Travel Tart 2

Oh dear:

"Taxpayers footed the bill for family members of two Coalition MPs to fly to one of Australia's farthest-flung territories, the idyllic Cocos Keeling Islands in the Indian Ocean, for a weekend stay. The $10,000-plus bill to fly the wife and two daughters of West Australian Liberal Luke Simpkins and the husband of Northern territory Country Liberal Natasha Griggs to and from the tropical islands is the equivalent of a business-class round trip ticket to Honolulu for each of the four family members."  (Public pays $10k for family trips to tropical isles, Heath Aston, Sydney Morning Herald, 9/3/16)

Hm...

I wonder, is rambamming responsible for whetting our politicians' appetite for travel at someone else's expense? I mean, take Luke Simpkins, for example.

Back in 2012, a nice man, quite out of the blue, for no apparent reason, slipped Luke a ticket to Israel. To put it mildly, the experience messed with his head something terrible. On his return, he began muttering about halal meat turning us all into Muslims and squawking from his parliamentary perch that unless we ratcheted up sanctions against Iran, we'd all be rooned. Then, in 2013, he conceived the urge to visit the "homelands" of "major non-English speaking communities in his electorate." He did Vietnam. He did Greece. He did Thailand. And he did Macedonia, which he found to be "complex."

And now this...