What a hoot it must be sometimes to be a politician in the age of decaying media. I have in mind Nationals Senator Bridget McKenzie who was asked last weekend for her views on allegations that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese did not properly declare perhaps thousands of dollars worth of flight upgrades from Qantas on Parliament’s register of interests.
It’s a legitimate question — and more on that below — but why would anyone ask “Sports Rorts” McKenzie to be the integrity tsar? This is the same McKenzie who failed to declare her membership of a sports club granted $36,000 under a McKenzie-approved grant, leading to her resignation from the Morrison ministry. It is the same McKenzie who failed to declare on the parliamentary register that the firearms business, Beretta Australia, had funded her “flights and recreation” for trips to New Zealand and Tasmania.
Asked why she had declared the gifts but not their source (until asked by a reporter), McKenzie said it was “not unusual” for senators to adopt “different declaration methods”.
The McKenzie example is a great illustration of how far the media has crumbled. She is the clear winner when the media has no memory of her disgrace just four years ago. It is also a reminder that politicians have played games with the disclosure rules for many years.
Friendly skies
This is but one dark corner of Australian public life that has come to the fore courtesy of a new book, The Chairman’s Lounge, by former Australian Financial Review columnist Joe Aston. Given a good run in the Nine papers at the weekend, Aston makes the case that Albanese has been the beneficiary of years of largesse from Qantas, both as a politician on official business and as a citizen paying for his overseas travel.
Most damagingly, the book cites Qantas sources to allege that Albanese would “liaise directly” with former Qantas CEO Alan Joyce about his “personally funded” travel, leaving open the strong inference that Joyce ensured Albanese was given upgrades on flights to Hawaii and London, among other destinations.
“It would be a safe presumption that he paid for an economy ticket in the full knowledge he would never have to set foot in that unholy cabin.”
Albanese says he officially declared all 22 flight upgrades on Parliament’s register of interests. Aston’s point is that the declarations don’t detail the dollar amounts involved and therefore don’t capture the full story. Aston points out, too, that at the time of some of these upgrades Albanese had been transport minister or opposition transport spokesman, with Qantas as a major stakeholder.
There are serious public interest issues at play. They all go to the system of accountability in Australian politics. Side by side with this is the awful inference of the Aston thesis that, for all his apparent sincerity, Albo may be just another political grifter, vulnerable to being duchessed by those with a business agenda.
Albanese bases his defence on the well-established practice whereby it is sufficient to declare any gifts over the value of $300 on a register of interests which can be viewed online by anyone. This transparency is all well and good. In theory it can tell us whether a politician has been potentially bought or not. In practice though, the system depends on the honesty of a politician — and is a self-regulated one at that. There are no officials carrying out checks.
This leaves the media to act as an arm of accountability. The arrangement might have made sense decades ago when the rules of disclosure were agreed by Parliament and there were teams of experienced journalists poring over all things Canberra. Now we effectively have a weak system with little or no enforcement floating in an increasingly degraded political culture.
Up, up and away
It is routine for politicians to receive flight upgrades and to declare them. They all do it. Yet as Aston points out, they are not required to record the dollar value of the upgrade which could run into many thousands of dollars on a privately funded overseas trip. So it is possible to play by the rules but still be out of bounds. As Aston has it, this is the web that Qantas weaves to ensnare politicians and senior bureaucrats who might have major policy decisions to make on the airline.
And what of Albanese? Aston has drawn an unflattering portrait.
“For all his talk of growing up in public housing, his appetite for sponsored VIP hospitality and travel is insatiable,” Aston told The Australian, adding that it was Albo who petitioned Joyce to have the privileges of the exclusive Qantas Chairman’s Lounge extended to his then 22-year-old son Nathan.
“Insatiable”. It’s a hell of a picture to paint of the man who plays the principled politician in public but who behind the scenes is desperately seeking to leverage his position for all he can get. If Aston is right, it’s either a disturbing betrayal of the “I fight Tories” working-class values Albanese once espoused or it is the natural arc of those who mix with the wealthy and the powerful, without ever putting their hand in their own pocket. The latter, of course, is exactly the milieu of the Chairman’s Lounge.
At the same time, who in the opposition comes to the debate with clean hands? Surely not prosecutor-in-chief Peter Dutton who flew to Western Australia to spend an hour at Gina Rinehart’s 70th birthday party earlier this year. Was that economy, Mr Dutton? Dutton said he paid his own way, which just goes to show you can still be cosy with rich and powerful, whoever pays the bill.
There’s not a lot of class in this saga.
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