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Under one line of federal law, a spare room in Canberra counts as a hotel. Not like a hotel. "Taken to be commercial accommodation", whether it is or not.

This episode reads the rules that decide what federal politicians are paid and what public money they can spend: the salary, the electorate allowance, the car, the travel allowance, the office budget's shopping list, and the authority that was built in 2017 to watch over the expenses.

In 2015 the government announced a review of the whole system. Eleven years and thirty six recommendations later, this is what the rulebook says. The spare room, the wreaths, the flags: none of it needed anybody to break a rule.

This episode names no politician. It is about the rules, not the people who use them.

Every fact in it comes from the public record. The narration is an AI voice.

CHAPTERS
00:00 The spare room
01:42 The shopping list
03:47 The review
04:39 What the job pays
07:23 Fifteen words
09:13 Who checks
11:56 A blank sheet of paper
13:52 What they built
16:34 Nine years
18:25 Eight rulebooks
20:43 The ledger

SOURCES

The rules
Remuneration Tribunal (Members of Parliament) Determination 2026, F2026L01115, 22 August 2026
Remuneration Tribunal (Members of Parliament) Determination 2024
Remuneration Tribunal, Statement of Decision, 11 June 2026
Remuneration Tribunal, Report on Ministerial Salaries 2026
Parliamentary Business Resources Act 2017, Compilation No. 6, 1 July 2026
Parliamentary Business Resources Regulations 2017, section 66
Parliamentary Business Resources (Parliamentary Business) Determination 2025, F2025L00135
Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority Act 2017
Australian Taxation Office, Taxation Ruling TR 1999/10

The money
Department of Finance, Portfolio Budget Statements 2026-27, Outcome 3
Australian Bureau of Statistics, estimated resident population, 31 March 2026
Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority, parliamentarians' expenditure data, quarterly releases, July 2024 to June 2026 (calculations by Audit This)
Salary rates in force in 2026 for the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand; Reserve Bank of Australia exchange rates

Who checks
Auditor-General for Australia, published correspondence, letter of 6 August 2015
Australian National Audit Office, Report No. 42 2014-15, Administration of Travel Entitlements Provided to Parliamentarians
Australian National Audit Office, Administration of the Parliamentary Expenses Management System (performance audit)
Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority, Annual Reports 2018-19 to 2024-25
Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority, published rulings, repayments register and Certifications page
Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority, published protocol on referrals, 1 November 2022

The review, and what was built
Prime Minister, media release and press conference, 2 August 2015
An Independent Parliamentary Entitlements System, Review, February 2016, including its Terms of Reference of 2 August 2015
Prime Minister, press conference, 13 January 2017
Department of Finance, appointment of the independent reviewers, 28 April 2026

The other parliaments
Queensland Independent Remuneration Tribunal, Determination 38/2026; Queensland Members' Remuneration Handbook
Tasmanian Department of Premier and Cabinet, routine disclosures of ministerial travel and entertainment costs
Northern Territory Remuneration Tribunal, Report and Determination No. 1 of 2026, Special Inquiry, Salaries and Other Entitlements of Assembly Members
Salaries and Allowances Tribunal (WA), Members of Parliament Determination No. 1 of 2026
Corruption and Crime Commission (WA), report on electorate allowances, December 2019
Parliamentary Remuneration Tribunal (NSW), Annual Determination, 28 July 2026

Audit This follows Australian public money to the end of the paper trail.

Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end.

Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This
Corrections and tip-offs: [email protected]

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In 2008, a new shape appeared on a map of New South Wales. A coal exploration area called Mount Penny, in the Bylong Valley.

Years later, the minister responsible was asked, at a public inquiry, how he knew where to put it. He said he was pretty good at geography.

When Mount Penny was granted, its boundary covered, in the corruption commission's own words, "the vast majority" of a cattle property a politically connected family had bought the year before, to retire on. And all of the two farms next door.

Ian Macdonald, Edward Obeid and Moses Obeid were convicted in 2021 of conspiring to commit wilful misconduct in public office. Every appeal was dismissed, the last by the High Court of Australia on 4 February 2026.

The family received $30 million. Thirteen years, a public inquiry, a criminal trial and two appeals later, not one dollar of it has ever come back.

Built entirely from the public record.

New episodes weekly.

CHAPTERS
00:00 A new shape on the map
01:38 1906: the minister nobody could convict
03:28 The farm
05:54 The minister
07:36 How you open a coalfield
09:14 The bid that lost on purpose
10:54 What a shape on a map is worth
12:52 The room
14:55 Thirteen years
17:37 Where the money went
20:17 The valley

SOURCES
R v Macdonald; R v Edward Obeid; R v Moses Obeid (No 17) [2021] NSWSC 858
R v Macdonald; R v Edward Obeid; R v Moses Obeid (No 18) [2021] NSWSC 1343
Macdonald v R; Obeid v R; Obeid v R [2023] NSWCCA 250
Obeid v The King; Macdonald v The King [2026] HCA 1
Independent Commission Against Corruption, Operation Jasper report, July 2013
Mining Amendment (ICAC Operations Jasper and Acacia) Act 2014 No 1 (NSW)
NSW Crime Commission, Jasper II report, 24 April 2025
ABC News, 1 February 2013 and 24 October 2021

Everything named in this episode is a matter of criminal conviction or the public record. Sources are above. If you find an error, tell me and I will correct it and note the correction here.

Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end.

Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end.

Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This
Corrections and tip-offs: [email protected]

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Go and find your last payslip. There is a line on it you have almost certainly never checked. It says tax.

Between 2014 and 2017 a payroll company in Sydney collected $141,291,923 in tax withheld from ordinary workers' pay. It kept $105,625,304 of it.

Plutus Payroll advertised itself as free. It was free because the fee came out of the tax. Every worker got a payslip saying the tax had been paid.

Fifteen people were sentenced. As at the date of this recording, the convictions of all five men at the centre of it stand. Dev Menon and Jason Onley have filed appeals against their convictions, and no appeal has been determined.

This is also an episode about a gap in the law that a court had already described, in writing, eleven years before anybody walked through it.

Built entirely from the public record.

New episodes weekly.

CHAPTERS
00:00 The payslip said the tax had been paid
01:12 1989: a bricklayer, and the gap a court described
04:08 The pitch, and a joke about tax that is 2,400 years old
06:06 The men who ran it
09:08 How the machine actually worked
12:14 "Lovely"
14:07 What the money bought
16:15 The room was wired
18:09 The blackmail
21:41 Squeaky clean
24:32 The ledger: fifteen sentences
28:06 The register, and what changed

SOURCES
R v Cranston [2023] NSWSC 1004
R v Cranston [2023] NSWSC 1008
R v Lauren Cranston [2023] NSWSC 454
R v Cranston (No 9) [2021] NSWSC 1413
R v Cranston (No 31) [2023] NSWSC 488
Menon v R; Onley v R [2025] NSWCCA 56
Anquetil v R [2025] NSWCCA 147
In the matter of Plutus Payroll Australia Pty Ltd [2019] NSWSC 1171
R v Walters [2001] NSWSC 640
R v Walters [2002] NSWCCA 291
R v Iannelli [2003] NSWCCA 1; (2003) 56 NSWLR 247
Australian National Audit Office, Report 32 of 2018-19
Australian National Audit Office, Report 15 of 2023-24
PwC for the Fair Work Ombudsman, June 2012
Senate Economics References Committee, "I just want to be paid", December 2015
Melbourne Law School and Monash University, February 2017
Australian Business Registry Services, Registrar statement, 30 November 2022
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Labour Force, employees
plutuspayroll.com, techpilotfund.com.au and synep.com, archived captures, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, 2014 to 2018

If this episode has raised anything for you, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is on 1300 22 4636.

Audit This takes one Australian fraud and follows the money to the end of it.

Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end.

Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This
Corrections and tip-offs: [email protected]

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Between January and July 2017, two family day care services in western Sydney looked after 2,132 children.

They claimed 398,936 sessions of care. That is more than two and a half thousand sessions of childcare every working day, for seven months. In one month alone they enrolled more than 1,600 children, about three quarters of their entire book, in about four weeks.

Not one session happened. Not one child was ever there. The Commonwealth paid $9,274,016.

Three years earlier, in a house on the New South Wales side of the Murray, one woman running one service put in 80 false claims and was paid $3,646,269.72. Fourteen children were named on them. The payment she used was the one set aside for children at serious risk of abuse or neglect. It could run to nine thousand dollars a week for a single child, the provider decided for themselves that the child was at risk, the provider set the hourly rate, and the decision to grant it could not be appealed by anyone.

This episode is about how both frauds worked, which took no skill at all, and about the system that paid for them, which is the part that should worry you. A form the provider filled in themselves. A risk assessment the provider made themselves. A rate the provider set themselves. And a report by the government's own umpire, published in 2014, that set out in plain words exactly how the payment could be used.

It ends with the Auditor-General. Over six years the Commonwealth identified thirteen million dollars lost to child care subsidy fraud, and recovered $116,707 of it, from seven cases.

Episode one ended because nobody asked. This one ended because nobody went and looked.

Built entirely from the public record. No speculation, no dramatisation, no guessing at what anyone was thinking.

New episodes weekly.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open
0:55 The graduation ceremony
2:36 Act one, the payment
4:07 Act two, Albury
8:00 Act three, the jury room
11:30 Act four, the warning
12:41 Act five, sixteen hundred children in a month
14:49 Nearly ten sessions a day, for every child
17:30 The accounts are frozen
19:47 Act six, the part that is not about money
21:13 What that money was worth in caseworkers
22:30 Act seven, the sentences
23:45 Side by side
26:00 Act eight, it is still happening
26:52 What was never recovered

SOURCES

Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, case summaries

Australian Federal Police

Australian National Audit Office, "Management and Oversight of Compliance Activities within the Child Care Subsidy Program", Auditor-General Report No. 42 of 2024-25, tabled 16 June 2025

Productivity Commission, "Childcare and Early Childhood Learning", Inquiry Report No. 73, 31 October 2014, Appendix B

New South Wales Ombudsman, reports to Parliament on the child protection response to risk of significant harm reports

Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee, inquiry into the Jobs for Families Child Care Package

Australian Business Register

Australian Bureau of Statistics, national, state and territory population

Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end.

Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end.

Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This
Corrections and tip-offs: [email protected]

Send us Fan Mail

In 2011 a finance officer at Queensland Health sat down to do the most boring job in government. He found a payment he did not recognise, typed the vendor's name into a free government website, and eight seconds later he had uncovered the largest fraud in the state's history.

Two and a half thousand kilometres away, a senior public servant in Western Australia had already been doing the same thing for three years. He would keep going for another eight.

By the time anyone stopped him, Paul Whyte had taken about twenty seven million dollars from the department responsible for public housing. He pleaded guilty to 564 charges. Roughly twenty two million dollars has never been recovered.

This episode is about how he did it, which is not clever, and about why nobody stopped him, which is the part that should worry you. A signature threshold. A cost centre with one owner. A tip that was not a crime and nearly went in the bin twice. And a warning, published by an auditor general six months before any of it was found, that said exactly what was about to happen.

Built entirely from the public record. No speculation, no dramatisation, no guessing at what anyone was thinking.

CHAPTERS
0:00 Cold open
0:15 The most boring job in government
1:48 The birthday party
3:54 The warning nobody read
5:02 Western Australia
6:25 The committee room
7:15 Below your number, you sign
7:59 A mare called Mossnip
10:38 The tip
14:06 He owned the cost centre
14:51 The address on every record
17:10 The waiting list
18:05 Accountable, not responsible
19:18 The ledger
20:42 Side by side

SOURCES

Corruption and Crime Commission of Western Australia, "Operation Taurus: Exposing corruption in Department of Communities"

Corruption and Crime Commission of Western Australia, public examination of Grahame John Searle, 22 June 2022, before Commissioner John McKechnie QC

Supreme Court of Western Australia, sentencing of Paul Whyte before Justice Joseph McGrath, 19 November 2021. Twelve years, eligible for parole after ten.

Queensland Audit Office, "Results of audits at 31 May 2011", Report No. 5 for 2011, June 2011

Crime and Misconduct Commission Queensland, "Fraud, financial management and accountability in the Queensland public sector: An examination of how a $16.69 million fraud was committed on Queensland Health", tabled 25 September 2013

Western Australia Legislative Council committee examination of the Housing Authority, Parliament House Perth, 19 October 2017

Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end.

Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end.

Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation.

Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This
Corrections and tip-offs: [email protected]