RAAF

• Australians could be forgiven for feeling weary of political scandals.
• For reporters and pundits, scandals generate excitement and drama, something more novel than the tedium of day-to-day political processes.

Flying high

• Consequently, the public and press have been quick to anger when politicians are caught misusing or abusing their taxpayer-funded travel entitlements.
• But his new Senate leader, John Gorton, took a different approach, tabling all the hidden documents in the Senate.
• Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who had originally appointed his “political mother” Bishop to the role, found his position weakened too.

Mining for misdemeanours

• In the colonial era, wealthy landholders and squatters sought to influence parliamentarians with monetary bribes.
• In 1869, a Victorian parliamentary select committee found that pastoralists and investors, led by the highly influential squatter and speculator Hugh Glass, had engaged in “corrupt practices”.
• Glass and his peers had kept a fund of money for bribing MPs during debates about land reform.
• In 1930, federal treasurer and former Queensland premier Ted Theodore was forced to resign, pending an inquiry into his financial affairs.

Pork-barrelling

• Is pork-barrelling – the art of directing public funds and grants to marginal electorates – a form of corruption?
• Much of it goes unpunished, but occasionally an egregious case arouses the public ire.
• Read more:
  View from The Hill: Bridget McKenzie falls – but for the lesser of her political sins

Grey areas

• But sometimes, sex scandals are newsworthy for their own sake, public administration aside.
• In 1975, Deputy Prime Minister Jim Cairns and one of his staff, Junie Morosi, found themselves at the centre of a media scandal.
• As his recent biographer Sean Scalmer put it, the inquiry was “a hammer blow” to this “would-be gentleman”.
• Read more:
  Welcome to the new (old) moralism: how the media's coverage of the Joyce affair harks back to the 1950s

Why scandals matter

• Scandals matter because they illuminate the tensions that shape our political processes.
• A core pillar of responsible government is that ministers are accountable to parliament.
• There have been many innovations in Australian politics in the hope of minimising corruption and avoiding scandal.

Joshua Black is affiliated with the Australian Historical Association, and the Whitlam Institute at WSU.