As foreign minister, Julie Bishop spearheaded the privatisation of Australian aid, a policy that created huge opportunities for the corporate sector. A company called Palladium took particular advantage, signing a multimillion dollar contract to deliver “administrative support services” on Nauru.
Around the same time, the then defence industry minister Christopher Pyne voiced an ambition to turn Australia into a major arms exporter. In accordance with that lofty goal, he travelled to tout Australian weapons systems to the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, despite the involvement of both countries in the bloody war in Yemen.
Pyne had revered the deposed Malcolm Turnbull so much as to describe him as “Aslan” (you know, the Jesus-lion in CS Lewis’s children’s book), while when Bishop offered herself as leader she suffered a humiliating first-round defeat in the voting that eventually installed Scott Morrison.
So unsurprisingly, they both left parliament before the recent election – and both quickly obtained sweet new jobs.
Bishop joined the board of, um, Palladium, a company which the ABC describes as “one of the biggest beneficiaries” of her policy of aid privatisation.
Pyne took on a role as defence consultant for a firm of business advisers called EY. That meant, he explained, he would provide “strategic advice to EY, as the firm looks to expand its footprint in the defence industry”.
Now, in August 2018, Morrison signed off on a statement of ministerial standards, a document produced so the Coalition might move on from Barnaby Joyce’s shenanigans. The statement explains in point 2.25, that ministers must not, for 18 months after leaving their gig, “lobby, advocate or have business meetings with members of the government, parliament, public service or defence force on any matters on which they have had official dealings as minister in their last eighteen months in office.”
They’re also supposed to promise that, in their post-ministerial life, they won’t take personal advantage of information they’d accessed in their old jobs.
Not surprisingly, Labor has declared Pyne and Bishop to be in flagrant breach of those undertakings.
Perhaps you have some sympathy with their desire to establish new careers. Everyone needs to earn a quid, right?
Well, these two don’t.
Because the pair were elected before 2004, they belong to the cohort of politicians still eligible for the benefit package called the Parliamentary Contributory Superannuation scheme.
William Summers provides the best explanation of the workings of that system, a complex calculation based on years spent in parliament and relevant positions obtained.
According to his assessment, for the financial year 2018-19, Bishop will receive a payment of $212,991; Pyne will get $173,296.
That’s just for that year, mind you. Because the pensions are indexed to the salaries of current MPs, they increase over time. In 2012, for instance, parliamentarians received a 30% pay boost – and so did their retired brethren and sistren.
It’s possible that, rather than accept a huge and growing pension rolling in every year for as long as they live, Bishop and Pyne opted to take lump sums. Summers calculates that Bishop could have grabbed a one-off windfall of over a million dollars – and still be “paid at least $106,000 each year for the rest of her life.”
To put these grotesque figures in perspective, compare them with the amounts allocated to Newstart recipients.
Those on Newstart can claim the grand total of $277 per week, the lowest rate of any country in the entire OECD.
According to a Salvation Army report in 2018, that means that, on average, people on Newstart must, after paying accommodation expenses, somehow survive on just $17 per day.
As Luke Henriques-Gomes explains, Newstart has remained unchanged since John Howard effectively froze payments in the mid-1990s. Since that time, the base salary of a federal politician has grown by $85,776.37 in real terms – with corresponding increases flowing through to parliamentary pensions.
Yet the tiny sums allocated to welfare recipients are policed with utter ruthlessness.
Under its robodebt system, the Department of Human Services trawls income data from the Australian Tax Office, using algorithms to detect supposed discrepancies. Upon discovering an apparent anomaly, the department places the onus on welfare recipients to establish their innocence.
These are, of course, some of the most vulnerable people in the community. Some don’t speak English well; others suffer from various disabilities. Yet they’re expected to produce payslips or other documents pertaining to work they performed up to five years ago – and threatened with all kinds of penalties if they can’t.
Between July 2016 and October 2018, figures from the Department of Human Services showed that 2,030 people, many of whom were classified as “vulnerable”, died after receiving a Centrelink debt notice.
As Terry Carney, a former long-serving member of the administrative appeals tribunal’s social security division, told the ABC:
“It’s the conduct that you would expect [from] a tinpot, third-world country. …”[It’s] a bit like the Mafia saying, you know: ‘You owe me money. Do I have to prove that you owe me money? No I don’t.’ “That … is what we usually say is extortion.”
While Newstart recipients must defend themselves against algorithmic accusations, Pyne and Bishop have been investigated by the secretary of Morrison’s department, Martin Parkinson, who declared he had “no grounds to believe that either Mr Pyne of Ms Bishop have breached the standards”.
How did he come to that conclusion?
Well, he spoke to them and they both assured him they intended to remain compliant.
In any case, as he explained, under the current ministerial guidelines, there were no specific actions that could be taken against ministers once they had left the parliament in the event the standards had been breached.
As Katharine Murphy puts it, the standards are “not enforceable and rarely policed”.
If the computer decides someone living below the poverty line might have received an overpayment, they can expect to be hounded until they crack.
Yet politicians can float from parliament to the private sector on a river of taxpayer-funded gold – and it’s all perfectly legal and above board.
When Morrison touts his Christian values, one thinks of Matthew 13:12: “Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.”
• Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist
