One Nation’s NSW leader Mike Newman racked up $211,000 in taxpayer-funded flights, five-star hotels and restaurant and bar bills during his plum 28-month stint as a senior trade commissioner in Japan.
Despite frequently railing against wasteful public service spending since his elevation as NSW One Nation leader, expense reports from Newman’s time as a senior trade commissioner reveal he billed taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars staying in plush five-star hotels, including the Grand Hyatt, Four Seasons and Marriott in Seoul, as well as hundreds of bar and restaurant bills.
Contained in expense reports obtained by the Herald via freedom of information laws, the spending also includes about $20,494 spent on a seven-month stay in a Meriton Suite in Sydney before he moved to Japan. The spending occurred despite Newman living in Sydney when he was appointed.
Newman was also charging taxpayers about $8000 a month to rent an apartment in Tokyo for some of that time.
A significant chunk of Newman’s spending appears to have occurred while he was in Australia. The expense reports show a bill adding up to almost $5300 at Crystalbrook Kingsley, a hotel in Newcastle, in August 2023. There are also entries for Avenue and Redoak Boutique Beer Cafe, two bars in Sydney’s CBD. The expenses also include spending categorised as “drinking places, bars, taverns, nightclubs ETC”.
The spending, on top of the roughly $450,000 annual salary as a NSW senior trade and investment commissioner in Japan, will probably open Newman up to accusations of hypocrisy after his criticisms of NSW public service spending since his surprise appointment in September.
Newman has repeatedly railed against spending in the bureaucracy and has raised the prospect of “claw[ing] back entitlements from those found responsible for having egregiously misused public funds without consequences”.
“There is so much money and waste that is inside the public service,” he said during his unveiling in August. “Having worked inside, I saw first hand how your money is being misallocated and misspent.”
Newman justified the spending and pointed to cases when he used his own money to fund trips, such as in October 2023, when he said he spent about $10,000 to attend an Australia-Japan Business Council event in Melbourne because the government would not approve the trip. He also claimed he saved taxpayers $150,000 in 2022 by firing a PR team which had been contracted in the lead-up to then-premier Dominic Perrottet’s visit to the country. “They were hopeless,” he said.
His extended stay at the Meriton Suites in Sydney was a result of COVID restrictions in Japan at the beginning of his appointment, Newman said, which meant he was unable to travel to the country.
He defended having taxpayers fund the extended stay in his home city on the basis that he had already had the furniture removed from his home in Sydney when the restrictions were put in place. Newman said the period when taxpayers funded both his apartment in Tokyo and the Meriton – about two months – was because he had travelled to Japan before his family.
“I couldn’t have my family sleeping on streets,” he said. “They were staying in the Meriton while I was in Japan or Korea.”
While Newman said spending on alcohol was pre-approved, such as the Crystalbrook Kingsley event and a $400 bill at Wests Newcastle in 2022, he was unable to recall some spending. He could not recall a bill for about $60 at the Redoak on Clarence Street in Sydney’s CBD two days before Christmas in 2021, for example. “You don’t have to drink beer to go into these places,” he said. “I could have been having lunch.”
However, some of the charges were categorised in the reports as “drinking places, bars, taverns, nightclubs ETC”. Newman said that at times he would eat in bars, but that did not mean he was charging taxpayers for alcohol.
In total, Newman claimed about $135,878 in accommodation costs. Those included $8000 in monthly rent between April and August 2022, as well as hotels and about $15,737 in removals, furniture storage and associated insurance. Part of his salary package included a budget of about $60,000 for relocation costs. The government had paid for his rent while he searched for a permanent home, he said.
Other spending included about $11,826 spent on airfares and $11,724 on train tickets. Meals and hospitality – including spending at bars – amounted to about $12,100. Newman said his airfare costs were inflated because he could not book trips until he had approval from the department, often last minute, and said the train tickets had been booked for the entire Perrottet delegation.
The accommodation included several stays at five-star hotels. Though the expenses do not detail the length of the trips, they show Newman spent about $13,042 over seven separate stays at the Four Seasons in Seoul during his time as commissioner.
Newman said he stayed at the Four Seasons and Grand Hyatt because they were close to the Australian embassy, and that he received a discount. On one occasion, he had stayed there as part of Perrottet’s delegation. “The net cost is not much different from staying out in woop-woop in Seoul [where] it would take 45 minutes to an hour to get anywhere because Seoul traffic is so dire,” he said.
The senior trade and investment commissioner roles were created by the former Coalition government and came under intense scrutiny after the appointment of former Nationals leader John Barilaro sparked a major controversy over claims of “jobs for the boys”.
Despite that, Newman has raised the prospect of reappointing senior trade and investment commissioners, and justified his time in the country, saying he had been involved in securing a series of deals for NSW businesses in the role.
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