TREASURER Joe Hockey charges taxpayers $1000 a month, the equivalent of the Newstart unemployment benefit, to sleep in his wife’s $2 million Canberra home.

Mr Hockey has claimed travel allowance totalling $184,000 to stay at the home during parliamentary sittings since 1998, more than half the original sale price of $320,000.

The figure has averaged $1000 a month since 1998, roughly equivalent to the $519 a fortnight the government expects unemployed people on Newstart payments to live on.

Mr Hockey’s wife Melissa Babbage’s astute purchase of the blue-ribbon real estate investment in 1997 has seen the property’s value grow to around seven times the original purchase price.

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Under travel allowance rules, Mr Hockey is allowed to claim $271-a-night when he stays in Canberra to cover the cost of accommodation regardless of whether he stays in a hotel, his own property or a friend’s home.

The arrangement has allowed Mr Hockey to claim about $12,267 a year in travel allowance for the last 15 years to sleep in his wife’s home.

His use of the travel entitlement is allowed under the current rules and does not represent any improper use of his entitlements.

media_camera Joe Hockey inside his wife’s Canberra house with Annabel Crabb in an episode of ABC's Kitchen Cabinet.

Asked last week if his travel ­allowance had helped pay off the mortgage, Mr Hockey said: “I don’t know, I pay rent’’ — to his wife.

“The house was a piece of Hockey mercantile genius,” former Liberal MP Ross Cameron told biographer Madonna King.

“Joe brings to the Treasury what I describe as an ancient Armenian sense of where the sweet spot of the deal is.”

The original owners when the home was purchased included Mr Hockey, his father and his wife Melissa Babbage, a self-made millionaire. Mr Hockey has subsequently stated that his Canberra house is owned by his wife and he pays rent.

Mr Hockey declined to reveal how much rent he pays his wife to live in the house.

The Hockey family also own a five-bedroom home in Hunters Hill that is now estimated to be worth $5.4 million.

They are currently in the process of selling the family’s $1.5 million Queensland farm.

The Treasurer endured a storm of protest this week over pointing out the obvious, that it helps to have a high paying job to buy a home.

“The starting point for a first homebuyer is to get a good job that pays good money,” he said.

“Then you can go to the bank and you can borrow money.”

Mr Hockey later insisted that he “totally’’ understood that property in Sydney and Melbourne was “very expensive”.