{"id":476966,"date":"2020-02-14T13:58:01","date_gmt":"2020-02-14T13:58:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newmatilda.com\/?p=131437"},"modified":"2020-02-14T13:58:01","modified_gmt":"2020-02-14T13:58:01","slug":"just-when-you-thought-the-sports-rorts-affair-couldnt-get-any-worse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2020\/02\/14\/just-when-you-thought-the-sports-rorts-affair-couldnt-get-any-worse\/","title":{"rendered":"Just When You Thought the Sports Rorts Affair Couldn\u2019t Get Any Worse\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Grant from Auditing\u2019 has dropped \u2018Scotty from Marketing\u2019 right in it. And the net result is a stench of corruption enveloping the Morrison government. Ben Eltham explains.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Summer rains finally fell on large parts of New South Wales this week. They didn\u2019t 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\u00a0New South Wales bushfires were finally contained<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

But that\u2019s not happening, because the government finds itself mired in a series of corruption scandals.<\/p>\n

The key issue, as it has been for weeks now, is the\u00a0sports rorts affair<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

The scandal blew up after the National Audit Office released a\u00a0devastating report into the orgy of pork barrelling<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The government\u2019s initial response to the Audit was to try and downplay it: a variation of the classic \u201cnothing to see here, folks\u201d line. Morrison himself argued many times that\u00a0no rules had been broken<\/a>\u00a0and that all the projects funded in McKenzie\u2019s dodgy process were eligible.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Nationals Senator and Minister for Sport, Bridget McKenzie. (IMAGE: CNBP, Flickr)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\u00a0fancy rowing clubs in Mosman<\/a>,\u00a0grants for female change rooms to clubs with no female players<\/a>, grants to a\u00a0shooting club that McKenzie herself was a member<\/a>\u00a0of, grants that sporting\u00a0clubs boasted about before even receiving them<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 the more journalists dug, the worse things seemed.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

An established funding program was subverted by a \u201cparallel process\u201d of political decision making inside McKenzie\u2019s office, quite transparently driven by political interest. Questions were raised about the program\u2019s 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\u2019s re-election strategy.<\/p>\n

As former senior New South Wales judge Stephen Charles QC argued, this was not just ministerial misconduct;\u00a0it was corruption<\/a>.<\/p>\n

So, after weeks of defending her, Morrison bowed to the inevitable and sacked McKenzie. After a hastily convened investigation by Morrison\u2019s hand-picked Secretary of the Department of Prime Minster and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens, McKenzie was sent on her way.<\/p>\n

On the day he sacked McKenzie, Morrison announced that Gaetjens\u2019 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?<\/p>\n

Just to make matters more opaque, Gaetjens\u2019 report was never released, with Morrison claiming that it was a cabinet document. He therefore kept it secret. It\u2019s marvellous stuff, this open government business.<\/p>\n

Given the level of misconduct revealed by the Audit Office, Labor and the minor parties were always likely to make the sports rorts scandal a priority for the new Parliamentary year. And so it proved yesterday, when the Auditor-General himself and a key auditor from the Office were called to give evidence before a Senate Committee.<\/p>\n

In scathing testimony, Auditor-General Grant Hehir and senior auditor Brian Boyd demolished the government\u2019s position with a few well-chosen lines.<\/p>\n

Were all the grants eligible, Senator Eric Abetz asked Boyd? No, answered Boyd.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

As\u00a0Boyd told the Committee<\/a>, \u201cIf you\u2019ve completed your work, or in some cases \u2014 as in this one \u2014 you\u2019ve even started your work before a funding agreement is signed, you\u2019re not eligible to receive funding.\u201d Oops.<\/p>\n

It got worse. We also found out that the Prime Minister\u2019s office was intimately involved\u00a0 with McKenzie\u2019s office in drawing up the dodgy list of grant recipients. Auditor-General Hehir told Senators there were \u201cdirect\u201d communications between Morrison\u2019s office and McKenzie\u2019s, including at least 28 versions of the now-notorious\u00a0colour-coded spreadsheet<\/a>\u00a0that laid out the various sports grants by marginal seat.<\/p>\n

The Auditor-General described a process where key advisors from Morrison and McKenzie\u2019s offices haggled over which projects to fund, using the spreadsheet as the basis for their decisions.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s, it\u2019s hard to see how he can plausibly argue he wasn\u2019t privy to the rorts.<\/p>\n

Not for the first time, Morrison and his government have got themselves into trouble because of their serial inability to tell the truth, and Morrison\u2019s apparently unstoppable impulse to try and brazen his way out of political trouble.<\/p>\n

Back in January, for instance, Morrison went on national television and told the Seven Network\u2019s\u00a0Sunrise<\/em>\u00a0program that \u201cevery single one of the projects that was approved was eligible<\/a>. Every single rule was followed in relation to the program\u201d. That was manifestly untrue.<\/p>\n

Yesterday\u2019s testimony also leaves Secretary of the Department of Prime Minster and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens in a tricky spot. The day McKenzie was sacked, February 2, Morrison told reporters that\u00a0Gaetjens had cleared the sports grants program of any political interference<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cWhat the Secretary has been asked to do here is assess the Auditor-General\u2019s report and consider the fairness elements of that. And he\u2019s made a very clear finding which said that the Minister actually did not take as a primary consideration those factors, those political factors, so he\u2019s actually rejected that as a position.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n

It\u2019s impossible to reconcile that statement with what the Auditor-General and his staff told the Senate yesterday. Either the Auditor-General is wrong, or the most senior public servant in the land is, or Morrison is lying about what is in Gatejens\u2019 report. I think most of us can draw our own conclusions in this matter.<\/p>\n

Late on Friday, Gaetjens released a short summary of his report in a\u00a0submission to the Senate Committee<\/a>\u00a0investigating the sports rorts \u2014 but not the report itself. The summary argued that \u201cthere were some significant shortcomings with respect to the Minister\u2019s decision making role.\u201d But Gaetjens also wrote that \u201cthe evidence I have reviewed does not support the suggestion that political considerations were the primary determining factor in the Minister\u2019s decisions to approve the grants.\u201d This seems almost laughable, given what the Auditor-General has said.<\/p>\n

The sports rorts affair has once again exposed grave deficiencies in the way in which Australia\u2019s Westminster government holds elected leaders to account. Scott Morrison is the Prime Minister and, short of a successful vote of no confidence, there are ultimately very few sanctions that Labor and the Parliament can apply.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As long as Morrison retains the confidence of the Liberal Party, he can tough this one out, as damaging as it will be to his political credibility.<\/p>\n

Given what we\u2019re seeing in established democracies right now, from the US to the UK to India, Scott Morrison\u2019s enduring problems with the truth could perhaps be seen as a lower order issue.<\/p>\n

But Morrison\u2019s serial lying matters, because it speaks to his ongoing subversion of democratic norms. Ordinary\u00a0citizens are rapidly losing trust in Australia\u2019s democracy<\/a>, and the decline has been among the more precipitate of all western democratic systems in recent years.<\/p>\n

In large part this is because of a widespread perception that the entire political class that rules Australia is corrupt.<\/p>\n

Most of us don\u2019t follow the intricacies of Commonwealth grants administration closely. But we can sense, intuitively, that much of what the people who run this country say is often untruthful. We see politicians\u00a0blatantly rorting spending programs<\/a>, whether it be travel entitlements or sporting grants, with essentially no consequences.<\/p>\n

And we can see that there is one rule for the powerful, and another for the rest of us.<\/p>\n

BE PART OF THE SOLUTION: WE NEED YOUR HELP TO KEEP NEW MATILDA ALIVE.\u00a0Click here to chip in through Paypal<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

The post Just When You Thought the Sports Rorts Affair Couldn\u2019t Get Any Worse\u2026<\/a> appeared first on New Matilda<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n

This post was originally published on New Matilda<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Grant from Auditing\u2019 has dropped \u2018Scotty from Marketing\u2019 right in it. And the net result is a stench of corruption enveloping the Morrison government. Ben Eltham explains. Summer rains finally fell on large parts of New South Wales this week. They didn\u2019t fall everywhere, and much of inland Australia is still in drought, but enough […]<\/p>\n

The post Just When You Thought the Sports Rorts Affair Couldn\u2019t Get Any Worse\u2026<\/a> appeared first on New Matilda<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5022,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1730,41069],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476966"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5022"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=476966"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476966\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":476967,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/476966\/revisions\/476967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=476966"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=476966"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=476966"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}