This was
Australia’s faux prime minister Scott
Morrison proudly pointing out that he had been fundraising at considerable
taxpayer expense in order to fill the election campaign coffers of the the Liberal
Party of Australia.....
The Courier-Mail, 19 November 2018, p.6:
While he was on the
Queensland blitz early this month, Mr Morrison confirmed he attended
fundraisers. Many of the donations came from Rockhampton and the Sunshine
Coast.
“I’m meeting with
supporters all around Queensland and I don’t make any apologies for that,” he
said.
“We’re raising funds for
our campaign to make sure Bill Shorten never becomes prime minister in the
country.” Mr Morrison was the special guest at Liberal National Party
fundraising events in several regional towns.
Here is what
he was not boasting about this month……
Seven years before he
was sacked as managing director of Tourism Australia – amid serious concerns
about his management practices – Scott Morrison was the subject of criticism in
a New Zealand audit report examining his activities as head of NZ’s Office of
Tourism and Sport.
A 1999 New Zealand
Auditor General’s report challenged the future Australian prime minister’s
handling of an independent
review of the Office of Tourism and Sport (OTSp) where he was managing
director.
The OTSp was a
quasi-independent body offering policy advice to the New Zealand government and
experienced the loss of a number of board members and officials during Mr
Morrison’s tenure. He finally resigned from the job in 2000 a year ahead of his
contract schedule and returned to Australia….
During Mr Morrison’s
time at the helm of OTSp in the 1990s, New Zealand’s then Tourism Minister,
Murray McCully, praised his input and defended importing him for the job.
“Australia actually
happens to do a bit better than we do out of both tourism and sport,” Mr
McCully said at the time.
But the Auditor General
and the NZ Labour Opposition questioned his performance.
In New Zealand in 1999,
the Auditor General found Mr Morrison had launched a PriceWaterhouseCooper
review of OTSp which precluded contributions from senior staff and the board.
He had said the review
was independent of them, but it seems they were not aware of this.
“Mr Morrison’s
explanation came as a surprise not only to (the office’s CEO and board members)
but also to the Minister himself,” the report said.
“These people had
regarded the PWC report as the review referred to in the purchase agreement.”
The Auditor General’s
report said the board should have been told it had a duty, under the
review arrangements, to commission its own “independent” review.
“It seems that at no
point did Mr Morrison do so,” the Auditor General found.
In June 2000, the New
Zealand Herald quoted the Labour Opposition’s tourism and sport spokesman
Trevor Mallard as blaming Mr Morrison for problems with the OTSp and the
minister.
“And a key reason for
that was that it was run by Mr Morrison, an Australian who was seen as Mr
McCully’s ‘hard man’,” said the report.
“Australian standards of
public sector behaviour ‘are lower than ours,’,” added Mr Mallard.
He was quoted as saying:
“My experience with Australian politicians is that rules and ethics are not as
important to them as they are to New Zealanders.”
Mr Morrison did not
respond to the claims but was supported by the Tourism Minister as “highly
regarded”.
He had lifted the energy
levels and the competence levels substantially above those previously servicing
tourism and sport, said Mr McCully.
Australian Labor is
closely examining the Prime Minister’s career before he was elected to
Parliament in 2007 and the New Zealand experience could be raised.
His next job after New
Zealand was as NSW Liberal Party state director but was linked to the party’s
2003 election failure.
Mr Morrison became
Tourism Australia managing director in 2004 but left in 2006, again ahead of
schedule….
Ever since Scott
Morrison was sacked from his job as managing director of Tourism Australia in
2006, the reasons for his dismissal have been kept secret.
At the time and since,
public speculation has variously attributed the now prime minister’s removal to
a personality clash with his minister, a falling out over changes to the
organisation’s structure, and a dispute over the agency’s contentious “Where the
bloody hell are you?” campaign.
But an auditor-general’s
report completed 10 years ago, which has escaped public scrutiny until now,
reveals that in the period leading up to Morrison’s dismissal, his agency faced
a series of audits and a review of its contractual processes ordered by the
Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, amid serious concerns about its
governance.
The auditor-general’s
inquiry into Tourism Australia – which followed these reviews, and was
conducted after Morrison’s departure – reveals information was kept from the
board, procurement guidelines breached and private companies engaged on
contracts worth $184 million before paperwork was signed and without
appropriate value-for-money assessments.
THE AUDIT REPORT OMITS
THE NEXT EVENT IN THE CHRONOLOGY OF RELATIONS BETWEEN THE MINISTER AND TOURISM
AUSTRALIA – THAT BAILEY SACKED MORRISON THE SAME MONTH.
The Australian National
Audit Office (ANAO) report examines three major contracts that Tourism
Australia signed while Scott Morrison was managing director. It criticises
processes in all three cases but especially the contracts for global creative
development – advertising campaigns – and media placement services.
Ten years since the
audit, and 13 years since the contracts were signed, those two completed
contracts appear not to be listed on the government’s AusTender website, where
all contracts are required to be available for public viewing.
Searches, including by
AusTender staff, have failed to locate them on the site this week. Procurement
rules say they must be reported within 42 days of the contracts being entered.
The 2005 request-for-tender documents announcing the proposed contracts are
listed…..
The audit report
criticises extensively the agency’s processes for drafting, executing and
managing the contracts, the opaque accounting processes involved in aspects of
them and poor communication with the board and regional offices, including by
service providers. It details Tourism Australia’s failures at the time to
adhere to guidelines – the signing of a contract without incorporating
measurable performance indicators and non-existent risk assessments or
value-for-money analysis.
Tabled in parliament on
August 6, 2008, the report was one of more than 40 the Audit Office had
produced in the previous 12 months.
It escaped public
attention at least partly because it was not among the handful that
parliament’s joint committee on public accounts chose to examine further in its
role as chief audit scrutineer. At the time, the committee was chaired by then
Labor MP Sharon Grierson with then Liberal MP Petro Georgiou as her deputy.
When the report was
tabled, Morrison was a member of the public accounts committee, which was
tasked with considering it for review. He resigned from the committee six weeks
after the report was tabled and, it is understood, some months before the
committee formally considered it. The Saturday Paper does not suggest
Morrison influenced the audit’s treatment. Grierson says that as Tourism
Australia had accepted its three recommendations, and nobody on the committee
raised any issues, the report was not officially examined further – standard
procedure in dealing with the volume of audits each year.
The Saturday Paper lodged
detailed questions about the audit report with Morrison’s office but was told
he was not able to answer them in the time available.
Performance reviews of
the two key contracts between 2005 and 2007 – contained in the audit – revealed
Tourism Australia had failed to disclose to its own board that it had
underspent $3.9 million on one of the contracts in 2006-07.
It was found that in one
case invoices had been raised before the contract was signed and that in
another case the price paid in some areas of a contract was “more expensive
than the benchmark”.
The audit report does
not mention then tourism minister Fran Bailey’s sacking of Morrison in July
2006, nor any of the alleged preceding tension between them that has been the
subject of public speculation since.
But The Saturday
Paper understands the events and issues the audit report outlines played a
significant role in Morrison’s removal. Unconfirmed news reports have since
alleged that he received a payout of more than $300,000.
Asked to comment this
week on the report’s contents in relation to Morrison’s dismissal, Bailey would
only repeat the one comment she has made before: “I reiterate that it was a
unanimous decision to get rid of Mr Morrison by the board and the minister.”
She added: “I have
always treated confidential matters as confidential.”……
The
Guardian, 18
November 2018:The Morrison government has extended emergency three-month funding contracts to 16 more financial counselling, legal aid and charity groups to keep them open over the Christmas holiday period after it cut their funding with little warning.
The move was made
without fanfare, logged quietly on the Department of Social Services website on
Wednesday evening.
It comes as the social
services minister, Paul Fletcher, faces continued criticism for his
department’s decision to overhaul funding arrangements for key community
services groups in the lead-up to Christmas.
In some cases, barely
two months’ notice has been given to groups to prepare for dramatic cuts in the
new year – a time of year when thousands of Australian families have
traditionally needed more emergency assistance and financial counselling.
On Wednesday
evening, the Department of Social Services (DSS) released a document on its
website saying it would extend emergency three-month funding contracts –
covering the period 1 January 2019 to 31 March 2019 – to 16 organisations that
had lost their funding in the latest round of grants:
FMC
Relationship Services
EACH
Uniting
(Victoria and Tasmania) Limited
VincentCare
Victoria
Odyssey
House, Victoria
Mallee
Family Care Inc
Anglicare
SA Ltd
Centacare
Catholic Country SA Ltd
The
Trustee for The Salvation Army (NSW) Property Trust
Southern
Youth and Family Services Limited
Vietnamese
Community in Australia NSW Chapter Inc
The
Uniting Church in Australia Property Trust (Q.)
C
Q Financial Counselling Association Inc.
Prisoners’
Legal Service Inc
Agencies
for South West Accommodation Inc.
CentreCare
Incorporated
Neither the government
nor the department has drawn attention to the funding extensions……
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