The perils of Cheryl
My local member of State Parliament is extremely greedy. She’s done absolutely nothing for the electorate, and now that her career has hit a dead end she’s looking for ways to milk us for even longer. Here’s what Crikey had to say about her:
The Golden award for greed, double dipping and nepotism must surely go to the Western Australian State Liberal politician, Cheryl Edwardes and her husband.
Ms Edwardes, aged 53, has recently announced that she will not be contesting the next State election having completed fourteen years in the State parliament. Until the Court Government defeat at the last election she had been a Minister for eight of those years.
Ms Edwardes at the tender age of 53 now leaves the parliament with a lump sum payment of $1,501,426 or a lifetime annual pension of $114,612. When Ms Edwardes leaves the parliament, her annual pension will be $9,000 greater annually than her salary had she remained in the parliament.
This however is not the end of the Edwardes’ largesse. Who, the readers might ask is to take her safe Liberal seat and follow on the family tradition? You guessed it: none other than Colin Edwardes, her husband. Job sharing you might say. She gets the big pension and he takes over her job and salary. Now the household will receive two parliamentary incomes of a little under a quarter of a million dollars a year.
That’s pretty bad, but it’s not surprising and I’d heard about it before. What I hadn’t heard was her absolutely disgraceful excuse:
So what is Ms Edwardes’ explanation for this convenient change in family circumstances? Ms Edwardes has told her voters of Kingsley that the emotional strain of dealing with the family and friends of the Bali bombing victims who live in her electorate has just got too much for her.
She’s using the victims of a terrorist atrocity to justify her horrendous greed. Usually I hate this expression, but I think it’s pretty safe to use it here: Cheryl Edwardes is Unaustralian.
(At least some pollies are prepared to put the community ahead of their own avarice.)
Time we paid pollies a decent amount while in office, with the standard 9% super(in the fund of their choice) applicable to all. They should be allowed a special concession to salary sacrifice up to a prescribed amount to reflect the more temporary nature of their tenure. When they leave parliament that’s it. No gold passes, zilch. About time the majors made this a bipartisan policy.
Anyone genuinely interested in reforming the system would be well advised to approach the other side confidentially with a coherent plan, rather than indulge in grandstanding populist jingoism.
Observa I generally agree with your post but the “more temporary nature” of pollies’ tenure is an illusion now that they’ve managed to make employment more temporary for all of us.
Maybe we should limit the number of terms they can serve at the trough. The man of steel has been there for thirty years. How many people do you know who have or are likely to have that tenure? (I can think of one)
I can’t claim to be as well versed with cheryl edwardes history as you would of course be robert, but i really appreciated her standing up for the rights of whistleblowers through her proposed ammendments [re. turning to the media shouldn’t be a criminal act in the instance of a corrupt public sector dept] in the face of unfair laws which were passed in 2003.
that is pretty much all i know about cheryl edwardes, but it just doesn’t seem like it could be the same person.