The Travel Rorts 2.0 scandal continues to not go away in the least, compounding a bad week for Australian PM Anthony Albanese, for whom the summer break just can’t come fast enough. Albanese needs to remember one of the most basic aphorisms in politics: when you’re in a hole, stop digging.
That applies not just to the Travel Rorts 2.0 scandal, but his social media ban for under-16s. Not a day old, and it’s already a running joke.
Teenagers in Australia are cheating the government’s world-first social media ban and openly mocking the prime minister on banned platforms.
Young people told the Telegraph how they were getting past the new age-verification technology by frowning at the camera. Others told Anthony Albanese to “f— off” after accessing sites such as Instagram and Snapchat, which the new law has banned for those under the age of 16 […]
“How it feels still having social media,” one young girl said in a video posted online showing her dancing. She added a hashtag telling the prime minister to “f— off”. Another called him a derogatory term before saying they had circumvented the government’s ban.
From here, Magoo has two options: take the L or dig in harder. We know exactly which he’ll choose, of course. That’s because under-16s were just the motte: the bailey is a digital ID for all Australians.
So, watch in the next few months, as Albanese and his e-Karen solemnly shake their heads and declare that, oh dear, oh dear, the only way forward is to make all Australians ‘verify their identity online’. A digital ID.
In which case, Albanese ought to remember that far more popular Labor PMs than him nearly committed political suicide by trying to force a government ID on Australians. When Bob Hawke tried to introduce his ‘Australia Card’, the backlash was so fierce that it led to a double-dissolution election. Like the ‘Voice’ referendum that so humiliated Albanese in 2023, initial public support for the card at 70 per cent quickly evaporated, plummeting to less than 40 per cent within a month.
In the other big L of this week, Albanese is doubling down on defending his indefensible ministers’ unrelenting wallowing in the trough of taxpayer-funded entitlements.
Anthony Albanese has doubled down on his defence of Communications Minister Anika Wells’ $100,000 taxpayer funded New York trip, after he asserted on Wednesday that her dash to the United Nations General Assembly was “not fun”.
The minister billed taxpayers almost $100k in airfares to travel to New York, advertising the government’s social media ban on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, while also notably enjoying some drinks at the famous watering hole for Australian expats, Old Mates Pub.
The more we learn about MPs’ abuse of taxpayers’ money, the worse it gets.
Trade Minister Don Farrell has used taxpayer funds to fly his wife and other family members a distance almost halfway to the moon while Greens firebrand Sarah Hanson-Young has ferried her lobbyist husband to and from Canberra on 78 publicly funded airfares.
Intensifying pressure on Anthony Albanese to reform parliamentarians’ entitlements, it can be revealed that Senator Farrell – one of Labor’s most respected and feared powerbrokers – has flown his wife, Nimfa, and potentially other family members a collective 3.7 times around the Earth under family reunion benefits since Labor won government in 2022 at a cost of $90,058.19.
They’re all in on it.
The Australian can also reveal that Canberra’s biggest user of family reunion taxpayer entitlements, Nationals MP Andrew Willcox, who holds Dawson on the central Queensland coast, has charged taxpayers to enable his wife to travel to Canberra for every sitting week since 2023. This amounted to 161 flights as a cost of $123,385.55, to travel a distance equivalent to 3.9 laps of the Earth.
Trust the Greens to be even worse, though. Sarah ‘Sea Patrol’ Hanson-Young (so named, after she mistook a TV drama for a documentary) is not only abusing her airfare privileges to the hilt, but the anti-mining Greens MP’s husband is making a nice little earner as a lobbyist for mining companies.
The saga of parliamentary entitlements further engulfed the Greens on Wednesday following revelations by the Australian that Senator Hanson-Young had charged taxpayers $49,902 to fly her husband, [Ben Oquist], to and from Canberra since July 2022.
That date is when Mr Oquist commenced working at DPG Advisory Solutions, a Canberra-based government relations firm founded by Liberal operative David Gazzard, which counts Rio Tinto and Salesforce among its corporate clients.
If these creeps didn’t have double standards, they wouldn’t have any.
Even though one of their own has emerged as the biggest user of taxpayer-funded travel, the coalition are clearly happy to sacrifice a few pawns to take a queen or two from Labor and the Greens. Multiple Liberal and Nationals politicians have joined the chorus to pare back MPs’ travel entitlements.
Nationals deputy leader Kevin Hogan has said the parliamentary travel entitlements saga is a “pox on the whole parliament” after it was revealed Greens Senator Sarah Hanson-Young charged taxpayers almost $50,000 to ferry her lobbyist husband to and from Canberra […]
Liberal frontbencher James Paterson confirmed the opposition would be “open” to changes to the rules on parliamentary travel entitlements, after the taxpayer-funded flights saga continued to plague ministers, coalition MPs and members of the crossbench.
Still, at least ‘Sharia Has-Been Dumb’ (as she is also known) is shutting her colossal yap for once. Hanson-Young is refusing to answer journalists’ calls, texts and emails, and even cancelled regular TV gigs.
The Silly Season can’t come quickly enough for these unconscionable scumbags to do their usual cockroach act and scurry out of the light again.
