Summer
rains finally fell on large parts of New South Wales this week. They
didn’t fall everywhere, and much of inland Australia is still in
drought, but enough rain fell where it was needed to allow weary fire
authorities to announce that the New South Wales bushfires were
finally contained.
For
different reasons, Scott Morrison has also had a difficult summer, so
the Prime Minister would no doubt have been pleased the bushfire
emergency he so badly mishandled is now receding. With Parliament
back and the serious matter of COVID-19 Coronavirus to attend to,
Morrison could be forgiven for thinking that February would be the
month where the government could regain the political initiative.
But
that’s not happening, because the government finds itself mired in
a series of corruption scandals.
The
key issue, as it has been for weeks now, is the sports rorts affair.
As we now know, roughly $100 million in sports grants were
distributed in a completely corrupt manner by former Sports Minister
Bridget McKenzie before the 2019 federal election.
The
scandal blew up after the National Audit Office released a
devastating report into the orgy of pork barrelling.
The
government’s initial response to the Audit was to try and downplay
it: a variation of the classic “nothing to see here, folks” line.
Morrison himself argued many times that no rules had been broken and
that all the projects funded in McKenzie’s dodgy process were
eligible.
That
approach proved unsustainable, as the media turned its attention to
the grants program and uncovered multiple instances of highly dubious
decision-making. Huge grants to fancy rowing clubs in Mosman, grants
for female change rooms to clubs with no female players, grants to a
shooting club that McKenzie herself was a member of, grants that
sporting clubs boasted about before even receiving them – the more
journalists dug, the worse things seemed.
The
Audit report was always going to be difficult to wriggle away from.
The report set down, in black and white, a devastating series of
findings about the sports grants program.
An
established funding program was subverted by a “parallel process”
of political decision making inside McKenzie’s office, quite
transparently driven by political interest. Questions were raised
about the program’s probity by senior bureaucrats, only to be
batted away by McKenzie and her staff. A colour-coded spreadsheet was
even drawn up, one that had nothing to do with the merits of the
funding applications, and everything to do with the Coalition’s
re-election strategy.
As
former senior New South Wales judge Stephen Charles QC argued, this
was not just ministerial misconduct; it was corruption.
So,
after weeks of defending her, Morrison bowed to the inevitable and
sacked McKenzie. After a hastily convened investigation by Morrison’s
hand-picked Secretary of the Department of Prime Minster and Cabinet,
Phil Gaetjens, McKenzie was sent on her way.
On
the day he sacked McKenzie, Morrison announced that Gaetjens’
report found that McKenzie had erred, but that the program itself was
sound. Exactly how Gaetjens managed to come to that conclusion is
something that has puzzled journalists and onlookers. If the program
was sound, why was McKenzie sacked for rorting it? And if McKenzie
rorted it, how could the program be sound?
Just
to make matters more opaque, Gaetjens’ report was never released,
with Morrison claiming that it was a cabinet document. He therefore
kept it secret. It’s marvellous stuff, this open government
business…..
In
scathing testimony, Auditor-General Grant Hehir and senior auditor
Brian Boyd demolished the government’s position with a few
well-chosen lines.
Were
all the grants eligible, Senator Eric Abetz asked Boyd? No, answered
Boyd.
In
fact, as many as 43 per cent were not eligible. Boyd went on to
explain why. Some applications were late. Some projects had started
their work before they signed the funding agreement. Some had
actually finished the work.
As
Boyd told the Committee, “If you’ve completed your work, or in
some cases — as in this one — you’ve even started your work
before a funding agreement is signed, you’re not eligible to
receive funding.” Oops.
It
got worse. We also found out that the Prime Minister’s office was
intimately involved with McKenzie’s office in drawing up the dodgy
list of grant recipients. Auditor-General Hehir told Senators there
were “direct” communications between Morrison’s office and
McKenzie’s, including at least 28 versions of the now-notorious
colour-coded spreadsheet that laid out the various sports grants by
marginal seat.
The
Auditor-General described a process where key advisors from Morrison
and McKenzie’s offices haggled over which projects to fund, using
the spreadsheet as the basis for their decisions.
To
say this looks bad for the Prime Minister is an understatement. He
has been caught out in a particularly ham-fisted cover up, one that
looks all the more ill-judged now the facts have come to light. Given
the level and detail of communication between his office and Bridget
McKenzie’s, it’s hard to see how he can plausibly argue he wasn’t
privy to the rorts…..
Read
the full article here.
