If anything means anything anymore, surely former sports minister Bridget McKenzie should be sacked as agriculture minister.
The detailed revelations from the ABC’s Andrew Probyn yesterday — the actual spreadsheet, the exact scores of those clubs funded and those overlooked, the warnings McKenzie explicitly received — have managed to make her position even more tenuous.
But if she does resign or is sacked, is she headed for a life of shame, disgrace and a modest job in retail? Far from it. We hear McKenzie’s a hot tip for the high commissioner job in New Zealand.
There is precedent for this. Here’s what happened to other ministers and MPs who’ve left public service in disgrace:
John Sharp
Transport minister in the Howard government, John Sharp was forced to resign over a parliamentary travel allowances affair. Sharp had voluntarily amended his travel claims and repaid almost $9000 of misuse of his travel allowance, but did not publicly disclose this information; neither did the administrative services minister David Jull, who oversaw the process.
And yet, Sharp boasts a impressively packed post-politics CV. He went on to become chairman of the Aviation Safety Foundation of Australia and, between 2001 and 2015, he was a director of Airbus Group Australia Pacific. He is currently chairman of Pel-Air Aviation Pty Ltd and a director of Power and Data Corporation Pty Limited, Luerssen Australia and the Australian Maritime Shipbuilding Export Group. He is also deputy chairman and an independent director of regional airline Rex.
Sam Dastyari
Former Labor “bagman” Sam Dastyari points to another possible post-politics career for McKenzie: media expert on resigning in disgrace.
Dastyari quit following a series revelations about his relationship with the Chinese Communist Party — getting them to cover travel costs, asking colleagues not to meet with pro-democracy campaigners, et al.
Since then, Dastyari has stayed in the public eye, doing reality TV, spilling salacious politics goss on the radio, and regularly tweeting along the lines of “can you imagine if I did this?!” Indeed, it was absolutely no surprise to see him called on to write a column about the sports rorts affair.
Jim Short
The last chaotic decade often makes John Howard look like our great statesman, but there was a rash of resignations (seven altogether) in his first term. Short was assistant treasurer when it was revealed he’d granted a banking license to a subsidiary of a bank in which he held shares.
He resigned, and walked more or less straight into a three-year appointment as the Australian member of the executive board at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London. He was then appointed as Australia’s special envoy to Cyprus.
Santo Santoro
Santoro resigned as minister for ageing in mid-March 2007 after it was revealed that he had failed to disclose shareholdings in companies, some of which appeared to amount to conflicts of interest. Santoro, a Liberal, resigned from the Senate in April.
The following year he wandered into a lobbying gig and has stayed there ever since. Last we heard, he was offering Chinese billionaire Huang Xiangmo access to Santoro’s “best friend”, then-immigration minister Peter Dutton. According to a Four Corners/SMH investigation, Santoro was paid tens of thousands of dollars for arranging a meeting between the pair in 2016.
Bronwyn Bishop
After Bronwyn Bishop took a little taxpayer-funded helicopter ride, she eventually resigned from her role as speaker and was was dumped by Liberal preselectors. She then moved seamlessly into Sky News.
It was here — decked out in pearls and a fur stole, she complained about socialism (this has happened many times) and accused people with “a bit of depression” of “rorting” the disability pension.
Jim Cairns
In 1975, the “loans affair” (attempts to secure loans from Pakistani businessman Tirath Khemlani, rather than using the Treasury’s normal channels) claimed the scalps of deputy treasurer and deputy PM Jim Cairns, minerals and energy minister Rex Connor, and eventually the whole Whitlam government.
After politics, Cairns went into the counter-culture: he got into meditation, founded the ConFest bush retreats, and sold his self-published economics books outside Melbourne suburban markets.
Of course, McKenzie might instead want to take a leaf or two from the book of her Coalition colleagues and just wait for the whole thing to blow over. As it turns out, this is remarkably easy to do even after a full year of scandal.
If “Patsy” Mckenzie has any integrity left she’ll name names on the way out – if nothing else it will force Scumbo to up the ante to buy her silence.
If she goes to Wellington, she could take some leadership lessons from Jacinda, return to become leader of the Nationals and introduce them to concepts like integrity, probity and transparency.
You are being completely unfair to Jim Cairns. The attempt to bypass the Loans Council was a probably misguided effort to secure funding for developing national infrastructure. The Loans Council had a majority of Liberal state premiers plus the corrupt criminal Bjelke-Petersen. They had a single objective of thwarting all and any initiatives of the Whitlam government. While the connection with Khemlani was ill-advised, and certainly naive, it was neither illegal nor unconstitutional. In seeking a petrodollar loan Jim Cairns was attempting to advance the objectives of his government – explicit in the ALP program and supported by a majority of the electorate.
To describe Cairns connection with Confest, or his humbly sitting with a blanket over his knees with a card table containing his books outside the Prahran Market in the depths of a Melbourne winter, in the same context as a Bishop or Santoro, is a rank injustice.
You are absolutely right. Cairns fell into a life of humility and frugality which was in no way a reward or a compensation for losing his post; the comparison with public-trough-scouring scoundrels like McKenzie and the others is insulting. It looks like Charlie was ‘reaching’ for some kind of ‘balance’. What personal gain was sought or undeservedly achieved by Jim Cairns, Charlie?
Ditto, there is no comparison with McKenzie. Cairns should not have been included in this list, bad judgment by the author.
Well said Griselda and very lazy effort from you Charlie to paint Jim Cairns in the same light as Bridget McKenzie.
The best you can do in relation to Cairns is using Wikipedia as your reference?
Why not try referring to a text like Michael Sexton’s – Illusions of Power :The fate of a reform government (Allen & Unwin)?
Chapter’s 3 & 5, on Cairns and Connor respectively, gives a good insight into the bloody minded obstruction to the reforms of the Whitlam government, from not only the opposition but certain powerful heads of the federal public service, notably Head of Treasury Sir Frederick Wheeler.
The indiscretions undoubtedly arose out of frustration by Cairns & Connor, in being thwarted in their desire to raise through the Loans Council $4,000m so that Australian’s could have ownership and control of our petroleum and mineral resources ( then valued at $5.7b). As Connor quipped at the time ‘Who will own Australia?’
That answer is pretty obvious now and we are reaping the whirlwind !
But then again I have observed a sad state of affairs, especially in politics, myth, when repeated often enough has a way of becoming gospel.
Another reader who thinks Charlie got it quite wrong re: Jim Cairns.
It was a lazy cheap shot. So both Charlie, and whoever is currently Crikey’s editor who let this through, need a history lesson.
Well said, paddy! Jim Cairns did nothing wrong before or after he left politics. Thank you for your post, Griselda, which is also my recollection of events.
Might I also add that from the info given here, Sam Dastyari was NOT ‘rewarded’ with any government or other job when he resigned…so Charlie, why is he included in this article? It seems he is taking media and other jobs presumably offered to him.
What exactly, is wrong with that? Perhaps you weren’t able to bring yourself to admit that all of the ‘snouts in the trough’ were from the L/NP!!
Excellent point about Dastyari. I was too busy being agitated over Cairns to defend Dastyari but he doesn’t qualify for this list either.
Others, such as Downer, left Parliament without disgrace despite scandals such as the Oil For Food schemozzle in Iraq….& the illegal cabinet room bugging in Timor-Leste.
Well if she is found to have no legal authority to distribute the sports funds, she could go on the run as creditors chase her for $100 million.
Somewhere in the Caymans perhaps? Her mate Angus must have scouted out a few places recently.