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Tony Burke claims $12,000 from taxpayers for family trip to Uluru

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Tony Burke claims $12,000 from taxpayers for family trip to Uluru

April 2012

Labor MP Tony Burke spent more than $12,000 of taxpayer funds for a family trip to Uluru, according to the ABC.

Department of Finance records show that in April 2012, the then environment minister Tony Burke took a four-day return trip from Sydney to Uluru and claimed his own flight worth $2,181.43 plus four “family traveller” airfares worth $8,656.48. According to the ABC his office said the visit to Central Australia involved official business, including meetings with managers and rangers at the Uluru Kata Tjuta National Park and members of the nearby Aboriginal community of Mutitjulu.

Burke subsequently conceded taxpayers should not have been charged for his children to take business class flights to Uluru. “While I am completely confident that the questions in particular relating to Uluru and Cairns have been 100 per cent within the rules, they have also been completely beyond community expectations.

According to the ABC, Mr Burke requested a Finance Department review of his family travel claims over the past five years, but said he would not repay the cost of the tickets at this stage.

Read more 

On December 10, 2020, more than eight years after the trip, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that Burke had repaid $8,000 in the airfares. Read more

What's a rort?

Conflicts of Interest

Redirecting funding to pet hobbies; offering jobs to the boys without a proper tender process; secretly bankrolling candidates in elections; taking up private sector jobs in apparent breach of parliament’s code of ethics, the list goes on.

Deceptive Conduct

Claiming that greenhouse gas emissions have gone down when the facts clearly show otherwise; breaking the law on responding to FoI requests; reneging on promised legislation; claiming credit for legislation that doesn’t exist; accepting donations that breach rules. You get the drift of what behaviour this category captures.

Election Rorts

In the months before the last election, the Government spent hundreds of millions of dollars of Australian taxpayers’ money on grants for sports, community safety, rural development programs and more. Many of these grants were disproportionally awarded to marginal seats, with limited oversight and even less accountability.

Dubious Travel Claims

Ministerial business that just happens to coincide with a grand final or a concert; electorate business that must be conducted in prime tourist locations, or at the same time as party fundraisers. All above board, maybe, but does it really pass the pub test? Or does it just reinforce the fact that politicians take the public for mugs?

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