cash, then employment minister, was forced to correct her evidence to Senate estimates, in which she claimed the leak had not come from her office, when her senior media adviser, David De Garis, admitted that he had tipped the media off about the imminent federal police raids on the AWU headquarters.

Tim Wilson at Domain:

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has confirmed it has launched “preliminary inquiries” into Liberal MP Tim Wilson after receiving a complaint that the chair of the House Economics Committee may have breached the privacy act.

The Victorian MP has faced criticism after it was reported he collaborated with a multibillion-dollar fund manager, Wilson Asset Management, on a campaign against Labor’s franking credit policy, failed to declare his investments in funds run by the firm to inquiry hearings, and used the taxpayer-funded probe to help spruik Liberal Party fundraisers.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age also revealed Mr Wilson failed to tell hundreds of people who signed a petition on his government website – stoptheretirementtax.com – that their names, addresses, phone numbers and emails would be transferred to the company, run by his distant relative Geoff Wilson.

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All four appear serious enough to demand the ministers involved fall on their sword.

So ends the Age of Entitlement.

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.