Attorney General Michelle Rowland’s family excursion to Perth on the taxpayers exhibited a very special brand of greediness.

She sent a bill of $21,000 for her trip in July 2023, which included business-class airfares of $16,050.

The visit involved “ministerial engagements” and holidays with her husband Michael Chaaya and their two daughters. At the time, she was the Minister for Communications.

The Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority found her claim to be excessive, and the Attorney General says she will pay the money she nicked from the taxpayer.

The exact amount of the payment is undisclosed. It is the business class airfares on the family traveller scheme for her two tots that particularly stick in the craw.

According to information on the IPEA website, Rowland also charged $4,242.50 for her air fares there and back and claimed $1,392 in travel allowance for the first three days of the excursion.

What makes this holiday charged to the nation so irksome is that Rowland, in her own right, is well-padded financially, fertilised by her time as a senior lawyer and partner at Gilbert + Tobin.

She’s now on a salary of $413,000 a year, plus generous perks, and her parliamentary register discloses an interest with her husband in five residential investment properties – three of which are in the Pericles Unit of her family trust, Elysium Pty Ltd.

Kingston in the ACT, Randwick, Glenwood, Caves Beach, a Potts Point are all in their portfolio, while Chaaya also owns an investment property at Kenthurst in his own right.

She has two superannuation accounts and another one jointly with her husband.

Here are her interests as tallied by Open Politics.

Michael Chaaya is someone who would have no trouble forking up for his own business class fares to the West and for those of his daughters.

He’s the head of financial services at Corrs Chambers Westgarth and, according to experts in the field, he’d be trousering over $2 million a year. He was also spotted among the tribes at Graham Richardson’s State Funeral.

Chaaya is a beneficial shareholder in Corrs’ gleaming consulting offshoot, Garran Advisory.

One hundred percent of the shares in Garran are held by the $7 million man, Gavin MacLaren, on trust for the partnership.

Garran Advisors has collected a team of rusticated senior public servants to sell their services back to the public service.

The Rowland-Chaaya fingers in the parliamentary family travel boondoggle is illustrative of how bloated the perks for MPs and Senators have become.

The taxpayer-funded family travel racket alone runs at $1.1 million a year – a benefit for which all federal politicians are perfectly capable of paying themselves.

In February 2023, it was disclosed that Rowland, as Communications Minister, accepted before the May 2022 election $20,000 worth of political funding from Sportsbet.

Sportsbet is a company for which she had regulatory oversight as a minister. The gambling donation was not revealed at the time because, in a tricky manoeuvre, the money was split into two lumps to avoid the mandatory disclosure threshold.

She survived calls for her resignation and went on to become Attorney General in May 2025, where she faces calls for her resignation.

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Here’s the latest pile of parliamentary largess courtesy of the Remuneration Tribunal.

Justinian researcher Mae Milne has prepared a jaw-dropping Table of Parliamentary Entitlements.