Sacked

So, it turns out that Pansy Wong used her Parliamentary travel allowance for her little business trip to China - a trip in which she failed to properly seperate her public and private roles. This is expressly against the Speaker's Directions [PDF], which state explicitly that

no rebate is payable in respect of any travel undertaken by the member for private business purposes

And so as a result Wong looks likely to be dumped as a Minister.

So much for Bill English's claim that this was just muckraking. Wong corruptly abused her Parliamentary entitlements to enrich herself. And there's a name for that: fraud. But no doubt, she'll just pay the money back, and everyone will forget about it. Meanwhile, if any one of us abused the system to falsely claim a benefit worth thousands of dollars, they'd be being prosecuted. But I guess justice only applies to "little people"...