I’m open to looking at “gardening leave” for ex-MPs if it gives the parliament something we can do with rule-breakers. It’s a carrot and a stick. Right now we‘ve got neither. There’s no reward for following the rules and no penalties for breaking them. No wonder they’re useless.
https://twitter.com/GuardianAus/status/1177116800292724736
Of course we can just keep insisting people follow the rules and keep getting shocked when they don’t. But what we’re doing isn’t working. Once we stop paying them, we lose any power over them. And they’re running riot.
A temporary payment for ex-MPs who are subject to a cooling off period would give them skin in the game to actually do the right thing. If they break the rules, they refund the money, and pay a financial penalty like one year’s salary. Tell you what, that’d scare them.
It’d cost a bit of money and I don’t think they should be entitled to it frankly. But it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than a parliamentary pension for life and it’s an investment in actual transparency and integrity that I reckon should be valued much higher than we do right now.
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