The Rockliff Government must come clean about the $250,000 in taxpayer money spent on legal fees on behalf of unknown MPs for unknown reasons.
Spending public money on private lawyers for individual Members of Parliament is unusual to say the least. Racking up a bill of hundreds of thousands of dollars in just three years is astonishing.
These huge legal costs raise so many questions.
Who are these lawyers for? What are they for? How many MPs share in these expenses? Were they approved by Cabinet? Why couldn’t these MPs rely on advice from government lawyers? Are these private matters funded with taxpayer money? And fundamentally, why the complete secrecy?
To be clear, we’re not calling for all the legal details or the specifics of these matters. We’re just wanting some basic transparency. This is taxpayer money, and the default should not be secrecy, it should be to provide as much information as possible about these secret legal bills.
Given the clear public interest, we hope the government will front up with some answers on this extraordinary use of public funds.
