Health Minister Sussan Ley has stepped aside from the frontbench pending an investigation into her travel expenses, such as a taxpayer-funded trip to the Gold Coast where she bought an $800,000 beachfront apartment.
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The Farrer MP remained defiant in the face of calls for her sacking, and criticised the media for misconstruing her statements about her travel at an Albury press conference on Monday - her first public appearance since it was revealed she charged taxpayers $12,000 for a flight from Canberra to Brisbane in March 2016.
Ms Ley was adamant she would make a return to the frontbench after Cabinet Secretary Arthur Sinodinos acted as minister for health, sport and aged care.
“I have nothing to hide, I have not broken any of the rules,” she said.
“But I also recognise that I need to subject those travel records to scrutiny, I'm happy to do that.”
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull announced the secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Martin Parkinson, would oversee an investigation into Ms Ley’s travel claims.
And Ms Ley has also asked the Department of Finance to look into her flights to the Gold Coast.
But she refused to release the details of all her Queensland trips to the public, which number up to 27 flights in recent years.
“Will I allow the media access to go on a fishing expedition, at perhaps the cost of confidentiality of some of the both confidential and commercial in-confidence meetings I have? No, I won’t,” she said.
Regarding the $800,000 apartment purchase from a Liberal donor in May 2015, Ms Ley repeated her oft-quoted line it was “neither planned nor anticipated”.
She said she was alerted to the sale on a Friday by her partner Graeme Johnston, who owns a bin-cleaning business on the Gold Coast called Its Bin Cleaned.
“He drew my attention to an auction seen by him online at the De Ville Apartments the next day,” she said.
“I want to be very clear: my decision late Friday to attend this auction was made after I had planned to travel to the Gold Coast from Brisbane.
“The COMCAR was booked at 9pm Friday night to take me from Brisbane to my hotel and then drop me at the auction two minutes away.
“In hindsight, I should have just got out of the hotel.”
It was also revealed Ms Ley spent New Year’s Eve in 2013 and 2014 on the Gold Coast at the invitation of a “prominent Queensland businesswoman”, who was multimillionaire Sarina Russo.
One trip included a party at the lavish five-star Palazzo Versace hotel.