My experience of parliamentarians is vastly different to what the media portrays them as being. The notion that they work only part-time is diametrically opposed to the truth. They are among the hardest-working people in the community.
In my younger years I was a very active office-bearing member of the Young Liberal movement in South Australia. We had much to do with politicians whose election campaigns we worked on quite a bit.
I discovered that back-benchers are more likely to work seventy hours a week than seven hours a week. They have little time for family life and no time for personal interests. Aside from meeting with constituents, they spend long hours canvassing votes, attending public and party meetings, speaking at gatherings, opening new buildings etc. If any of them slacken off to even a small degree there are plenty of other political hopefuls waiting in the wings to knock them off in a pre-selection battle. It's happened to sitting members before today.
This is at direct loggerheads with the impression created by the media, that they are a pack of lazy buggers who work only a few weeks of the year to receive huge publicly funded incomes.
The time they spend in parliament is a tiny fraction of the overall time they spend working.
