A staff member for Victorian Liberal MP Sophie Mirabella who spent $906 on a taxi ride from Wodonga to Melbourne boasted on Facebook: “I don’t do buses.”
Adam Wyldeck provided taxi fare updates on Facebook as he travelled to the airport on Sunday, Herald Sun reports said. “Not even in Melbourne yet and the cab fare is sitting at $756,” he wrote. After a Facebook friend asked whether he could have caught a bus, Mr Wyldeck replied: “I don’t do buses.”
He said he couldn’t go by rail because “trains left way too early”. “It’s just how I roll,” he wrote. When people on Facebook questioned the trip as a blatant waste, Mr Wyldeck urged them not to make assumptions, but wrote “democracy isn’t cheap”. Mr Wyldeck later said he had asked for an invoice of the Cabcharge voucher he used for the trip, because he planned to pay the fare himself.
“There’s no government expense,” he said, adding “there’s no malice in anything there.” Mr Wyldeck said he understood taxpayers would want their money spent wisely. “If it was an instance where I had claimed it on government expenses then it would be a story,” he said.
Under Federal Parliamentary rules, Mr Wyldeck is able to pay for travel to the airport in order to get to Canberra for sitting weeks. Instead of a normal trip from Wodonga – flying from Albury to Sydney and then to Canberra – Mr Wyldeck travelled to Melbourne to do some work on the plane with Ms Mirabella.
Liberals said he had done nothing wrong and that he had indicated he would pay for the cab fare.
