You may have seen coverage today about the extravagant spending of Berejiklian Government Ministers that has been uncovered by my Labor colleague Rose Jackson MLC.

Rose has uncovered that Gladys Berejiklian and her Ministers spent more than $550,000 on international travel from June toDecember 2019, double what they spent in the same period last year.

This comes alongside a massive drop in Government workload, with the NSW Government passing half the number of laws in the last 6 months of 2019 as over the same period in 2018.

The full report is available here.

If you have access to Facebook you can watch a news story about the expenses here.

Rose has said: We understand that trips to promote NSW to the wider world have to be made but this is beyond a joke this Government is taking it too far, and taxpayers wont be laughing when they find out the cost. The Liberals and Nationals have taken the concept of a post-election honeymoon literally spending double the amount on overseas travel yet passing just a third of the bills in Parliament as over the same time period in 2018.

Some of theoutrageous expenses include:


Don Harwin spending nearly $20,000 on fancy hotels for an 8 day trip
Sarah Mitchell spending over $4,000on taxis
John Barilaro spending almost $3,000 on food and drinks and,
The Premier spending $121,158 on flights for one 6 day trip




The huge spike in spending on international junkets and tours being by the Liberals and Nationals was eight times what the Victorian Government spent:


New South WalesGovernment spend 2019: $547,063.46
Victorian Government spend 2019: $65,542.52


This includes the following extravagant trips:





HOW MUCH


WHO


WHERE


HOW LONG




$246,322


Gladys Berejiklian

Premier

& Stuart Ayres

Tourism Minister


UK and Germany


6 days




$89,761


Sarah Mitchell

Education Minister


USA and Canada


8 days




$55,088


Andrew Constance

Transport and Roads Minister


France, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Norway

Paris, London, Amsterdam, Oslo


10 days




$53,639


John Barilaro

Deputy Premier


USA


8 days




$44,112


Brad Hazzard

Health Minister


Norway and Denmark


11 days




$58,139


Don Harwin

Arts Minister


UK


8 days




$4,615


Kevin Anderson

Better Regulation Minister




New Zealand


2 days





What makes all of thiseven worse is thatfor the same time period in 2018, the Governmentspent less than half this amount on travelling overseas and passed almost triple the amount of legislation - and there is still no funding for the necessary upgrades to Hillsborough Road!



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