A jolly family reunion
That tension – between the reality of the job and public sensitivity – sits at the heart of one of the most controversial features of the system: family reunion travel.
To outsiders, the idea of taxpayer-funded flights for spouses and dependent children can appear like a holdover from Canberra’s more indulgent days. A minister earns around $400,000 a year. A backbencher’s base salary is nearly $240,000. But the justification goes to what the review called the “compact” between voters and their representatives.
Family reunion travel rules
The obligations of MPs when determining whether they can claim family reunion expenses.
- Dominant purpose: Under family reunion rules, an MP’s family can accompany or join them at Commonwealth expense while they are conducting parliamentary business. Travel must be for the “dominant purpose” of facilitating the family life of the parliamentarian.
- Value for money: MPs are required to use public resources for parliamentary business in a way that achieves value for money. MPs can have family members travel to Canberra under a cost-based limit per year, and can claim up to three return business-class airfares for family to travel elsewhere in Australia.
- Good faith: MPs need to act ethically and in good faith when using, or accounting for, public resources. They must not seek to disguise personal or commercial business as parliamentary business.
- Personal responsibility and accountability: An MP is personally responsible and accountable for their use of public resources and should consider how the public would perceive their use of these resources.
- Conditions: An MP must not make a claim, or incur an expense, in relation to a public resource if they have not met all of the conditions for its provision.
Under the current rules, family members may travel to join or accompany a parliamentarian when the MP is away from home for the dominant purpose of parliamentary business. The dominant purpose for the family’s travel, in turn, must be to support the MP’s family life. For most, this means spouses and children flying to Canberra during sitting weeks or meeting the MP elsewhere in Australia when duties take them interstate.
The support is tightly capped: an annual allowance roughly equivalent to a set number of return fares to Canberra, plus three Australia-wide trips that a family may share for duties beyond parliament.
The 2015 review clarified these rules. Chaired by former Finance Department secretary David Tune and head of the Remuneration Tribunal John Conde, the panel found that being a federal MP is a job unlike any other in the country: long hours, irregular weekends, no maternity leave, constant travel and weeks at a time spent thousands of kilometres from home.
They argued that unless the system provided some accommodation for family life, parliament risked limiting itself to those who could afford lengthy separations — hardly the representative mix Australians expect.
“Even when they are at home in their electorates, parliamentarians are rarely off-duty and need always to be prepared to respond to constituents’ representations – there is no such thing as an uninterrupted trip anywhere, and certainly not, for example, to the shops or their own children’s sporting events,” the review found.
The Tony Burke precedent
Tony Burke, now Home Affairs Minister and Leader of the House, was caught up in the 2015 scandal. He dug in his heels, stressing he’d followed all rules, amid revelations that as environment minister, he used “family reunion” travel rules to charge taxpayers $12,707.65 for business class tickets, accommodation, car hire and allowances so his family could join him at Uluru in April 2012.
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But in December 2020, Burke repaid his family’s costs, around $8600, saying while they were within the rules, it “did not meet community expectations”.
In doing, he has laid down a marker for Sports and Communications Minister Anika Wells, whose expenses have been subject to a week of media scrutiny.
Arguably thanks to Burke, it’s now up to Albanese and Wells to determine where community expectations lie. And how much respect they should show them.
