She charged the taxpayers for this privilege. She refused to apologize or repay the cost despite being asked repeatedly. Her position was no longer valid. Tony Abbott’s position was also weakened after he appointed Bishop, his “political mom”, to the role.

Bronwyn Bishop resigned as Speaker due to a scandal involving travel expenses.

Mines for criminals

Abusing the “perks” of a job is one thing. Another thing is to admit that you are corrupt. In truth, Australia has a long history of corruption. In colonial times, wealthy landowners and settlers tried to influence parliamentarians by bribing them.

A Victorian select committee in 1869 found that investors and pastoralists, led by Hugh Glass, the influential squatter, were engaging in “corrupt practice“. Glass and his colleagues had kept money to bribe MPs in debates on land reform.

Corruption was rampant among colonial politicians who used public money for projects that benefited them personally. In the 1880s Victoria’s railway Minister Tommy Bent built a line through his electorate to increase the value of his land. Frank Bongiorno, a historian who has suggested that “everyone knew Bent as a crook”, said: “and newspapers called him ‘one'”.

Victoria was not unique in its corruption. Queensland historians like Lyndon Megarrity showed how railway financiers bought influence on railway legislation during the 19th century by paying cash bribes. In the 1970s, Joh Bjelke Petersen, Terry Lewis (his Police Commissioner), and a vast network of business people, developers, and other influential people upheld this tradition of political corruption.

Queensland’s scandals of corruption have sometimes had national implications. Ted Theodore, former Queensland premier and federal treasurer, was forced to resign in 1930 during an investigation into his finances. Theodore, who was wealthy and controversial, was accused of gaining from the sale of Mungana Mines to the Queensland Government (where he served as premier at the time) for a inflated price.

It was crucial to the timing of this scandal. The timing of the scandal was crucial. The state government initiated its Royal Commission against Theodore only weeks before Labor took office in 1929. The report was delivered shortly before the first budget of the new government. The federal treasurer was forced to step aside at the height of the Great Depression. This, according to historian Joan Beaumont, was a “body blow for the Scullin administration. Theodore lost his chance to influence Australia’s response during the Depression by the time he cleared his name and returned.

Sports Rorts 1.0, in which Bridget McKenzie resigned as a minister under the Morrison government over a generous grant given to a shooting club of which she had been a member, seemed like history repeated on a much larger scale. The Coalition’s 2019 election campaign grants for sports and recreation were in direct contradiction to the advice given by the minister.

Grey areas

When public and private questions are layered over each other, it is even more difficult to understand the complexities of pork-barrelling.

Daryl Maguire, NSW Member for Wagga Wagga, convinced Gladys Berejiklian in 2016 to grant $5.5m to a clay-target shooting range within his electorate. The grant was made outside of the normal channels, and the fact that Maguire and Berejiklian were intimately involved in the process led to a conflict-of-interest scandal.

Sometimes, however, sex scandals can be newsworthy in their own right, regardless of the public administration. In 1975, Jim Cairns, the Deputy Prime Minister, and Junie Morosi – a member of his staff – were at the center of a scandal.

The media criticized the couple for their extramarital affair while highlighting Morosi’s physical attractiveness.

Cairns suffered from the publicity surrounding their affair. Tom Uren, his friend and former colleague, noted in autobiography there were “irregular” relationships among conservatives which “weren’t exposed in the media”.

In the past, however, conservatives were fair game when it came to sexual exposure. In colonial days, accusations of infidelity in marriage and nepotism colored many conservative politicians’ careers. Graham Berry, an early colonial libertarian in Victoria, quit as treasurer after a select panel inquiry was launched into a previous extramarital affair and the possible bribery that resulted from it. According to his biographer Sean Scalmer, the inquiry dealt a “hammer blow” on this “would-be man.”

Journalists choose when to hide and when to reveal. Media showed they still had this power when BBarnaby was with Vikki Campion, a staffer at the newspaper, and their pregnancy in 2018. They waited for unimpeachable proof and used JJoyce’swords during the marriage equality referendum, where he defended “”raditional””marriage, as a justification.

Why scandals matter

Scandals are important because they reveal the tensions which shape our political process. Our democratic system is characterized by the physical and social distances between voters and their representatives; the privileges accorded ministers in order to perform their duties, and media discretion when deciding what and who becomes scandalous. These include blurred lines of power and privilege.

Ministers must be accountable to the parliament. Ministers who mislead the parliament, or as in the case of Scott Morrison, did not reveal their ministerial appointment to the parliament, undermining the most important constraint of executive power in Australia.

Many innovations have been made in Australian politics to minimize corruption and avoid scandal. Monique Ryan, an independent MP, introduced a private member’s bill in late 2023 to curb lobbying and make ministerial diary public. If it passes, this will bring to light another gray area in Australian politics.