A successful leader most needs sound judgment. Australia's Prime Minister Tony Abbott singularly lacks good judgment. His judgment of people is proving appalling; his instincts for reading political tea leaves seem non-existent. For a onetime Rhodes scholar, he seems a surprisingly slow learner.
On Sunday Abbott's handpicked house speaker Bronwyn Bishop resigned after three weeks of raging controversy for hiring a helicopter to fly 75 km from Melbourne to Geelong for a party fundraising event, costing taxpayers 5,227 Australian dollars. She did not save much time counting the time to and from the airport, and she could have used public transport or a chauffeured government car.
She has form, stretching back decades, as a serial abuser of the public purse. As a junior minister in the Howard government from 1998 to 2001, she spent AU$140,000 on charter flights (in addition to commercial flights). More recently, she spent AU$88,000 on an overseas trip last year to lobby unsuccessfully to become head of the Inter-Parliamentary Union; AU$6,000 to charter a plane to fly from Sydney to Nowra — a 20-minute flight that cost more than an economy round-the-world fare; flights to attend colleagues' weddings; and AU$1,000 a day for limousines to transport her to operas. All this at a time when the government's mantra was austerity and an end to the age of entitlements.