A trip to the US Tony Abbott had to cancel after losing the prime ministership to Malcolm Turnbull cost taxpayers more than $60,000.
The latest update of parliamentary entitlements shows Abbott had been planning a trip on 25-27 September last year as prime minister, but the visit was aborted after he was replaced by Turnbull in a Liberal party leadership ballot on 14 September, just 11 days before he was due to fly out.
The aborted trip still cost taxpayers $60,282.75, according to the register of entitlements.
Clarification was sought from Abbott’s parliamentary office to explain the cost, but questions were referred to the prime minister’s office. It advised that questions should be directed to the Department of Finance, but the department said the government did not comment on the work expenses of individual senators and members.
Just days before Abbott was ousted, he had taken a two-day trip to Papua New Guinea, from 9-11 September, where he attended the annual Pacific Islands Forum for lengthy talks about climate change. His register of expenditure of entitlements shows the trip cost taxpayers $15,697.75.
Back in Canberra, on 11 September, Abbott was then caught in an awkward moment in Parliament House before a community roundtable on the resettlement of Syrian refugees.
While standing with Scott Morrison and Peter Dutton, Dutton joked to Abbott that because some attendees were running late it felt like the roundtable was running to “Cape York Time”. Abbott replied, “We had a bit of that up in Port Moresby.”
Dutton then replied: “Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re, you know, about to have water lapping at your door.”
Three days later Abbott lost the prime ministership to Turnbull.
The parliamentary entitlements also show the contents of George Brandis’s bookcase has expanded again.
The attorney general has demonstrated his friendship with his colleague, Christopher Pyne, by using taxpayer dollars to buy the latter’s book A Letter to My Children.
Late last year Brandis also bought the Sky News host Peter van Onselen’s book, Battleground: Why the Liberal Party Shirtfronted Tony Abbott, and Greg Sheridan’s ode to his own wild years spent with Abbott, among others, when they were at university, When We Were Young and Foolish.
George Christensen, the Liberal National party federal member for Dawson, did not buy a single book with taxpayers’ money in the last six months of last year, according to his register. But in the first six months he purchased nearly two dozen books with taxpayer dollars on the rise of radical Islam and the threat of Islamic State, as well as a separate title about the degeneracy of Australian intellectuals.
Bronwyn Bishop’s register shows she repaid the cost of her controversial $5,227.27 helicopter flight from Melbourne to Geelong for a Liberal party fundraiser on 5 November 2014.
Bishop eventually tendered her resignation as Speaker of the house as a consequences of the “Choppergate” scandal, on 2 August 2015.
