Hon. Bronwyn Bishop MP is no more

The Sydney Morning Herald: Bronwyn Bishop as Speaker

Come federal polling day this year Australia will see the last of the Hon. Bronwyn Kathleen Bishop - Senator for NSW for six and a half years, Member for Mackellar for twenty-two years and Speaker of the House of Representatives from 12 November 2013 to 2 August 2015 when her forced resignation from that post resulted in an ignominious return to the government backbench.

The 73 year-old Ms. Bishop was dumped by the Liberal Party as its endorsed candidate in Mackellar on 16 April 2016 after a long but lacklustre political career spiked by periods of controversy.

Most notably when:

in 1990 when she breached Liberal Party conditions that said neither members of parliament nor candidates could accept money on the party’s behalf for their own campaigning;

in 1994 she breached parliamentary funding guidelines in relation to a researcher she had employed who was being paid by FAI Insurance;

her three-year stint as Minister for Aging saw her become known as the Minister for Kerosene Baths after mistreatment of the elderly in nursing homes came to light in 2000;
based on alleged security concerns she ordered that women wearing the burqa or niqab be segregated from others in the visitors' gallery of Parliament House in 2014;

as probably the most-biased politician to have ever occupied the Speaker’s chair she removed MPs from the House of Representatives chamber 400 times over 18 months with 393 of these instances involving Labor MPs (as well as condoning the Liberal Leader of the House openly calling the Leader of the Opposition a c*unt); and finally,

her excessive use and alleged abuse of parliamentary travel entitlements became public knowledge culminating in Choppergate in 2015.

Described as the “unacceptable face of the Liberal Party” and widely disliked both within and without the party, it is unlikely that she will be missed when the 45^th Australian Parliament is formed.