Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Joint Committee on Public Accounts and Audit report into the administration of government grants. The report recommends sweeping changes to the administration of taxpayer grant schemes. That includes making sure there are clear guidelines for allocating public money, the novel suggestion of keeping clear records of how decisions are made and the excellent suggestion of actually implementing compliance mechanisms to ensure that guidelines are, in fact, followed.

The fact that a committee, dominated by government members, concludes that there's something rotten in the way that government grants are being administered, and then the government falls well short of community expectations, is very telling. The fact that the committee remains unconvinced that the minister even had the authority to issue the grants, which were at the heart of sports rorts, is particularly concerning. So many community organisations, small businesses and individuals pour hours of their time into applying for grants. They expect their applications will be assessed objectively and against the published criteria and they expect public money to be used wisely. This government doesn't even bother to pretend anymore. Various grants, particularly the community development grants, which government officials conceded in estimates are used as a slush fund for election promises, are blatant pork-barrelling. Millions of dollars of public money continue to be used to feather their own nests and secure another term in power.

For this reason, earlier this year, the Greens moved to propose a select committee inquiry into the allocation of government grants. We know it's not just sports rorts, we know it's not just the community development grants and we know it's not just a handful of other ones; we know that this is a systemic problem. So we moved that there be a committee that actually looks at the administration of all government grant programs during and after election campaigns. We wanted it to look at things like eligibility criteria; management and assessment processes; the use of closed grants programs, which are not open to public applications but just require the minister to nominate the recipient; adherence to the published assessment processes and program criteria; the relationship between election commitments and grant allocations; the need to demonstrate value for money; the efforts to influence votes through grant allocations; the role of ministers in determining the award of grants; and measures to manage the risk of politicisation of funding outcomes and announcements. We know that all these things desperately need to be examined, because, frankly, we already know the grants programs are rorted to high heaven. We wanted to get to the bottom of how that could be fixed to try to attempt to restore some confidence in the public about the administration of their money.

It was all going very well, and we thought we were going to have support to establish that excellent inquiry. We'd had a chat with all the various people whose votes we needed to get the inquiry up, and what do you know? Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party, who had told us they would support this inquiry, at the last minute changed their minds. I think it was two days later that a photograph of Senator Hanson opening a sports stadium in Rockhampton and holding a novelty cheque ran in the papers.