Kristina Keneally (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

'Well, I'll leave that stuff in the bubble. I don't comment on gossip or other stories. I just reject the premise of the question. I'll put your editorial to one side and your commentary on it.' These aren't my words, of course; these are the words of the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison. It is ironic that he says at every media conference that he is happy to take questions and then spends the rest of the media conference providing answers like the ones I've just outlined here. But worse than that irony is that we have a Prime Minister and a government, a Liberal government now in its seventh year, that are proving a developed allergy to scrutiny. With that allergy comes dire consequences for our political system and for the parliament. It engenders in the community a distrust in politicians, it creates a sense of frustration and hopelessness from the very people who need government working for them and, ultimately, it is an erosion of our democracy.

With the answers from the Prime Minister like the ones I read out, the Morrison government shows that it is quite willing to treat the Australian people with contempt. This is a government willing to frustrate; this is a government willing to dismiss journalists whose job it is to keep elected representatives accountable. Now, as we have seen with this corrupt sports rorts scheme, it's clear that the Morrison government does not have respect for taxpayers' dollars. To call this corrupt sports rorts scheme a saga, which some have done, is an understatement when it comes to describing how wilfully this Liberal National government has used, first $100 million and now, it's been revealed, another $150 million of taxpayers' money—our money, the Australian people's money—to win an election. This isn't just my assessment. This isn't just the Australian Labor Party's assessment. This just isn't a political attack. The independent Auditor-General in Australia—the person whose job it is to keep the government and its spending and decision-making under a magnifying glass—said more than 61 per cent of the projects awarded funding by sports rorts 1, as he is talking about here, or nearly two out of three, were not projects recommended by Sport Australia. Sixty-one per cent of the projects awarded funding were not recommended by Sport Australia. The Auditor-General goes on: there was a clear 'bias' towards 'marginal' seats and those that the Morrison government wanted to win to maintain power. The minister at the time, Senator McKenzie, and her office were running a parallel process to Sports Australia to—and I quote the Auditor-General—'identify which applications should be awarded funding'.

Senator Farrell made clear that some 2,000 groups—sports organisations, mums and dads, and volunteers—put in their applications to the Sport Australia funding program with the expectation that they would be assessed on their merits through a robust evidence based process, that they had a fighting and fair chance to compete against other sports groups for this funding. It's now well known, thanks to the reporting of ABC and Andrew Probyn, that this parallel process set up by Senator McKenzie in her office included a colour coded spreadsheet identifying—wait for it—the electorates and the parties that held the seats from which the applications had come. On what basis is that relevant?

Senator Polley interjecting—

One would hope that Senator McKenzie was not, as Senator Polley suggested, learning to improve her colouring technique. Maybe she'd just learnt to use Excel spreadsheets and she thought it would be a fun exercise! That's not what happened. We know—don't we, Senator Polley?—that's not what happened, because the Auditor-General's report tells us that what happened is they set up a parallel process alongside Sport Australia to make their own determinations so that they could award funding to projects—what was it?—61 per cent of which were not recommended by Sport Australia.

Going back to this colour coded spreadsheet, what is also interesting is that the metadata of the document shows that it had been edited by a Liberal Party operative, an employee of then Minister McKenzie. It would be really interesting if we actually had this information fully in the public domain so that the parliament and the people of Australia, particularly those groups that missed out, could make an assessment of what really happened in Senator McKenzie's office and who else was involved, but I'll come to that in a moment. There is no denying what is happening, and there is no amount of deflection from a Prime Minister who is allergic to scrutiny because—what did he do when asked about this? He said it had nothing to do with him. Let's just park that there for a moment. It had nothing to do with him even though the Community Sport Infrastructure Grant Program was used as a $100 million slush fund to keep the Liberal-National government alive. Senator Wong made the point: does the Prime Minister really expect us to believe that something that happened in his government that involved $100 million being allocated on a political basis was not of interest to the adman, the marketing guy, who serves as the Prime Minister? I know we're not meant to use names besides official titles, but I will just acknowledge there are some in the community who refer to him as Scotty from marketing.

What's important here is to understand that the Prime Minister and the Morrison government weren't playing by the rules. What is one thing we teach our children when we enrol them in sport?