Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

You're dead right—I'll take that interjection. What a joke! This government is not serious about improving integrity in sports for sports men and women, because if it were, it would show some integrity itself and we would have heard from Senator Cash this morning, producing all the documents which the Senate has requested her to do and we would have got the information that the Australian people are demanding.

We will get this information whether the government likes it or not. This afternoon, we start a Senate inquiry into what we'll call sports rorts 1. We'll start that inquiry and—whether they like it or not—the government, ultimately, will be required by the Senate to produce all of this information that they're currently hiding from us, and, more importantly, hiding from the Australian people. We will get to see the list of 400 clubs whose proposals Sport Australia declared were the best in the country. We'll get to see that. We'll get to see the list of the more than 2,000 clubs whose volunteers spent hours preparing and weeks working on these grant applications—we'll get to see that list of the more than 2,000 clubs who were done in the eye by this government who cheated them. This afternoon, the government are saying to sportspeople: 'We expect you to lift your game. We demand integrity from you.' But the government themselves show no integrity. There is nothing that relates to integrity about this government.

As I say, bit by bit, drip by drip, we will get this information, and the Australian people will see just how dishonest this government have been in the awarding of these grants. People will see just how dishonestly the government have treated all of these clubs right around the country in relation to their applications and all the hard work that people have done. They'll ultimately see that the government are not interested in sportsmen and sportswomen, not interested in the clubs that so many people work for and volunteer for, and not interested in improving sporting arrangements in this country. The government are only interested in one thing and one thing alone: getting themselves re-elected. This whole system was biased against the sporting clubs, who thought they were on a level playing field, that this was honest and that, if they did the right thing and their applications were the best, they would be rewarded with better sporting facilities. That simply did not happen on this occasion.

The government simply said: 'Okay, where do we need to win a seat? Here's $500,000'. And, if you had a terrific proposal in a safe Labor seat or, for that matter, a safe Liberal seat, you never had a chance. I've heard what the Prime Minister has said, and one of his other defences is: 'We actually increased the number of grants that went to Labor seats'. Well, that may or may not be true; I'm not sure whether it is. But we do know that, where the government did put money into a Labor seat, it was on the border of one of the marginal seats that they were trying to win—so at least 50 per cent of the sporting participants in that particular club would have lived in the marginal seat that the government was trying to win. So even there they can't be honest with the Australian people. Even there they can't say to the Australian people: 'Yes, we rorted that as well'.