Snout in the Trough

A ROOKIE Victorian state MP is billing taxpayers thousands of dollars to employ two of her children in her office because she has “trust issues” with staff.
Catherine Cumming, an independent upper house MP, hired her 19-year-old son and her daughter — who is 18 and still at high school — as casual electorate officers.
The Western Metropolitan MP also employs her niece, her “long-time friend” and her friend’s 21-year-old son.
Parliamentary colleagues are stunned at the arrangement, with one MP saying it “does not pass the pub test”.
But she said: “I feel the need to surround myself with people I can trust and who are capable of doing the job.”
Ms Cumming, a mother of five, said last night her children had “absolutely heard it all from the back seat of my car” during her long career as a local councillor.
“Both of my teenage children have been coming in and looking after the office when people are sick as well as learning what it is to be an electorate officer, because I’m learning how to be an MP.”
When her son posted about his new job on Facebook in May, a friend asked: “Nepotism?” He replied: “Oh course.”
Ms Cumming, who dramatically split from Derryn Hinch’s Justice Party after last year’s state election, said she hired an experienced former Liberal staffer to be a senior adviser but that person had since departed.
“Obviously I have a lot of trust issues after what I have for her children to learn how to manage electorate business, adding she had also given casual jobs to a law student and a person who worked for a council.
Federal politicians are specifically banned from hiring their partner, child, parent or sibling to work for them in taxpayer-funded roles.
But similar rules do not exist for state MPs, with fulltime electorate officers paid between $65,999 and $94,731 a year. Casuals receive a 25 per cent loading.
An upper house MP said: “It is widely considered that having family employed under that banner (of an electorate office) is not appropriate … It’s an ethical issue.”

Yeah smells like Sir Humphrey and his chums

All you need is a secretary in you local office, and a secretary in the parliament and that is it.

If you want policy officers, local community officers and media officers or any other person other than the secretaries, then you hire them out of your own pocket.

Oops, I have suddenly found myself in one of Aesops Fables, sorry about that.

Well Barnaby sees his second partner most every night, but his first mainly on visits to the Children's Court.  Mind you their respective lawyers see plenty of each other.

Sorry, you're not quite right Rusty.