BARNABY Joyce has gone on the defensive after he skyrocketed to the top of the pile for claimed expenditure.
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The Member for New England has registered $1,073,991.45 in expenses over the first six months of 2015, new documents have revealed.
He is followed by Justice Minister Michael Keenan, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and Health Minister Sussan Ley.
Mr Keenan claimed $737,742.87 over the short period.
The majority of Mr Joyce’s expenses came from office fit outs with the minister paying over $670,000 to relocate his head office to Armidale and to renovate his Tenterfield office.
The figures show that Mr Joyce spent $305,148 for his Tenterfield digs while the Armidale relocation experiment has so far cost $365,748.
Mr Joyce defended the Armidale costs and justified it by saying he is actually saving taxpayers money.
“It would be vastly different, vastly more expensive if they had built it where they had proposed to build it which is in Sydney,” the minister said.
“This is a ministerial office in a regional town, near a regional university, dealing with regional issues for agriculture unsurprisingly a lot of co-operative research centres in cotton and beef.
“It gets very good usage, and Armidale is a lot easier for rural people to get to see me and ministerial staff than an office in the middle of Sydney.”
A spokesperson for Mr Joyce also defended the cost of his Tenterfield office.
“When Barnaby was elected the MP for New England he decided to move to Tenterfield not only because the of the historic influence the town has had in Australian politics but also he had no need to be in Inverell as his good mate, Senator Williams had an office there as well.”
Receipts totalling some $430,867 with the Department of Finance were also lodged for the last six months of 2014.
In documents released by the Department of Finance there is also a $4,737 charge for a return helicopter trip Mr Joyce made from Armidale to Legume for a roads meeting to discuss the Mt Lindesay Rd project.
“Normally it would be a roughly 4.5 hour (each way) road trip from Tamworth so Barnaby used part of his annual expense allocation to get up and back in a day which fit better within his tight ministerial diary,” a Joyce spokesperson said.
The expenses filings show that in the first half of 2015, Mr Joyce also spent a further $137,000 on charter flights, $28,000 on domestic scheduled airfares, had car costs of $32,000, outlaid a further $110,000 on office facilities, had $56,000 of office administrative expenses, claimed $20,000 of travel allowance and had $13,000 of family travel costs.
