On Monday, Mr Abbott was asked if he was comfortable with Mr Hockey’s fund-raising activities during an interview with Channel Nine.

Mr Abbott responded by saying that he had not read the Fairfax Media report but that “all political parties have to raise money”.

“Typically, you raise money by having events where senior members of the party go and obviously they meet people at these events,” he said.

“The alternative to fund-raising in this time-honoured way, is taxpayer funding.”

Mr Abbott said that in the context of a “very tough” budget, the idea that taxpayers should fund political parties was “very, very odd”.

When asked if there should be a federal ICAC, Mr Abbott said that he thought that Canberra had a “pretty clean polity”.