Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Public interest immunity, hey? Secrecy, more secrecy, more secrecy to hide this government's corrupt practices. They are corrupt practices. This is corruption. This is the use of public funds to achieve an outcome that the government wants to see happen, not occurring under a process that is fair and just and accountable and transparent. Are we surprised? I'm not surprised. It didn't surprise me at all when Minister Cormann turned up and said 'public interest immunity', despite, as Senator Patrick just said, it almost certainly being unjustified. I'm not surprised, because this government has got form. We have got these sports rorts on top of other scandals: Minister Taylor, for example, with both the grasslands saga and the issue of the doctoring of documents with the City of Sydney—scandal after scandal after scandal.

Of course, whilst we are still coming to terms with this sports rorts scandal, we've got another one that lands on the desk—one that is actually even worse: $150 million of another sports program, the Female Facilities and Water Safety Stream program. It's a $150 million slush fund, a $150 million pork barrel, with no guidelines about how this money is going to be spent. They're not opening up the process to grant applications. Basically, here is $150 million that the government is going to use to buy itself an election. Under this new program we know that, on top of the sports rorts scandal that we are yet to see Phil Gaetjens's report about, the biggest single grant, for $25 million, was for a pool in Attorney-General Christian Porter's marginal seat of Pearce, which was announced three weeks before the election. This is the very example that typifies absolutely classic pork barrelling 101. Then there's the Sydney tidal pool under this new program as well. The local council weren't even aware the money had been awarded for this tidal pool. They weren't aware of the grant when they were listed as a recipient. And then the department listed another recipient, a local charity lobbying for the pool, but a member of the tidal pool committee said they didn't have any idea about that $4½ million and that he had no idea if it would be given the grant to build the pool. These examples show the scale of this blatant pork barrelling that is going on and the blatant corruption of using public funds to buy or attempt to buy election outcomes.

An analysis done by The Guardian of the 41 projects awarded under sports rorts version 2 found that almost 60 per cent of the projects were in marginal seats, including $30 million in the ultramarginal seat of Corangamite, which the government were desperate to hold onto, $25 million in Christian Porter's Western Australian seat of Peace and $20 million in the WA seat of Swan. When some other coalition-held seats which were under threat are taken into account, 73 per cent of projects were located in marginal or at-risk seats. By dollar value, $111 million of that $150 million of grants was spent in marginal seats.

This is not a level playing field. This is dodgy and this is unfair. We've got community sports clubs that are working hard to instil values of fairness, cooperation and inclusion in their members, and basically we've got the government saying, 'Stuff that; we only care about your club if it's in the seat that we want to win.' People are working so hard to raise money for their local community sports club, with sausage sizzles, trivia nights and raffles. They put in hours volunteering, washing uniforms, coaching the teams and running committee meetings. They put so much time and effort in, only to be told by this government: 'No, we don't care. Even if you demonstrate that the value of your application is really, really high, you don't get any money unless you're in our target seats.' The Greens see this selfish and unfair scheme that's been cooked up by the government, and we say it is enough. We need to have genuine time for real scrutiny and transparency. It is absolutely time for a federal anticorruption watchdog that has real teeth.

It is interesting that Minister Cormann talked about public interest immunity. It's interesting that he's talking about the public interest. Here are a few things that might be more in the public interest than another coalition cover-up. We need to get an honest account from the Prime Minister about the role that his office has played in sports rorts 1 and in sports rorts 2. We need a government that uses government funding in the public interest, to benefit the community, rather than a desperate cash splash to benefit its constituencies. We need a government that's got a real plan to tackle the climate emergency. We need a government that's willing to lift Newstart and to help people on income support—a government that believes in the public interest rather than in its own narrow-minded self-interest.

But instead, we have now got yet another corrupt cover-up from the scandal-ridden coalition. The Greens believe in transparency, and we know that this is not transparent. This smells, and the Australian public know it smells as well. We believe in accountability, and the coalition absolutely have to take their hands out of the public purse and start being honest with the Australian people about what they've done, and whether they stand for anything more than just being elected. I can say that at the moment it certainly looks like they don't. The government have sent a clear message to anybody who lives in a safe seat, saying: 'You lose! You get nothing!' And people know it's true. It's no wonder that people have lost faith in politics; it's no wonder faith in politics is at an all-time low. No wonder people are cynical about politicians—we just can't blame them.

The government's excuse is, 'Well, Labor does it too.' As if that fixed anything! Prime Minster: we need you to get off the bench, lace up your boots and bring the Green's bill for a national integrity commission to a vote. The Senate voted recently to establish a committee into sports rorts round 1, and that was before this latest development. We will be examining the evidence. We know that Senator McKenzie has resigned, but we know that isn't the whole story. It's barely even the start of the story. In particular, what we need to know is what the Senate and the Australian public are so far having hidden from them: what role the Prime Minister's office played in this corrupt pool of cash. There are questions which the Prime Minister must answer. Did his office coordinate with Liberal Party strategists in the lead-up to the 2019 election in allocating these grants? What other programs did his office coordinate the allocation of funding for? And was the Prime Minister aware of his office's involvement in this scandal?

The Australian public needs answers to these critical questions. Anyone concerned about the state of our democracy needs answers to these critical questions. Our democracy is fragile, and to see it undermined by this latest attack is truly alarming. Any time we ask the government probing questions about this, the response we get from the government is that they 'reject the premise of the question'. Well, I have something to tell them: it's not a matter of rejecting the premise of the question. We need to reject the premise of this government. This government is corrupt. These scandals are just coming one after another and there is only one thing for it: the Australian public needs to vote this rotten government out of office.