No joke. Every time I see a story like this I think, "is this type of stuff legal in other developed countries?"
Part of the reason, I think, is that individual parliamentarians make fewer of their own decisions than they do in the US. It's almost unheard of for an individual member of parliament to vote against their party on a given issue, so all decisionmaking on whether to support a given law is done at the party rather than individual level. And you can't persuade a whole party to support a law just by buying it steak dinners and hookers, you have to convince 'em that it's actually a votewinner. (Or you could just get your industry group to donate huge sums of money to the party, which is how, for instance, the Australian Hoteliers' Association keeps liquor licencing laws written to their advantage in most states).