Susan Templeman (Macquarie, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The sense of entitlement these Liberals have is breathtaking, and there are some common themes running through it. Aside from arrogance, the Liberals seem to have a problem with travel. It's not that they don't like it; in fact, they do—they just don't like paying for it themselves. It's not just Senator Cormann who didn't notice that a private company had paid for his family trip to Singapore—Helloworld; the member for Farrer resigned as minister after a pattern of trips that featured the Gold Coast as a destination and a propensity for charter flights on busy capital city routes.

The revelations included charging taxpayers more than $12,000 to charter a government VIP jet to the Gold Coast for an afternoon meeting in 2016. Then we learned that she and her husband bought a $795,000 Gold Coast investment property on a May 2015 taxpayer funded trip to Queensland. But in her view, that was okay, because it was a spontaneous spend of more than three-quarters of a million dollars, as you do. You have to wonder how unplanned it was when you know the member for Farrer had been inspecting Gold Coast apartments nine months before she actually bought one. What about the air fares and taxis paid for taxpayers for her New Year's Eve celebrations in 2012 and 2014—17 trips to the Gold Coast at a cost of $40,000? There's a pattern; they don't believe the rules apply to them but they do.