The
New Daily,
1 June 2020:
I
was wrong. The Community Development Grants program isn’t the
Coalition’s hot $1.126 billion political rort – it’s the
Coalition’s hot $2.5 billion-plus political rort.
It’s
not 11 times bigger than #sportsrorts, it’s 25 times bigger and
counting.
The
government has a number of corrupt slush funds, but none more
blatantly designed to buy votes with taxpayers’ money than the CDG
scheme purpose built in 2014.
As
reported last week, analysis of the government’s GrantConnect
website showed Coalition seats “luckily” scored 75.5 per cent of
last year’s CDG money, while Labor seats managed just 19.9 per
cent.
Of
the 68 federal seats Labor now holds, 22 have never received a cent
in CDGs while those that did score well tend to be of particular
political interest or history.
And
the Coalition has quietly arranged to keep this particularly rich
pork barrel rolling for another six years.
As
Michael West Media has posed, why buy one election when you can
buy three?
Billions
of dollars in corrupt pork barrelling can seem a little abstract, so
using Vince O’Grady’s spreadsheet analysis, I’ve chosen an
example of a frontline seat and those that adjoin it to demonstrate
how much an Australian Electoral Commission boundary costs or
benefits communities.
The
Labor-held seat of Hunter in regional New South Wales abuts three
National seats to its west and north.
It
is a particularly rich green line that separates Hunter from the
Nationals’ Calare, Lyne and New England.
Since
the Coalition invented CDGs in 2014 through to and including the 2019
election year, only $108,000 in CDGs show up on the GrantConnect site
for the good folk of Hunter.
 |
| Source: AEC map; TND graphic |
…..CDGs
are not supposed to be purely regional grants – some of the biggest
winners are rich Liberal-held city seats – but it is the National
Party that has done by far the best out of the way this barrel has
rolled.
In
2019, the 68 Labor seats averaged $836,000 in CDGs, Liberal seats
$2.086 million, LNP seats in Queensland $2.473 million – and the 10
National Party seats scored an average of $6.712 million.
That
contrast is stark on the ground……
As
previously reported, the CDG process was designed by the newly
elected Abbott government to avoid any embarrassing involvement of
public servants in divvying up the spoils, as
subsequently happened with the McKenzie/Morrison #sportsrorts
scandal, and the $100 million environment grants program that was
also
conveniently established before the 2019 election.
Read
full article here.
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