The awful events at Bondi Beach have taken travel rorts off the front page but documents show Defence Minister Richard Marles is using an Air Force 737 as his own private jet. Rex Patrick reports.
Apologies to Richard Marles for using the title of Defence Minister in the lede to this article; he much prefers the title of Deputy Prime Minister. It’s all about the look.
What next in travel rorts
The Prime Minister has asked IPEA, the Independent Parliamentary Expense Authority, to examine whether the parliamentary travel entitlement rules require reform (hint: they do).
MWM is on the case, with an FOI lodged to see what’s been happening behind the tightly drawn curtains of the Prime Minister’s Office.
MWM readers will be kept informed.
Meanwhile, on RAAF VIP Airways
In August 2023, journalist Samantha Maiden revealed that the Defence Minister, – sorry, Deputy Prime Minister – had been personally consulted over the decision to stop publishing where politicians are flying on VIP flights during the same period he personally ran up a $3.6 million bill.
VIP Flights: Albo’s secret mission revealed. Destroy after reading
Publication of VIP flights, generally, cannot present a security risk.
They were indeed regularly published, with details of routes and passengers, from the late 1960’s until 2022. VIP flights generally take off from secure airports, often from quarantined Royal Australia Air Force (RAAF) areas of those same airports, and the reports are requested to be made public well after the event.
MWM has been fighting two separate Freedom of information (FOI) battles with the Department of Defence (‘Defence’) over the release of flight details.
In the first FOI fight, from September 2023 to October 2024, Defence capitulated in the Administrative Review Tribunal, effectively telling MWM there were no security issues with the flights themselves, rather a concern with identifying individuals with close ties to high office holders to target (presumably with cyber surveillance).
Defence’s real concerns with Disclosing Passenger Details (Source: Defence)
Second request
When a second FOI request was made in October 2024 by MWM focussing on the Defence Minister’s – sorry – Deputy Prime Minister‘s, ‘last four flights’, the FOI was met with hostility and obstruction.
Only after taking the matter to the Information Commissioner (OAIC) and threatening to elevate it to the Administrative Review Tribunal, did Defence again capitulate.
What the documents show in this case is that two of the four flights in question were between Avalon, 64 km from Melbourne airport, and Canberra. The first was a morning flight on 23 September 2024 from Avalon to Canberra. It involved two pilots, and according to the passenger manifest, 5 other security /support/defence staff and lots of empty seats.
Why the Defence Minister didn’t take a commercial jet is not known. There are plenty of, circa $1000 business class flight options from Melbourne to Canberra. Perhaps such a course of action would not have been befitting of a Deputy Prime Minister on that occasion.
And the entourage
A second flight that took place on 10 October 2024 at the end of a parliamentary sitting week, from Canberra to Avalon, carried the Defence Minister – sorry, we keep getting that wrong, Deputy Prime Minister – and three other Victorian MPs, Resources Minister Catherine King, Libby Coker MP and Joanne Ryan MP.
All were appropriately designated by the RAAF as ‘entitled passengers’.
The FOI suggests 13 other security /support/defence staff tagged along. Again, there were plenty of empty seats on the flight.
Boeing Business Jet (BBJ) (Source: Defence)
The two other flights taken by the Deputy Prime Minister – he’ll be happy we’re finally using that more elite title – that were captured by the FOI were a Sydney – Java (Indonesia) – Timor – Avalon flight from 28 to 30 August 2024 and a Melbourne to Port Villa flight on 18 September 2024 returning to Avalon the next day – both using the RAAF’s smaller Falcon executive jet.
Dassault Falcon 7X(Source: Defence)
Perhaps it was appropriate for the Deputy Prime Minister to fly on a Falcon ‘private’ jet for these international trips, but it’s hard to see the justification for taking a near empty RAAF 737 on travel that could easily have been conducted on commercial flights.
Bronwyn “Chopper” Bishop
Richard Marles lives in Geelong. Maybe he could fly at the front of a commercial aircraft from Canberra to Melbourne and then take a helicopter the rest of the way to Geelong. Bronwyn Bishop did that once in 2015 (and lost her job as Speaker of the House).
But Bishop’s extravagance was less expensive for the taxpayer than Marles’.
Apparently, the Deputy Prime Minister regards a hour’s ride in a luxuriously appointed Comcar between Melbourne Airport and Geelong to be an intolerable inconvenience. But even allowing for security requirements it’d be a much more cost effective solution than an RAAF crewed 737.
When the domestic flights above were taken, FOI had not successfully extracted VIP flight details out from under a flight manifest secrecy blanket deployed by former Prime Minister Morrison, but endorsed by Marles.
Maybe the next MWM FOI on the Deputy Prime Minister’s flights might reveal that a bit of sunlight on the issue has stopped such extravagance. We’ll just have to wait and see.
Rex Patrick is a former Senator for South Australia and, earlier, a submariner in the armed forces. Best known as an anti-corruption and transparency crusader, Rex is also known as the "Transparency Warrior."