Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the document.

This report of the Australian National Audit Office on the Regional Development Australia Fund is damning to say the very least because it describes the previous Labor government's misuse of taxpayers' money. In what has now been revealed as a token gesture of independence, Labor set up an independent advisory panel to assess the applications for the third and fourth funding rounds of the Regional Development Australia Fund. It was chaired by a former Labor MP, Christian Zahra. The panel was appointed, as the report states, 'for their experience, knowledge and expertise on regional Australia.' Yet the minister at the time, the member for Ballarat, chose to ignore the advice of these experts that her own government appointed. In decisions found by the ANAO to involve 48 per cent of the program's funding Ms King chose to ignore the independent panel 's advice. The ANAO report stated that 27 per cent of the applications approved by the minister had not been included by the panel in the 'recommended for funding' category because ‘the panel did not consider them to be of sufficient quality.'

Even more damning is the fact that the then minister approved 23 projects worth some $90.6 million that were categorised by the independent panel as 'not recommended for funding.' These projects were assessed as having 'no identifiable positive impact on the broader community,' and yet Labor and Ms King thought they should be given $90.6 million. I say to the people of Australia, Labor spent almost $91 million of your money on projects that were seen as having no benefit. What a complete farce this has been. Such decisions led the ANAO to state:

… there was not a strong degree of alignment between the Minister's funding decisions and the panel's recommendations.

What an understatement. Of course the decisions made by the minister diverged from those recommended by the panel on 40 occasions in round three and 34 occasions in round four. Just when you thought it could not get any worse, the ANAO delved deeper. They discovered that 80 per cent of the projects the minister decided not to fund, despite the panel recommending funding, were in seats held by the coalition. In round three alone it equated to 93 per cent. Do the words 'pork barrelling' mean anything to anyone in this room? Sixty-four per cent of projects that the then minister approved for funding, even though they had not been recommended by the independent panel of experts, were in Labor held seats, compared to just 18 per cent in coalition held seats. The ANAO could not put it any clearer when they wrote:

A feature of the round three and round four decision‐making was the lack of alignment with the assessment advice provided to inform those decisions. It is difficult to see such a result as being consistent with the competitive merit‐based selection process outlined in the published program guidelines:

So, only months out from an election, the Labor minister at the time, Ms King, the member for Ballarat, chose to ignore the system and the independent panel that had been set up by her own government. This was a wilful disregard and contempt for Australian taxpayers and their valuable dollars. I wonder now whether Senator Wong, the Manager of Opposition Business, will reconsider her defence of this project. She said in June of last year:

… funding requests were assessed by an independent panel through a transparent, merits-based process, with projects measured against criteria such as value-for-money, eligibility, risk and viability.

I hope Senator Wong is listening—those words are as hollow and as shallow as the funding decisions that were made by the previous government. The findings from the ANAO tell a very different story. They say that projects of no merit and no value were funded by the government—$91 million worth of taxpayers' money or thereabouts went to projects that had no merit, just months out from a federal election being called. This has all the hallmarks of another grubby whiteboard affair and the pork-barrelling that we saw with multicultural grants—we have now seen those features in these rural and regional development grants. It is easy to label this as just another sorry tale in the waste and mismanagement perpetuated by the previous two governments but, as with all their failures, the matter needs to be taken very seriously. It involves precious taxpayer dollars that people have worked so hard to provide, and the previous government has wasted those funds so massively. That is why Australia finds itself in the perilous debt position it does today.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to thank Senator Bernardi for alerting us to what can only be called an absolute rort of Labor Party proportions. The ANAO's report on the Regional Development Australia Fund, as Senator Bernardi has very clearly pointed out, shows what a pork-barrelling exercise this was. I am conscious of the fact that the coalition's regional program, when it comes out, will attract—not from the ANAO but from the Labor Party—accusations of pork-barrelling. I know that will happen. I can predict it. I have seen it before.

The Labor Party will say, 'Most of the money has gone to coalition electorates.' As I always point out, most rural and regional seats are held by the coalition, therefore, as a matter of course, most of the grants should go to coalition electorates. But did that apply under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments? The number of genuine rural and regional seats in the federal parliament held by the Labor Party was infinitesimal, so the majority of people living in rural and regional Australia who were represented by coalition members did not get what, fairly, they should have received—and the ANAO has clearly set out what fairly should have gone to those regional seats.

There were a couple of non-Labor seats that did seem to get an unusual amount of assistance from the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments. They were the seat of Lyne and Mr Windsor's seat—the seat of New England. New England and Mr Oakeshott's seat in Lyne seemed to do pretty well out of the Labor governments. One can only wonder why that was. Could it have been that they were the two members from conservative seats representing rural parts of Australia who defied their electorates and kept Ms Gillard and the Labor Party in power for three more years than should have been the case?

I join with Senator Bernardi in condemning the former Labor governments for their pork-barrelling. But forget about my condemnation and forget about Senator Bernardi's condemnation; just have a look at what the ANAO said about it. The ANAO do not always get it right, but normally they do. This is a case where they have clearly exposed the rorts that went on while Labor was in charge of the purse strings. That should be a salutary lesson to everyone.

John Williams (NSW, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What Senator Bernardi, backed up by my colleague Senator Macdonald, has raised here today is really concerning—this handling of a regional slush fund. That is how it has been described. The ANAO report on the Regional Development Australia Fund found that almost half the money went to projects that had not been recommended for funding and that money had been withheld from coalition seats. Is this how those opposite work with taxpayers' money?

The Australian National Audit Office report tabled this afternoon raises a number of questions about decisions made by the then regional services minister, Catherine King, relating to the administration of some $226 million worth of Regional Development Australia funds. I find this appalling. We have heard of union slush funds—they are commonly mentioned when we talk about the Labor Party and how they operate. But this is regional development funding that should have been going out evenly, with no bias whatsoever, into the regional areas that so desperately need support. Instead, the previous Labor government put together a slush fund.

Ms King has rejected any suggestion that there was mishandling of funding. Of course she has! Some 106 funding applications were deemed to be 'not recommended for funding' by an independent advisory panel, but Ms King funded 14 of them anyway—to a total of $87 million. That is another $87 million of pork-barrelling. This is appalling and I hope that this chamber has more to say about these disgraceful actions of bias, using regional development money as a slush fund and not spending taxpayers' money on a fair and appropriate basis—allocating it based on need—throughout regional Australia. I hope this is not the last we hear of this.

I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted.