This column looked at some of the issues the Liberals were bringing up 2 months ago and concluded they were being petty.
The fact that the Libs were still focused on the same issues today at senate estimates confirms that it was spot on.
Quote:Tasmanian Liberal Senator Eric Abetz spoke from the heart. "We can take pay cuts and he will get childcare at taxpayers' expense."
His Victorian colleague on the senate's finance and public administration estimates committee, Michael Ronaldson, chimed in: "It has started already - the riches of office."
Kevin Rudd's decision to freeze (not cut) MP salaries has got right up the noses of some Coalition politicians - even though, over the last two years, they received increases that were twice the inflation rate.
That resentment is at least part of the reason they reacted with such hostility to the revelation that part of the duties of a staffer at The Lodge would be to help look after the Prime Minister’s 14-year-old son Marcus.
Rudd nipped the controversy in the bud by announcing immediately that he would pay for the child care component out of his own pocket. But he should not have to.
Australians expect the prime minister and his family to live in The Lodge. That is why it is there.
Rudd’s job involves very long hours, and — like his predecessor, John Howard — he is a workaholic PM. Therese Rein not only runs a business which involves some travel back to Brisbane but also has duties as the PM’s wife.
So Marcus’s parents can spend less time with him than was possible before the family was transplanted to Canberra, and he is without the support network that was available in Brisbane.
The child care role involves very little. Someone who Marcus knows needs to be there when his parents are absent. And he needs to be transported to school, and perhaps to other activities, when Rein is not available to do it.
The PM's son, after all, can't just get on a bus like ordinary kids. There are security considerations.
So it is reasonable for us, the taxpayers, to pick up the tab. The Howard children, after all, cost taxpayers a heck of a lot more without Abetz, Ronaldson and Co. complaining.
It was because Howard had children at school when he became prime minister that he and Janette decided the family would stay in Sydney, moving into Kirribilli House rather than The Lodge.
That meant funding two full-time official residences. It meant regularly flying Canberra-based public servants to Sydney at considerable expense because that was where the PM chose to be for the convenience of his children.
And anyone who thinks domestic staff at Kirribilli House were not involved in child care under the Howards is simply naive.
(When their children were adults the Howards lost their excuse - but they stayed on in the taxpayer-funded harbourside mansion anyway).
Abetz, Ronaldson and the other Coalition politicians who this week made a teenage boy the centre of a political row ignore this.
There was no basis for their criticism. They revealed themselves as mean-spirited, small-minded whingers
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=449520