Governor-General, David Hurley, has been criticised for using his office for commercial purposes and personal lobbying. The latest incident resulted in an apology even though the G-G claims he received no benefit for appearing in a video endorsing a builder who undertook major renovations at his private residence in Canberra. This is Hurley’s third brush with vice-real protocols this year. It’s almost unheard-of for the Queen’s representative to be acting in this way. First, was a glamour shot of a Federal Executive Council meeting after the election had been called – that was circulated on social media by then MP, Tim Wilson, who was present at the meeting. Hurley also attracted controversy a few months ago when it was publicised that he had lobbied the Prime Minister for funding of the largely non-operational Australian Future Leaders Foundation Ltd resulting in the award of more than $18m from the Commonwealth Government. The firm had allegedly gathered support from business leaders by using its connections. What is eyebrow-raising is the rapid response by now Government Ministers and MPs (all male) to defend the Governor-General’s actions with personal character references. News Corp journalist, Samantha Maiden, however, wrote a piece headed: “Is time up for the under-fire Governor-General after a series of strange comments and gaffes reveal an embarrassing lack of judgement?”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Governor-General, David Hurley, has been criticised for using his office for commercial purposes and personal lobbying. The latest incident resulted in an apology even though the G-G claims he received no benefit for appearing in a video endorsing a builder…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9","wpcat-9-id"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=679"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":680,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/679\/revisions\/680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/womenrep.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}