By Brittany Busch
Attorney-General Michelle Rowland is the second minister to refer their use of family travel entitlements for auditing, as Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says he has asked parliament’s expenses watchdog for advice on the rules around politicians’ spending.
Rowland’s decision to refer her expenses to the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA) came to light three days after beleaguered Sport and Communications Minister Anika Wells referred her own entitlement claims for auditing following a week of headlines about her use of perks, including flying her husband to successive premiere sporting events, their children to Thredbo for a ski trip, and leaving taxpayer-funded chauffeured cars idling for hours outside events.
Ministers Anika Wells and Michelle Rowland with Prime Minister Anthony Albanese in 2023.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Rowland, who ranked fifth in a list of federal MPs claiming family reunion entitlements, billed taxpayers $16,050 for three family flights on a week-long journey to Western Australia in 2023, at a total trip cost of $21,685, as first reported by The Australian Financial Review.
A spokesperson for Rowland said on Friday: “The attorney-general has referred a trip from 2023 to the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority for advice.”
Rowland has spent the most on family entitlements – $52,600 in 3½ years – out of all capital city MPs on the eastern seaboard, followed by Wells. Both have young families.
The prime minister insisted during a press conference at the Tomago aluminium smelter in NSW on Friday that he had asked the expense authority for advice on the rules, a day after he staunchly defended MPs’ use of entitlements.
“At least two members of parliament have referred themselves for the details of their audit. But in addition to that, I’ve said to IPEA, please give us some advice, and we’ll take that on board, and when that advice is received, we’ll make a decision in the usual way,” he told reporters.
Albanese had previously said, when asked about Wells, that he would welcome advice from the watchdog, but had not confirmed he had sought additional advice from the agency.
Asked to clarify on what day he asked IPEA for advice, he said: “I ask all the time, publicly.”
A statement released by the authority on Friday night confirmed the prime minister had made the request.
“The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority (IPEA) has received a request from the Prime Minister to provide preliminary advice on certain aspects of parliamentary travel,” it said.
“The CEO will respond to the Prime Minister’s request in due course. IPEA will not otherwise comment on the details of the Prime Minister’s request or the CEO’s response.”
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer
Earlier on Friday, Opposition Leader Sussan Ley wrote to Albanese demanding Wells be investigated by the prime ministerial department, and offered to meet to hash out bipartisan reforms to the entitlements system.
“What Minister Anika Wells has done is clearly scandalous, and the whole country is reeling from all of the information that they’ve received about what she has done. She has not shown an ounce of contrition. She has not stepped up and said sorry, or she understands what struggling Australians are going through,” Ley told Sky News.
Ley was forced to resign from Malcolm Turnbull’s frontbench in 2017 following revelations she had used a taxpayer-funded trip to buy a Gold Coast property.
The independent watchdog’s investigation of Wells, which could take months to complete, has the power to interview ministers about events for which they claimed travel entitlements, check calendars, and inspect metadata to determine if work events were scheduled around social events already locked into the calendar.
The government gave a signal earlier on Friday that reform to the entitlements could be on the table after Albanese had repeatedly ducked responsibility for handling the ordeal, when Health Minister Mark Butler said the IPEA investigation could herald legislative reform.
“I think we should wait for the independent authority to provide some advice,” Butler told Sunrise when asked whether the rules needed to be changed.
“If [reforms] then have to be enacted through legislation, I’m sure that’s what we would do.”
The Parliamentary Business Resources Act requires an independent review every three years, but the last report was finalised in late 2021.
The government has twice delayed the next review, The Australian Financial Review reports, and it is now scheduled to occur in late 2027.
Ley said she wrote to the prime minister to say Wells should be investigated for potential breaches of the ministerial code of conduct, which says ministers’ behaviour should not be wasteful or extravagant with public resources.
“What I want to see is that public trust restored and public confidence in the system, and that’s clearly gone right off the rails under Prime Minister Albanese,” she said.
Ley has until now left attacks on the government’s expenses to her finance spokesman James Paterson as the controversy has dragged on for more than a week.
Asked on Friday about her own expense scandal, Ley said: “I put my hand up, I apologised, and I resigned, and I held myself accountable to the ministerial code of conduct.“
Read more on the expenses saga
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