Australia's PM Malcolm Turnbull shakes hands with China's President Xi Jinping at G20 Summit in eastern China's Zhejiang province, September,2016. Associated Press/Ng Han Guan. All rights reserved.It is hard for those of us who are not members of the NSW Labor Right Faction to feel much sympathy for its members who get into trouble, but the events leading up to Senator Dastyari's resignation from the Opposition Front Bench deserve further scrutiny.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of these events is that, while the Senator fessed up, repeating ad nauseam "I made a mistake", he did not tell us what exactly his mistake was. Was it that he asked businesses to pay some of his personal expenses? Or was it that they were foreign and, if not foreign, then Chinese-owned, businesses that appeared to have, as many Chinese-owned businesses do, links with the Chinese Government. So, in owing these businesses, Dastyari may appear to have owed something indirectly to the Chinese Government.
Meanwhile, those of us who are not on a 200K+ salary with work-related travel expenses thrown in are left to marvel at the sense of entitlement that enabled the Senator to flick expenses he had no wish to pay himself off to a couple of businessmen. What might he have done that they have already owed him for or what might he have to give them in return?
