Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to call out the egregious revelations over the last few weeks regarding the previous government's industrial-scale rorting of grants. Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse, we are only partway through an audit committee inquiry into grants administration. As the chair, I'm not going to pre-empt the recommendations—the member for Dunkley here has bearing witness to this nonsense that keeps emerging—but I do want to highlight the evidence.

Billions and billions of taxpayer dollars were treated as a Liberal Party slush fund. Billions of dollars with no guidelines, allocated with no proper process but with secret decisions and secret criteria, and no records kept as to why decisions were made. I'm not contesting the right of ministers to make these decisions, but they are subject to the Financial Management Act, and they are subject to the grants guidelines. They say that ministers must receive written advice before making a decision, and they have to record the basis for their decisions. But the upshot is that billions of dollars were rorted for the Liberal Party.

The most depressing thing, though, is that no-one is surprised by this anymore. That's a shameful and shocking thing our country. The second most depressing thing is they still don't understand that what they did was fundamentally wrong. They just come up with lines like: 'Oh well. You're the government now. Move on.' We have to interrogate this, and we have to learn the lessons.

I will give you the example of the $4.8 billion Urban Congestion Fund: 83 per cent of funding from this just happened to go to Liberal and National electorates. It's a Deirdre Chambers moment. It's just a coincidence that there's only congestion in Liberal and National electorates. I don't think congestion only happens in their seats. It included, of course, the infamous commuter car parks rorts, a $656 million slush fund. Sixty per cent of that went to Victoria; apparently you didn't need commuter car parks in New South Wales or Brisbane or other states. The interesting thing in the audit report we have been inquiring into is that the department did some modelling and found out that most congestion in Melbourne—even if you just want to say, 'We were pushing the funding into Melbourne because Josh Frydenberg was worried about his seat,' and it turned out he was right on that front—is in the north-west of Melbourne, yet all the commuter car park funding went to the south-east. That's not a coincidence; that's where the seats that they were worried about were. But there was no process. They didn't write to state and territory governments who run the transport infrastructure. They didn't write to councils. It was just made up by Liberal MPs. Many were in Josh Frydenberg's electorate of Kooyong.

Speaking of Kooyong, it is more than car parks now. You'd think the big national projects were going to be funded by the $4.8 billion Urban Congestion Fund. You were the minister at one point, weren't you?

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