Josh Frydenberg (Kooyong, Liberal Party, Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Moore for his question. As the member for Moore knows, we on this side of the House have taken the Auditor-General's report into the Community Sport Infrastructure program very seriously. We're implementing the recommendations from that report, including the extension of the Commonwealth grant rules and guidelines to situations that involve corporate Commonwealth entities like Sport Australia, and the decision-maker is a minister.

As this House would be aware, particularly those opposite, it's not the only report of the Auditor-General that has made important observations. There was a report, Auditor-General report No. 9 of 2014-15, into the design and conduct of the third and fourth funding rounds of the Regional Development Australia Fund, a fund which was $1.4 billion and saw, under rounds 3 and 4, more than $200 million awarded. This report found, on page 132:

A feature of the Minister's decision making was the lack of strong alignment between the funding decisions taken and the panel’s recommendations

And:

… the records of the reasons for funding decisions taken contrary to panel advice generally provided little insight as to their basis and made no reference to the published selection criteria.

The House may be interested to know who the beneficiary of this process was. Well, the Auditor-General says, on page 19:

Guess who the minister responsible for this program was. The member for Ballarat. Now it's the invisible member for Ballarat!

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