Taken To Be

Transcript of the published episode, checked against the episode script. Figures are written as numbers, and three dots inside a quotation mark words the narration leaves out. Spot an error? Email auditthismedia@gmail.com.

00:00 The spare room

There’s a spare room in Canberra. A single bed. A wardrobe. A window that looks out over somebody’s back fence.

Under one line of federal law, that room counts as a hotel.

Not like a hotel. Counts as one. In the rule’s own words, it is “taken to be commercial accommodation”. And the same rules say that means places like a hotel. A motel. A serviced apartment.

And in Canberra, the spare room. Here’s why that matters. When a federal member of parliament stays away from home on parliamentary business, they’re paid a flat allowance for the night. It covers the bed, the meals, the incidentals. It isn’t a reimbursement. What they don’t spend, they keep.

And the rate depends on where they sleep. Stay in a hotel, and you get the full rate. Stay somewhere with no receipt (a mate’s couch, your sister’s spare room, a place you own) and you get a third.

Everywhere in Australia. Except Canberra. In Canberra, every bed is a hotel. Even a flat the member owns. Under this year’s rules, for almost every member, that’s $349 a night.

No receipt. No question about whose bed it was. The rule has already answered it.

So of all the Canberra nights members claim, how many were hotels, and how many were spare rooms, or flats members own?

The published record can’t tell you. Most were probably hotels. That’s what the allowance is for. But the rule never needs to know, so nobody ever has to say.

And here’s the thing. None of this is a loophole. Nobody slipped through a gap. It’s 15 words, in a registered legal instrument, and you can read it on your phone tonight.

01:42 The shopping list

It isn’t even the strangest thing in the rules.

The rules also have a shopping list. Section 66 of the regulations sets out what a member’s office budget can buy. And it is very specific.

Printing, on paper up to 700 grams per square metre. Or on flat magnetised material, which covers a fridge magnet.

Audio posters. Interactive voice response phone surveys. Flags. Wreaths. In the latest year of published figures, by our own count from the expenses data, federal parliamentarians claimed about $190,000 worth of wreaths.

And you’ve already decided what you think about that. So look at when.

Three quarters of it in two months. April. And November.

Anzac Day. Remembrance Day. The two months this country lays most of its wreaths.

That isn’t a scandal. That’s a local member at a dawn service with something to put down.

Now do the same thing with flags. Same rule. Same budget. More than $3 million, in the same year.

Lay out every month in the published figures. The tallest bar is June.

The next tallest is June. In June 2024, flag spending ran at about twice an ordinary month. In June 2025, about three times.

You might say 2025 was an election year, with new members setting up offices. Take every one of them out, and that June is still more than double. And the June before had no election at all.

You might say flags have their own calendar. They do. Reconciliation Week ends in early June. NAIDOC Week is in early July.

So look at things that don’t celebrate anything. Office equipment. Stationery. IT equipment. They all jump in June as well. And in July 2024, office equipment fell to about half an ordinary month.

What do they have in common? They last. You can still have them in July.

And the office budget is set for each financial year. There is no clause that carries what’s left into the next one.

None of that means the flags are wasted. They’re handed out to constituents and local groups, which is exactly what the rule is for.

03:47 The review

It just means June is the last month that year’s money can be spent.

None of that needed anybody to break a rule. Not the spare room. Not the wreaths. Not the flags.

That’s the point. 11 years ago, a Prime Minister stood in front of the cameras and announced a review of the whole system. A root and branch review, he called it. Not a quickie review, he said. Not tinkering.

Reform. Six weeks later, he wasn’t the Prime Minister. But the review went ahead without him. The law was rewritten in 2017. And a new authority was built to watch over it.

And 11 years later, this is what the rulebook says.

04:39 What the job pays

Before we go any further, let’s put the whole thing in proportion.

This financial year, the Finance department’s budget for supporting parliamentarians and others, including their offices and their staff, is about $735 million. Spread that across everyone who lives in Australia, and it’s about $26 each.

That’s the scale of it. This episode isn’t about the size of it.

Who decides what that money can be spent on. Who checks.

And what was actually built, after 2015, to do both.

So start with the salary, because it’s the number everybody argues about. And it’s the small one.

A federal backbencher is paid $239,000 a year. This year the Remuneration Tribunal gave them nothing more. No increase at all. And it acknowledged, in its own words, that “this approach will result in a reduction in real remuneration”.

The Prime Minister gets that salary, plus 160 per cent on top. A little over $620,000. More than the salaries set for the Prime Ministers of Britain, Canada or New Zealand.

But the salary isn’t the interesting part. The interesting part is what comes with it.

Every member also gets an electorate allowance. Somewhere between about $40,000 and $57,000 a year, depending on their seat.

Now, that sounds like a work expense. It isn’t. In law, it’s part of their pay. And that one decision puts it completely outside the reach of the expenses authority. It can’t audit it. Nobody acquits it. There are no receipts.

The tax office has written down how an allowance like this works. This is the Commissioner of Taxation, in a public ruling.

“It is an amount contributed towards an expected expense, and is made regardless of whether the Member incurs the expected expense. The spending of the allowance is at the complete discretion of the Member.”

At the complete discretion of the member. So you pay tax on it. You don’t have to spend it on anything. What you don’t spend, you keep.

Some or all of it may well go on the electorate. How much? Nobody publishes that.

There’s a car, too. Or, if you’d rather not have the car, $19,500 a year instead. The rule even says, to avoid doubt, that the amount “is not affected by how many vehicles could be provided to the person”. A member with a vast electorate, who could have up to three four wheel drives, and takes the cash instead, gets exactly the same as everybody else.

So add it up, for a backbencher in a big country seat who takes the car money.

The salary. The allowance. The car. More than $315,000 a year, paid as money, before a single work expense. And before their office and their staff, which are paid for separately.

And the work expenses are a different machine entirely. With its own rules. Its own watchdog.

07:23 Fifteen words

And its own spare room.

Back to the spare room. The travel allowance works like this. A member stays overnight somewhere that isn’t home, on parliamentary business, and is paid a flat rate for the night. If they can show the bed was commercial, a hotel or a motel, they get the full rate. If they can’t, they get a third.

Unless the bed is in Canberra. Section 23, subsection 3, of the Remuneration Tribunal’s determination. 15 words.

“For the purposes of this Division, accommodation in Canberra is taken to be commercial accommodation.”

Taken to be. Whether it is or not. The determination before this one did the same thing, in different words. So it covers every night in the figures you’re about to hear.

And the drafters didn’t hide it. Under three separate sections there are notes pointing back to it. In case you missed it.

Now the numbers. There are only two you need. In the latest year of published figures, by our own count, four out of every five nights of travel allowance were in Canberra. And three quarters of the money.

Before you do anything with that, be fair to it.

Canberra is where the Parliament sits. Of course most of the nights are there. And most of them were probably in hotels, which is exactly what the allowance is for. This isn’t a story about members claiming nights they shouldn’t.

It’s a story about a question the rule doesn’t ask.

Because it never asks whether the bed was a hotel or a spare room, the published record can’t tell you how many were which. And the rule gives nobody a reason to find out.

So here is the most anybody can say. If Canberra were treated like everywhere else, and every one of those Canberra nights had been a bed with no receipt, the bill for that one year would have been up to $3.8 million lower.

That’s a ceiling, not a number. The real figure is somewhere below it, and it isn’t in any published record.

09:13 Who checks

The rule doesn’t require it to be. The rule allowed that.

Here’s a different question about politicians’ expenses. Not how much. Who checks?

For most public money in this country, the answer is the Auditor-General. An independent officer of the Parliament, with the power to demand the books of any Commonwealth agency. If anybody is going to check how politicians spend public money, you’d think it would be the Auditor-General.

And by 2015, that office had been auditing politicians’ entitlements again and again, for 15 years. Its latest report on them was tabled that June.

So it’s worth knowing what happened when, in the middle of a huge row about politicians’ expenses, somebody asked the Auditor-General to look.

July 2015. A senator writes to the Auditor-General and asks him to check whether one use of entitlements was within the guidelines.

On 6 August, he writes back. He won’t audit it. And in the same letter, he says why.

The reason isn’t about one claim. It’s about everybody. “It remains the case that the use by Parliamentarians of the entitlements available to them, including for travel, are largely subject to a self-assessment regime under which individual judgements as to the eligibility of use are undertaken within a complex and opaque framework where the eligible purposes of entitlements use... are ill-defined.”

Self-assessment. Complex. Opaque. Ill-defined. That’s the Auditor-General, describing the whole system.

And then, repeating his own office’s finding, the sentence this whole episode is a test of.

“It has often been the case that it is only when particular entitlements usage is highlighted through other sources, including the media, that closer consideration is able to be applied.”

In other words, it was often the news, not the system, that raised the question.

He wasn’t brushing it off. An independent review had already written the fix, and handed it to the government in 2010. In his words, those recommendations had “not been actioned or otherwise formally responded to” in the five years since.

So his office’s latest audit made no new recommendations about the framework.

Not because nothing was wrong. Because the fix had already been written, and the government hadn’t acted on it.

That same audit counted how the old system handled complaints. In about five years, the Finance department logged 72 separate matters involving possible misuse by a parliamentarian.

Most of the ones it finished were classified as relatively minor. In 12 of those, the department recommended it didn’t need to write to the member at all. In seven of the 12, that was because the use appeared to be within the rules.

That was the system in the winter of 2015. And four days before the Auditor-General wrote that letter, the government had already announced it would start again.

11:56 A blank sheet of paper

2 August 2015. The government announces a review of the whole system. The statement released that day says the committee will start with “a blank sheet of paper”. And it says something else. That some parliamentary travel has been “inside entitlement but outside community expectations”.

Inside the rules. Outside what you’d expect. Both at once.

The terms of reference are dated the same day. And one sentence in them is the yardstick for everything that follows.

“The objective will be to establish a workable system for authorising potentially contentious expenditure before it has occurred.”

Before it has occurred. Hold on to that. The committee reports six months later. 36 recommendations. And it doesn’t mince words. It sums up the verdict of the reviews before it. A system that is “complex, confusing, incomplete, contradictory and immensely difficult to follow and administer”.

And then this. “An opaque, complex expenses system will inevitably lead to errors and invite abuse.”

It wants the word entitlement gone. “Misleading, anachronistic and inappropriate”, it says. Call them work expenses.

It wants one Act instead of a tangle. A test of why the money was spent. Spending published monthly, once a new computer system is built. And a law requiring members to certify that what they claimed met the rules.

Now, one more detail from that review. This committee was set up to give the government options for an independent system. And in its chapter titled “Independence”, it looked at the model Britain built after its own expenses scandal and, in what it called a preliminary look, found the major and costly changes made there “unnecessary and inappropriate” for Australia.

It did not recommend an independent authority. Its recommendation in that chapter was to strengthen a division inside the Department of Finance that already existed.

Remember that, too. The government accepted all 36 recommendations, in principle.

13:52 What they built

And then it had to decide what that meant.

11 months after the report, in January 2017, the next Prime Minister announced an independent authority. The one the review hadn’t recommended.

He said it would be a compliance, reporting and transparency body. He said it would “monitor and adjudicate all claims”. And he said the model was the United Kingdom.

The laws followed that year. And the best way to understand what was built is to read it the way a member would.

Start with what counts as parliamentary business. The Act has four kinds. Parliamentary duties. Electorate duties. Official duties.

And party political duties. What goes inside that last one is written by a minister. The current version says it includes going, as a member, to “a formal meeting of a political party, including a meeting of the party executive”, and to “a national, state or territory conference of a political party”.

So going to your own party’s conference, as a member, is by law parliamentary business. And the Act says the Parliament can’t vote that definition down. It is a legislative instrument that cannot be disallowed.

Then the obligations. Section 25 says members “must be prepared to justify publicly” their use of public resources, and “must act ethically and in good faith”. There is no penalty attached to either.

Section 26 is the main test. The expense must be “for the dominant purpose of conducting the member’s parliamentary business”.

Dominant purpose. Not sole purpose. And the Act doesn’t define dominant.

Then section 28. Break a condition on a claim and, in the Act’s own words, that “does not of itself prevent public resources from being provided”.

The next section says the Commonwealth isn’t liable to pay it. If it’s found, it can be recovered, with a loading of up to 25 per cent. But nothing stops it being paid first.

Now remember the yardstick. A system for authorising contentious spending before it occurs.

Here’s what exists instead. A member can ask the authority for advice before they spend. If they get that advice and act within it, they’re protected.

But nobody has to ask. For almost everything, the claim is paid first and checked afterwards.

And the review’s law requiring members to certify that their claims met the rules?

Search the Act. The words “certify”, “certified” and “certification” don’t appear in it.

Not once. The authority does ask members to certify their spending reports, and it publishes who did. They certify the spending was for parliamentary business. Not the amounts. And it’s a request, made after the money is spent. It isn’t a duty in the Act. And the Act says nothing about what happens if a member doesn’t.

16:34 Nine years

The rule allowed that.

So what has the authority done with nine years? Start with the one thing it can produce that settles a question. A ruling. The law treats a ruling as conclusive, unless the member proves otherwise.

In nine years, it has made three. Three. It does plenty of checking. In one recent year, more than 5,000 checks. But checking isn’t deciding. And when it does decide, listen to how it says it.

It doesn’t say cleared. A review closes with one of at least four different sentences. “Consistent with the legislative framework.” “In accordance with the legislative framework.” Sometimes, that it accepts the member’s advice. And sometimes, “not inconsistent with the legislative framework”.

Not inconsistent with. Which is the regulator’s way of saying it did not establish that anything was wrong.

At least four different endings. We couldn’t find anything the authority has published that explains the difference.

And when money does come back, the register can’t tell you whether it was a penalty or a member correcting their own claim. It has no field for that. The authority’s own page says repayments are “not necessarily due to a parliamentarian having claimed incorrectly”. A repayment, on its own, is not an admission of anything.

Then the publishing. And to be fair, this part is real. Nearly every dollar of work expenses is published, every quarter.

But look at what’s in it. By our own count, more than half the money is published as lump sums, per member, per quarter, described, literally, as “Aggregated Total”. And more than half of it doesn’t tell you when it was spent.

The review also wanted every flight and every night of travel allowance labelled with the kind of parliamentary business it was for. For travel allowance and charter flights, that’s done. For ordinary domestic flights, more than 15,000 of them in a year, the file records no purpose at all.

18:25 Eight rulebooks

The only trips that come with a written reason are the ones overseas.

There are eight other parliaments in this country. Same job. Eight more rulebooks. And they differ a lot.

Queensland. The electorate allowance goes up to about $114,000. And every dollar of it is acquitted. Reported to the Clerk of the Parliament, tabled every year, member by member, category by category, and certified by the member and by the Clerk.

Tasmania. The government has released what its ministers spend on travel and entertainment. Beyond that, we looked for a single member’s expenses, published by the parliament or the government. We couldn’t find one.

The Northern Territory. Electorate allowances start at around $100,000 a year. Less if the member takes a government car. And they’re higher for the huge remote seats. The determination says the allowance covers the expenses members incur, used at their “sole discretion” in servicing their electorate. We found almost nothing published about how it’s spent.

Western Australia. In December 2019, the state’s Corruption and Crime Commission published a report on electorate allowances. Its introduction opens like this.

“$7.5 million a year. Unaccountable to the State. Unaudited by the State. That is the annual cost of the electorate allowances paid to Members of Parliament. There are rules for its use. But no one checks to see if the rules are followed.”

That was then. Today, in Western Australia, members report to the tribunal every year what they spent their electorate allowance on, category by category. They certify it. And they have to say how much they drew and didn’t spend. The rules say the tribunal publishes those reports. Overseas trips on the members’ travel allowance are reported by each member, trip by trip, and published on the tribunal’s website.

So it can be done. And then New South Wales. Where the tribunal that sets politicians’ pay wrote down, this July, what the current law allows.

It describes “the freedom which the current legislative scheme gives Members, effectively to use the entirety of their individual Electoral Allowance as salary, with resulting pay inequity.”

And then this. “What use is actually made of this allowance thus remains unknown to the Parliament or the Tribunal, that not being publicly disclosed or reported.”

Unknown to the Parliament. Unknown to the tribunal that sets it.

20:43 The ledger

The rule allowed that.

So. 11 years. 36 recommendations. Let’s add it up. The word entitlement is gone. They’re work expenses now. Done.

One Act instead of a tangle. Done. A purpose test, and value for money. Done. Break either, and there can be a 25 per cent loading.

Spending published monthly, once a new computer system was built? The system was built. It cost about twice its original budget. The publishing is still quarterly.

Every trip labelled with the kind of business it was for? Travel allowance and charter, yes. 15,000 domestic flights a year, no.

Members certifying their claims, by law? They’re asked to. No Act makes them.

An independent authority? The review didn’t recommend one. One was built anyway.

And the thing the government asked for on the very first day. A system for authorising contentious spending before it happens.

Optional advice. For those who ask. The authority’s own published protocol says it can refer a matter to the federal police. We went through seven years of its annual reports. We couldn’t find a single figure for how often it has done that. Not a number. Not a zero.

And right now, there is another review under way. Two independent reviewers, appointed in April, with the statutory review of this Act folded into their work. Their final report is due next year.

When they look, this is what’s there. A spare room in Canberra that counts as a hotel.

A budget that expires in June. And a word that isn’t in the Act.

In the first episode, nobody asked. In the second, nobody went and looked.

In the third, it said so on the payslip. In the fourth, everybody looked. It took 13 years, and not one dollar came back.

And this time, nobody had to break a rule. Audit This.