Rod Kemp (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Stott Despoja, we did not even know you were there, you were so quiet! But, one thing I know you have always wanted to do over the years is to be transparent and open, and for governments to be accountable. To be quite frank, I took the liberty of not thinking that you would have any problems with this at all, Senator Stott Despoja.

So here we have, as I said, at least a draft list of election promises that have been made by the Labor Party. I stress: I suspect, because of the variety of sources that we have had to use to gather this list, that there may well be some errors in that list. But this will at least get the process going so we can hear from the government and from Minister Ellis whether these promises are ones which the Labor Party has made and intends to keep.

The curious thing with all this is: they say that, in politics, the big problems in the end are the cover-ups. It is one thing to take the heat on the actual issue involved—and this issue is the massive amount of money that was pork-barrelled by the Labor Party into marginal electorates. And, of course, remember: I am only speaking about the sport and recreation grants; I am not speaking about the huge number of other programs which the Labor Party used to pork-barrel its way to winning votes in these marginal seats.

Why—you would have to ask—would the Labor Party want to cover this up? The first element clearly is that, having attacked the former government by accusing it of indulging itself in pork-barrelling, it would be rather astonishing to find that the Labor Party not only did precisely the same thing but did it by a factor of two, three, four or five times. That itself, I would suggest, would be a very interesting story. I suspect the second issue is the sheer quality of these grants. Now, it is quite possible that many of the projects which have been listed are entirely worthy projects. They may well be projects in which the money will be well used. I regret to say that the inquiries that I have made certainly reveal stories of grants and promises which seem to be very poorly based indeed. Again, if we have some time I may mention those. The third element is that this Labor Party government—unlike the previous government, which constantly increased sports funding—on coming in, said that they had to be fiscally responsible and cut sports funding extensively—