Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This report of the Australian National Audit Office on the Regional Development Australia Fund is damning to say the very least because it describes the previous Labor government's misuse of taxpayers' money. In what has now been revealed as a token gesture of independence, Labor set up an independent advisory panel to assess the applications for the third and fourth funding rounds of the Regional Development Australia Fund. It was chaired by a former Labor MP, Christian Zahra. The panel was appointed, as the report states, 'for their experience, knowledge and expertise on regional Australia.' Yet the minister at the time, the member for Ballarat, chose to ignore the advice of these experts that her own government appointed. In decisions found by the ANAO to involve 48 per cent of the program's funding Ms King chose to ignore the independent panel 's advice. The ANAO report stated that 27 per cent of the applications approved by the minister had not been included by the panel in the 'recommended for funding' category because ‘the panel did not consider them to be of sufficient quality.'

Even more damning is the fact that the then minister approved 23 projects worth some $90.6 million that were categorised by the independent panel as 'not recommended for funding.' These projects were assessed as having 'no identifiable positive impact on the broader community,' and yet Labor and Ms King thought they should be given $90.6 million. I say to the people of Australia, Labor spent almost $91 million of your money on projects that were seen as having no benefit. What a complete farce this has been. Such decisions led the ANAO to state:

… there was not a strong degree of alignment between the Minister's funding decisions and the panel's recommendations.

What an understatement. Of course the decisions made by the minister diverged from those recommended by the panel on 40 occasions in round three and 34 occasions in round four. Just when you thought it could not get any worse, the ANAO delved deeper. They discovered that 80 per cent of the projects the minister decided not to fund, despite the panel recommending funding, were in seats held by the coalition. In round three alone it equated to 93 per cent. Do the words 'pork barrelling' mean anything to anyone in this room? Sixty-four per cent of projects that the then minister approved for funding, even though they had not been recommended by the independent panel of experts, were in Labor held seats, compared to just 18 per cent in coalition held seats. The ANAO could not put it any clearer when they wrote:

A feature of the round three and round four decision‐making was the lack of alignment with the assessment advice provided to inform those decisions. It is difficult to see such a result as being consistent with the competitive merit‐based selection process outlined in the published program guidelines:

So, only months out from an election, the Labor minister at the time, Ms King, the member for Ballarat, chose to ignore the system and the independent panel that had been set up by her own government. This was a wilful disregard and contempt for Australian taxpayers and their valuable dollars. I wonder now whether Senator Wong, the Manager of Opposition Business, will reconsider her defence of this project. She said in June of last year:

… funding requests were assessed by an independent panel through a transparent, merits-based process, with projects measured against criteria such as value-for-money, eligibility, risk and viability.

I hope Senator Wong is listening—those words are as hollow and as shallow as the funding decisions that were made by the previous government. The findings from the ANAO tell a very different story. They say that projects of no merit and no value were funded by the government—$91 million worth of taxpayers' money or thereabouts went to projects that had no merit, just months out from a federal election being called. This has all the hallmarks of another grubby whiteboard affair and the pork-barrelling that we saw with multicultural grants—we have now seen those features in these rural and regional development grants. It is easy to label this as just another sorry tale in the waste and mismanagement perpetuated by the previous two governments but, as with all their failures, the matter needs to be taken very seriously. It involves precious taxpayer dollars that people have worked so hard to provide, and the previous government has wasted those funds so massively. That is why Australia finds itself in the perilous debt position it does today.