Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate—

(a) notes that:

(i) on 13 December 2018 the Prime Minister and the then Attorney-General announced the Government would establish a Commonwealth Integrity Commission,

(ii) 966 days since that announcement the Government is yet to introduce legislation into the Parliament,

(iii) the Government is addicted to rorting taxpayer's money, including through the:

(A) Commuter Car Park Fund,

(B) Community Sports Infrastructure Grants, and

(C) purchase of land in the Leppington Triangle;

(iv) on 26 July 2021 the Leader of the Australian Labor Party announced Labor would establish a powerful, transparent and independent National Anti-Corruption Commission; and

(b) calls upon the Government to introduce legislation to establish a powerful, transparent and independent anti-corruption commission as an urgent priority.

Labor have brought this motion to the chamber today for debate because of the concerns we have with the behaviour of this government and the way it uses public money as though it's Liberal Party money. We have seen example after example after example of this, and it seems that after eight years this government no longer even pretends to care about having proper process and integrity in government decisions, particularly when it comes to allocating public funds. I will go through some examples of this.

I think these declining standards, this lack of integrity and this culture of rorting—and there isn't a more appropriate word for it—come right from the top of this government. When you track back and look at some of these funds, which have been very clearly used for political purposes only, and look at some of the decisions that were made, you can see they were made by Mr Morrison, when he was Treasurer, and by Mr Gaetjens, when he was advising him. Then, when they moved into being head of PM&C and being the Prime Minister, when that decision was taken, we saw an explosion in these funds.

We see a pattern with these funds. What happens is a fund is announced. Millions of dollars, sometimes billions of dollars, are placed in these funds. Those funds sit there unallocated until there's some sort of dodgy process put around them, usually in the lead-up to an election. It has been politically successful for them, so why would they want to stop? We see decisions taken on the eve of the election. We saw this with sports rorts, where projects were signed off a week before caretaker, projects were then changed and then there were discussions between offices about who would get how much of the money, where it would go and what was politically beneficial for the government. These decisions were even being made after caretaker, and nobody cared. No-one polices caretaker any more—we've been through that with Mr Gaetjens. Decisions are made and election promises are given. Executive government decisions have been made, so it's all done under government, where money has been provided in the pre-election budget update, and then these funds are used to bankroll a list of election commitments.

There's not even any pretending about it any longer. We had a department in front of us in a committee hearing not long ago. We asked them whether this dodgy allocation of money was going to continue—this was in relation to the Urban Congestion Fund—a multi-billion-dollar fund—or whether there were going to be any changes to the way funds were administered out of this fund. We asked this question because of the damning audit report done on the commuter car park projects. The department's evidence was: 'No, there will be no change. There's still a billion dollars unallocated in the Urban Congestion Fund, and there will be no change to how this is allocated.' So we will see a repeat, no doubt, of what happened in the commuter car park project funds.

We saw in this year's budget that 21 new funds and grants programs will be established to allocate money. Twenty-one—on top of the funds they've already got, which we already know have been dodgy. The community development grants, let's have a look at those. Since the last election, $2 billion in this program, including an additional $55 million in this year's budget, and 68 per cent of projects went to coalition seats. Since the last election, 66 per cent of all funding went to coalition seats.

In the female facilities and water safety program—remember that?—88 per cent of projects went to coalition seats, and 98 per cent of funding went to coalition seats. In the Community Sport Infrastructure grants—sports rorts—where the ANAO found there was evidence of distribution bias in the award of grant funding—there was more than $100 million worth of funding. By round 3, once they'd got the rorting down pat—once they'd worked out exactly how to do it, and to do it to the utmost political benefit—73 per cent of round 3 funding had not been recommended by Sport Australia, and the overwhelming majority of funding was targeted at marginal coalition seats or seats they wanted to win in the election.

The Commuter Car Park Fund—now, that's a very special fund. This fund is the quintessential way to make sure that public money can be used for private benefit, for Liberal Party benefit, and the Prime Minister, the Treasurer and several cabinet ministers were up to their eyeballs in it. It's pretty nifty, the way they did it. They allocated all this money in a fund at the budget, hoping people wouldn't really notice it. On the night the Treasurer said, 'And we are building commuter car parks around Australia,' what he didn't say was, 'We're actually only going to do it if you meet the top-20 marginal seat list that we've also created, and we're only going to invite MPs or duty senators to apply for that funding.' They didn't say that on budget night. I went back and looked at the budget address. It just said, 'We're going to have this congestion-beating Commuter Car Park Fund.' People would rightly believe, if they'd been watching that, that it was for the whole of Australia, but the fine print that the Audit Office found was that that fund was only open to MPs or duty senators from the coalition who met the top-20 marginal seat list. How dodgy is that? It is out there in plain sight. No-one's even pretending.

Then they had this process called 'canvassing', where, in order to access this $660 million, you got an invitation. First, you had to be on the top-20 marginal seat list, and then you were asked, 'Would you like a car park?' or, in the Treasurer's instance: 'Would you like four car parks? Okay, you can have four, because we're allocating this.' There was no merit base to any of the decisions. This is what the Audit Office found. There was no merit assessment and no competitive assessment. No recommendations came from the department. This is the real kicker: 81 per cent of the projects were approved by the Prime Minister himself. How sweet a deal is this? As Prime Minister and Treasurer, you get to put all this money into a fund. You don't allocate it. You tell Australia that this is a fund presumably for everybody, and then, on the eve of an election, the day before caretaker, you sign off on, I think, 27 car parks which the department didn't know about, for which nobody had been able to apply and for which there was no merit base to the decision-making. How did the Treasurer know that the four car parks in his electorate were actually going to meet the objectives of the program? Well, that's easy: because there weren't really any objectives to the program. That's another way you design a fund to make sure you can use it for your own political purposes.

This has to stop, and there is no sign it's going to stop, because they're not shamed. You lot aren't shamed by the ANAO. You don't care anymore. Instead of actually dealing with this and the recommendations from it and changing your behaviour, you go out and attack the auditor. That's the way to do it: throw a bit of mud and hope it sticks. The only way to deal with this is to have a national anticorruption commission, and where are we? We're almost a thousand days from the day when the Prime Minister said he would introduce an anticorruption body for the federal parliament. Every other jurisdiction has one, but, 1,000 days later, we do not. We know this guy has been slow. He has been slow on the vaccine rollout and slow on quarantine. But he actually has a really valid reason to be slow on putting in place some sort of integrity body in this parliament, because you know what? They might actually have a look at this and get to the bottom of it. The auditor can only look at the department side of running a program, but an anticorruption body might be a different story. So is it any surprise that we are not seeing any movement on it? Only a Labor government will actually introduce a national anticorruption body and reintroduce standards for integrity and honesty in government.

The situation as it exists now is: if you're not on this top-20 list or some other list that staffers in ministerial officers have created, bad luck. How about we govern for 151 seats, instead of the top 20 seats that you're actually after? There's an idea. How about we do that when we have funds established for sporting programs, for women's change rooms and for building better region?

I notice the Prime Minister has banged an extra $250 million into that favourite little slush fund this budget, hoping that nobody sees it in the $100 billion budget spend. Who's going to notice an extra quarter of a billion dollars going into the Building Better Regions Fund? Who's going to notice? It will just sit there, nice and pretty, waiting until the election.

Then what do we do? We've got the system down pat, don't we? We go and canvass our coalition party room colleagues and say: 'Look, guys, we've got an extra billion here. You're in a bit of trouble in your seat, and you're in a bit of trouble, too. We want to pick that seat off. What do you need? What will it cost to get that seat? Who cares if it doesn't have any merit or competitive process or any recommendations. You know what we can do? We can sign it off before we go into caretaker and try to bind another government. Then our election promises will cost nothing because we're just ripping money out of these funds that the rest of Australia thought were for everybody but are actually only for our political campaign.' That's what you guys are doing. These funds have been corrupted by the process—or the lack of process—that you have put around them, and the lack of honesty.

We got told there are maps which allocate the Urban Congestion Fund across states. These are maps which say, 'In that seat, we'll give you this much,' before any applications are made. Then we've got funds with spreadsheets that tick-tack from the minister's office. It's not just Minister McKenzie's former role. It's the Prime Minister and Minister Tudge. I think Minister Sukkar was involved. The Treasurer was clearly involved because he got four car parks! He was one of the lucky ones. Mr Sukkar got quite a few, from memory. I think Mr Wilson got a lot down there, too. How about the Commuter Car Park Fund, where certain seats in Melbourne got 2½ times more than Sydney, even though Infrastructure Australia acknowledges Sydney has the most congested roads in Australia. Then, the other kicker that makes it special is that, while the data shows the most congested roads that need fixing are in the north-west of Melbourne, the money got allocated to the south-east. How blatant does it have to be? Honestly, you guys are professional at it. You've written the rule book, and—guess what—there are no rules. The only rule is that you want to hold your seat or win a seat. That's the rule. Instead of fundraising privately for the Liberal Party campaign, you've come up with this incredibly crafty way of using public money and then allocating it for all of your election commitments. Then you pretend that you didn't do it and that people voted for it. Well, people didn't vote for it; you'd already signed it off. You'd already allocated the money. It's so dishonest. It's so dodgy. It has to stop.

The only way it will stop is through a national anticorruption body, because it seems that there is no-one the Prime Minister will change his behaviour for. Why would he when it's worked so well for him? We're calling it out and we will continue to call it out. He won't answer questions when he's asked—'What did you know? What did you do?'—but we all know that he is leading this. He's right at the top, and he rewards this behaviour. It stinks, and it should stop.