BEFORE I get started I’ll declare upfront that I claim the parliamentary second residence allowance. In my case, I live in Wodonga – 320km from Melbourne – and rent a unit in the CBD when I attend Parliament so I reckon that I’m using the allowance in the manner that it is supposed to be used.
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But before I was a politician, I served for many years in the Australian Army as an investigator with the Special Investigation Branch. The military pays its members all sorts of travel and accommodation allowances and part of my job was to investigate soldiers who were rorting the system by claiming for things that they weren’t entitled to. We used to have a name for it – fraud.
In the military, if you got caught rorting the system there was no saying sorry and repaying the money to make it go away. You’d be charged and face a court martial. If you were found guilty you were jailed and then sacked and thrown out of the army in disgrace. It didn’t matter who you were, Private or General, the rules were the same.
I’ve been in the Victorian Parliament for more than a decade now and one of the things that both puzzles and bothers me about politicians is the way they think that the rules apply to everyone else but themselves. Rip off the system as a public servant and it’s off to court for you. But get caught doing the same thing as an MP and apparently all you need to do to absolve yourself from sin is to issue a suitably contrite apology – usually written for you by some government PR hack – repay the money and go to the back bench for 12 to 18 months or so and it’s all OK.
I’m not being party partisan here. In recent years we’ve seen politicians from both sides of politics with their snout in the trough. Winery trip on cab charge, helicopter ride, free airfare for your family or halal snack pack anyone? I wonder how that approach might play out in the court system … “Yes your Honour, my client did do a stick-up on the bank and steal 100 grand, but its OK because he said sorry and gave the money back. He’s also resigned as the crime boss of the gang and been demoted to henchman.”
Having been embarrassed twice in recent weeks, Daniel Andrews is now talking about reforming the system to stop future rorting of the second residence allowance. I read this as being more like Dan being very keen not to be embarrassed again by some other ALP member getting caught with his or her hand in the till. No doubt what will happen is a revised set of guidelines will be published that talk about upholding standards but mean nothing.
Yet just in case he is serious about doing something, I’d like to offer some help by way of the Bill Tilley three-step plan:
Firstly, instead of making more internal guidelines, let’s use the Parliament to make laws that make it mandatory for politicians to live in their electorate if they want to stand for or stay in parliament. MPs who find themselves living outside their electorate because of an electoral boundary redistribution can have an exemption as long as they stay in the same home, but everyone else has to live with the people that vote for them.
No doubt some of the MPs and aspirational party hacks that live in far more palatial suburbs than the voters they represent or claim they want to represent will scream blue murder at this. After all Brighton is much ritzier than Broadmeadows but does anybody seriously think that having the local member living in the area they are supposed to care about doesn’t make sense?
It’s not such a radical idea. After all, the Local Government Act requires that if you want to run for local council, you have to live in the municipality that you stand in. As state politicians we make the laws that govern local government and if we insist that others follow a standard that we don't set for ourselves we’re basically a bunch of hypocrites.
Secondly, get a compass and draw an 80-kilometre radius around the Melbourne GPO. If any part of an electorate is inside that radius then the local member is not eligible for the allowance. This will stop MPs moving to the far end of their electorate in order to claim it. Knowing how some MPs love spending public money on themselves it will probably also prevent a stampede so big and rapid it would upset the axis of the earth.
Finally, if it is a case of fraud, refer it to the police for investigation rather than allow them to be dealt with in-house. It’s been a while since I was in the police force but I reckon that the police are far better equipped to investigate fraud than politicians. After all from memory, I seem to recall that they can do things like get search warrants to look at where a politician might have used their credit cards and mobile phones, purchased fuel on their government fuel card or used city-link to travel to an address in the Melbourne Metro area when they claimed to be living in places down on the coast. They can also interview witnesses like the neighbours to find out if people actually live where they say they do, and examine and compare the gas and electricity bill usage between two homes. They can also arrest and charge people with fraud.
I stress that I am not accusing anyone of fraud or any other criminal action. Rather I’m just saying that we should be prepared to have these matters examined by the police rather than the somewhat cosy little arrangement that exists now.
If the police reach a view that criminal conduct has occurred then the perpetrator should be arrested and charged, just like anyone else who steals from their employer.
I wonder if any MPs who might be reading this are feeling uneasy right about now?
I’d like to hope not but sadly I suspect there might be.
- Bill Tilley is the member for Benambra and a former member of both the Australian Army Special Investigation Branch and Victoria Police. He lives in Wodonga with his family and his dog Barry. He receives the Victorian Parliamentary Second Residence Allowance.