For more than a week politicians have been peppered with enquiries about their dealings with Qantas and Virgin.
In my previous career as a paediatric neurologist and medical researcher I had lounge memberships by virtue of many hours in planes travelling to conferences. When I was elected in 2022, I accepted membership of the Qantas Chairman’s Lounge and Virgin’s Beyond club. It seemed like they came with the job. I knew I’d be travelling a lot, and they’d give good opportunities to catch ministers on issues and to work while in transit.
Those things were true. However, once I started working in Canberra, I became aware of the insidious nature of lobbying activities in Parliament House. Every sitting day, almost 2,000 lobbyists are in the house – 10 for every member of the house and the Senate. Most are not on the lobbyists’ register – they don’t have to be, because the register is toothless and ineffectual. Ministers are not required to release their diaries, so we don’t know who they meet with, when and why. Lobbyists have a role – they get in front of politicians and can elevate important issues of the day. But they shouldn’t have secret, unrestricted access to politicians when the not-for-profits and community groups don’t get that – when our constituents don’t get that.
Qantas has been on the nose for years. Selling tickets on cancelled flights, excess Covid-related travel credits, massive profits while receiving Covid-related taxpayer subsidies, a CEO receiving a $10m handshake after years of industrial relations battles, allegations of slot hoarding to prevent small players flourishing – Australians have demanded transparency on these issues. They want to know why the government hasn’t legislated mandatory compensation for delayed and cancelled flights, and why it has failed to address the effective airline duopoly by opening up slots and routes.
In that context, the recent revelations about lounge memberships and upgrades sit poorly with many. Their valid concern is of perceived or real conflicts of interest where politicians accept perks from airlines while in a position to legislate on those businesses’ commercial fortunes.
I gave up my Chairman’s Lounge membership last year because I’d become concerned about how lobbying activities affect government decision-making. I had presented the government with a private member’s bill to require all lobbyists to be openly registered and for their meetings with politicians to be put on the public record. I did not want to be compromised by lobbying activities.
A Chairman’s Lounge membership is a valuable gift. It’s not an earned benefit potentially available to all Australians, like other forms of lounge access. In medicine it’s been shown that even small gifts from pharma can affect doctors’ prescribing patterns. The airlines don’t offer these things for no reason.
I’m not telling my colleagues to give up their Chairman’s Lounge memberships, although I do think we should declare them and any upgrades offered to us. We shouldn’t use our position to curry favours like upgrades. But ultimately these discussions are just tinkering around the edges of a bigger issue.
Australians want more transparency from their government – about its decisions and what considerations play into them; about who it talks to before making those decisions. This is why I’ll keep trying to get the political parties to commit to greater clarity about their relationships with lobbyists and with industry.