The benefits of transparency

Ministerial expenses were released today, and as usual, I spent an hour trawling through the credit card statements hoping to find evidence of Ministers rorting us. So what did I find?

Nothing. No $1,000 a night luxury hotel rooms. No enormous piss-ups on the taxpayer's tab. No drinking away our money in the middle of the night in a lonely hotel room. And no Ministerial porn. The worst I can find is a $1,000 dinner held by Tim Groser which (as usual) has no detailed receipt (without which its difficult to judge whether he was extravagant or not), and that Todd McClay likes to have a kit-kat bar for breakfast every day.

This is the benefit of transparency: it improves behaviour. If you watch the scum, they stop rorting us. Simple.