Darren Chester hasn’t sent a fax for 15 years – but he’s still charging us for the line
Darren Chester, the Deputy Nationals leader, has been charging taxpayers for a fax line despite not using it for 15 years. He plans to disconnect the line after realizing it was part of his office setup since he was first elected in 2008. This expense was highlighted among other unusual charges disclosed in recent parliamentary expenses data.
- ▪Darren Chester has not sent a fax in 15 years but was still charging taxpayers $455 for the fax line.
- ▪He stated that most communication with his office occurs via phone, email, or social media.
- ▪The fax machine expense was part of a recent data release by the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority.
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Story provenance
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| Original publisher | The Sydney Morning Herald |
| Canonical URL | https://www.smh.com.au/cbd/darren-chester-hasn-t-sent-a-fax-for-15-years-but-he-s-still-charging-us-for-the-line-20260518-p5zye2.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed |
| Publication time | Tue, 19 May 2026 05:00:00 +1000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-18T19:04:56.969Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-18T19:04:56.969Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 4qIFfaJ5NDdO |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Sydney Morning Herald.