Let’s get one thing clear straight away – the Bronwyn Bishop helicopter outrage is worthy of widespread condemnation, and represents a blatant misuse of taxpayers money. Good then, I think we’re all agreed on that. What Madam Speaker was thinking, hiring the gold plated version of fast aerial transport for a short trip along the M1, is a mystery to me. Perhaps the good lady just wanted to get in and out of Geelong rather quickly, and without risking the ordeal of parking her Commonwealth issue car on the streets of Corio. Perhaps she just couldn’t bear the prospect of driving all the way there along a multi-lane freeway at 80 kmp/h in obedience to Nanny State’s road laws. Whatever.
One could dwell also, in this connection, on Wayne Swan’s flippant use of taxpayers money to get to and from sporting events during his time as Treasurer, but Swanny was never much one for watching the dollars, everything fiscal he touched seemed to end up blowing the arse out of the bottom line – so there’s not much fun to be had there, especially when Swanny reminds you, as his rather forlorn looking presence does each time the camera pans the green benches during Question Time, that his stint as ‘the world’s greatest Treasurer’ left the nation with generation gap defying debt. Some have made reference to the methods of transportation favoured by another speaker of fond recent memory, the oyster fancying Peter Slipper, but there is a dearth of ALP types wanting to remember with any great fondness the many times they lined up with Comrade Gillard in defence of Speaker Slipper.
So Bronnie got slammed, an
d there was no one, not even someone in a blue tie, willing to say she hadn’t made a mistake, done the wrong thing, behaved a little stupidly, and all of that. By Sunday, only the ABC was continuing to show excessive interest in the whole affair, compiling lengthy reports on its (lavishly taxpayer funded) news boards, with detailed side by side timeline comparisons of the Slipper case vs the Bronnie case. This was so, even though, in the big scheme of things, $5,000 of taxpayers is not really a huge amount in the multimedia Disney World that is the ABC – it would be hard pressed to fund just a few words of the opening sentence of an episode of Media Watch at the rate presenter Paul Barry is reportedly paid to produce fifteen minutes of television a week.
But I digress… the ABC has a penchant for becoming obsessed with particular issues that, somehow, always seem to have potential to cause maximum embarrassment to the conservative side of politics.
Exhibit A – when the Coalition won the last election, promising to stop the boats, the ABC suddenly became excessively interested in the arrival of asylum seeker boats, creating a whole website (and no doubt enlisting an army of eager interns) to keep the score of boat arrivals, despite having ceased reporting on the matter at all under the previous regime (in fact, we have some sympathy for the ABC here, the way the previous government had completely lost control of the borders, one would need a whole second 24 hour news service to keep up with the rate of illegal arrivals, were one to report on them all).
When the boats actually did stop under the new government, however, the ABC was left with an empty website, with no need for the expensive computer generated icons, or its expensive and cleverly designed software, and with nothing to fling in the government’s face. God knows how much of the taxpayers moolah was squandered on that attempt at a political gotcha. And talking of gotcha politics, I wonder what it costs per episode to produce Q&A? More than a few helicopter trips to and from Geelong I expect. In fact, if you had the annual Q&A budget to burn on anything you wanted, I expect you could pretty much buy the helicopter itself, and take as many trips in it as you like.
So let’s all be sufficiently outraged at Bronnie’s misuse of choppers – I know I am, if I was going to blow five grand on a trip somewhere it would not be to Geelong. But if the ABC really wants to start going blue in the face over what constitutes a waste of taxpayers money and demand the spending stop, then my generous advice to it, with the longsuffering taxpayers of Australia in mind, would be – bugger the five grand ride in a chopper, sell the bloody chopper!
