Dastyari blames old habit on debt saga

Embattled Labor senator Sam Dastyari has broken his silence on why he asked a Chinese businessman to pay a bill when he exceeded his parliamentary entitlement for travel.

Senator Dastyari told Fairfax it was an old habit from his days with the NSW Labor party in which if you overspent on a campaign you raised that money from donors and declared it.

The Labor senator resigned from the opposition frontbench over the saga amid accusations he'd been compromised, as reports emerged he had taken a pro-China stance on the South China Sea dispute, at odds with his party's position on the matter.