If you got 10 free flights a year, an annual pension of somewhere between $80,000 and $120,000, plus large bonuses if you happened to be have been anything but a bog-standard backbencher, you'd reckon you'd take your good fortune to a sun-kissed beach somewhere and giggle crazily as you waddled in your board shorts all the way to the nearest ATM and back.
But no. The age of entitlement goes on forever in the minds of some old politicians.
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'The Castle', the court, and the dreamin' ex-MPs
Four retired politicians left "dreamin'" after trying to use Section 51 of the Constitution to bid for bigger pensions at the High Court.
How else can we explain the decision of four former MPs, three from Labor, one from the Liberal Party, to take the begging bowl to the High Court, pleading that their fat pensions and those 10 free flights a year - free to them, though the cost is billed to the rest of us - just weren't enough?
They'd been robbed, they wept.
The High Court, bless its vast wisdom, told them to take a hike, and while doing it, to pay costs, which undoubtedly impoverished these poor fellows even more.
We would never presume to know what might be in the mind of a High Court judge, but you could hardly be blamed for imagining a snort of derision from the Bench at the implication that the Fabulous Four believed it was their own money they were fighting for.
Their own money?
In fact, in the golden years they'd been MPs, they'd had to slip no more than a peppercorn of dollars from their own pockets into their superannuation funds to be guaranteed fabulous returns.
![Former Defence Minister John Moore is one of four former MPs who launched a High Court bid for better taxpayer-funded ...](/web/20161014015316im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/4/n/n/v/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs0jhr.png/1476246457141.jpg)
Those fabulous returns didn't come from canny investments by a super fund manager, either: the taxpayer had to find the money, and keep on finding it, for the scheme was never funded, and the taxpayer is still doing so for hundreds of former politicians, many of whom served in obscurity.
Consider, as the High Court did, the case of just one of those ex-pollies, a chap called Tony Lamb, who was on the parliamentary backbench for nine years over two terms: 1972-75 (member for the Victorian seat of La Trobe) and December 1984 to March 1990 (for the seat of Streeton, since abolished).
![Former Labor MP Tony Lamb has been paid $1.3 million in retirement benefits.](/web/20161014015316im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/p/4/n/e/c/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs0jhr.png/1476246457141.jpg)
Lamb paid $35,297 into his super account during his unremarkable parliamentary career. Since then, he's been paid $1.3 million in retirement benefits, and continues to get more than $80,000 a year, plus those 10 free domestic flights.
Barry Cunningham, another Labor man from Victoria, does even a bit better. He managed to tot up almost 13 years over two separate terms as member for McMillan, all of them as a backbencher.
![Former Labor MP Barry Cunningham totted up 13 years over two terms as member for McMillan, all of them as a backbencher.](/web/20161014015316im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/i/u/s/p/w/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.gs0jhr.png/1476246457141.jpg)
Then there are two former Ministers: Barry Cohen, from Labor, and Liberal John Moore.
Cohen served for 21 years during the Whitlam and Hawke periods and was a minister during the Hawke administration. He was known for a sense of humour, which surely improved when he discovered the size of his pension, and which he surely must have employed while deciding on his High Court adventure to fatten it further.
Moore, having made a fortune as a stockbroker, was apparently still imbued with fortune when PM John Howard allowed him to stay on as Industry Minister even though he held significant share investments that could have been construed as a conflict of interest.
Moore was in Parliament for 25 years. For many of those years, his Who's Who entry boasted he'd played in the Wimbledon tennis finals. He finally admitted he hadn't.
All these years later, these four worthies, upset at limitations imposed by the Gillard Government on their wondrous good fortune, claimed they were victim of "an unlawful acquisition of their property by the Commonwealth".
Having got that out of their system, they really ought to find a sun-blessed beach somewhere.
One that is far, far from reality would suit them best.