Political junkets and influence

At least 39 federal MPs and senators - one in six parliamentarians - have enjoyed junkets since the last election, with Taiwan and Israel the most popular destinations based on an analysis of the interest registers.

What’s known in the trade as study tours are a fixture of Australian politics, where foreign governments, think tanks, and lobby groups try to influence our politicians by funding their overseas trips.

As detailed in the table below, eleven visited Taiwan in 2019-20 as guests of the national government, which paid for international flights, ground transfers, meals, drinks, and accommodation. Taiwanese taxpayers even stumped up for two MPs to bring their partners. 

The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI), which receives funding from foreign governments and arms manufacturers, paid for Tim Watts, the Shadow Assistant Minister for Cyber Security, to attend the Australia-Taiwan Cyber and Technology Dialogue in late 2019. This included three nights accommodation and return flights.  

The trips may not have influenced anyone’s views, but Taipei must be pleased with Senator Eric Abetz, the Chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation Committee, who, following his 2019 visit, called for Australia to defend Taiwan in the event of a war with China. Fellow traveller Ted O’Brien pushed the Morrison government to pursue a free trade agreement with Taiwan and more recently accused the Chinese Communist Party of trying to divide Australian business and the federal government over trade relations with China.

Just prior to visiting Taiwan, O’Brien was in China along with Tanya Plibersek on a trip paid for by China Matters, an Australian policy institute that seeks to build the Sino-Australian relationship. That’s not quite going to plan. 

Eleven MPs and senators visited Israel in late 2019. The Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council funded trips by six Liberals, while the International Institute for Strategic Leadership Dialogue sponsored two Labor politicians and one Liberal to attend the institute’s 11th annual dialogue. Unfortunately for the travelling band COVID-19 forced the 12th dialogue in 2020 to be held by video conference. 

The Israel Allies Foundation and ASPI funded one trip a piece, with the latter financing Assistant Defence Minister Andrew Hastie’s attendance at a conference ASPI co-hosted in 2019 with the BESA Center, a strategic studies think tank based in Tel Aviv. As reported by Crikey in 2016, a former head of BESA published a paper that year opposing the Obama Administration’s efforts to destroy Islamic State (IS) in Syria and Iraq, arguing that a weakened but functioning IS would undermine Iran’s ambitions to be a regional hegemon. During Trump’s presidency BESA published glowing articles on his foreign policy and winning ways, and later criticised Twitter for deplatforming him. 

Hastie seems popular with strategic policy institutes. In mid 2019, before he was appointed to the ministry, he received return business class flights to London and accommodation from the Henry Jackson Society (HJS) and Konrad-Adenauer Siftung to participate in a conference on Chinese and Russian Hybrid Warfare. HJS is a neoconservative think tank that supports interventionist foreign policy like the illegal invasion of Iraq, and in 2017 was denounced by one of its co-founders Matthew Jamison for demonising Muslims and running an anti-Chinese propaganda campaign. 

Senator Kimberley Kitching, Chair of the Senate Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade References Committee, received unspecified hospitality from Hermitage Capital Management during her visit to London in 2021 to receive an award for her role in the introduction of ‘Magnitsky’ human rights sanctions legislation. The award was presented by Hermitage’s founder Bill Browder, who is driving a global campaign for Magnitsky acts following the death of his colleague Sergei Magnitsky after he revealed corruption in the Russian government. In her acceptance speech Kitching thanked her ‘Wolverine’ buddies Andrew Hastie and Senator James Paterson for helping get the legislation passed.  

The United States government is normally a big provider of junkets to the US, but it has been tight in recent years, with the US International Visitors Leadership Program only covering stateside travel and accommodation for five MPs and senators in late 2019. Likewise the Australian American Leadership Dialogue’s 2019 Honolulu Leadership Dialogue required Andrew Hastie and Anthony Albanese to pay their way there, though in Albanese’s case Qantas upgraded him to business class for the flight back to Sydney. (We’ll have more to say about Qantas upgrades and hospitality in an upcoming article.) 

Three MPs snared perhaps the best junket of all: the Australian Computer Society's innovation and technology study tour of Estonia, Finland and the UK in November 2019.  But while a tour of northern European capitals sounds like a lot of fun, the public benefit is less clear.

Another three pollies were hosted by the Coalition for Conservation (C4C) on the sidelines of COP26, the UN climate change conference in Glasgow in November 2021. C4C was established by a NSW Liberal party member to help conservative politicians develop ‘market based solutions’ to reach net zero. Maybe they could look at the emissions trading scheme their government abolished in 2014.

One trip open politics initially couldn’t make sense of was Trevor Evans’ participation in a parliamentary delegation to the Philippines in 2019, as no one else declared they went on it. The same for Senator Paterson’s trip to New Zealand in 2019 and Nicolle Flint’s visit to Japan in 2020. But a check of the explanatory notes for the interest registers reveals that parliamentary delegations do not need to be disclosed because they fall outside the definition of ‘sponsored travel’.

That’s understandable given such delegations are not paid for by private or foreign interests, though it highlights that the table below significantly understates the true extent of overseas travel. Ministerial travel is excluded for the same reason. 

So there you have it - at least a partial picture. If not for COVID-19 the numbers would be much greater, however with the recent removal of border restrictions we can expect to see an uptick in travel in 2022. Once the election is out of the way it’ll be wheels up. For those who can hang on to their seats.

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