Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

We heard Senator Colbeck turn up this morning and say that they haven't had enough time to get the documents together. It's an interesting contrast between them saying, 'Not enough time, sorry—we've got to go back and scrabble away for another fortnight,' and the speed that at which they actually distributed these grants before the election. This so-called Female Facilities and Water Safety Stream program had a budget line, which, amazingly enough, was all allocated before the election and, amazingly enough, the vast proportion of it was allocated in marginal seats. Yet, when they're just being asked to put the documentation on the table as to how these decisions were made and why the money ended up being spent where it was, they say, 'Sorry, we haven't got enough time to get that to you today.' As my colleague Senator Waters has just said, we're not holding our breath. Come 24 February, I am not expecting that we're going to get all that information that we have asked for in this very reasonable order for the production of documents.

This is a problem, because transparency matters. The community and this Senate having that information matters. Transparency matters for accountability. Transparency matters for democracy. In 1883, there was a journalist who wrote:

… there is only one way to get a democracy on its feet … and that is by keeping the public informed about what is going on. There is not a crime … there is not a vice which does not live by secrecy. Get these things out in the open, describe them, attack them, ridicule them in the press, and sooner or later public opinion will sweep them away.

This coalition's political corruption is living on because of the secrecy. We've had sports rorts 1, which they are going out of their way to cover up. We've got sports rorts 2, which we are discussing this morning and which they are going out of their way to cover up. But it's only a small fraction of information that this coalition government wants to keep hidden from the public. The information that we've been asking for, as well as all of the communication that we've asked for in these OPDs this morning, we've been discussing all week. The Gaetjens report, funnily enough, contradicts the very thorough report done by the Auditor-General. The Gaetjens report is what they used to make Minister McKenzie take a fall for a problem that is actually spread across this whole government.

I'm looking forward to having the Senate inquiry—the beginning of our sports rorts inquiry—this afternoon to be able to discuss it with the ANAO and perhaps ask them whether they've got any idea as to why their very thorough report has apparently been completely disregarded by Phil Gaetjens, who just happens to have been the Prime Minister's chief of staff before his current role. We will get the Gaetjens report eventually and it will show, I'm pretty sure, that the ANAO investigation was much more thorough and much more probing and much more accurate in its assessment of the rampant corruption in the awarding of those grants.

Other information that has not yet come to light, which will be able to be described and attacked and ridiculed in the press, is the legal advice they might have received as to whether the minister actually had the legal authority to allocate those grants at all. Then, of course, we want to see the full list of the grants that were rorted by the minister so that we can see who missed out so the coalition government could use the government's money as its own personal electoral slush fund. That goes across both of these sports rorts schemes. In the first one, they actually had guidelines which they decided they weren't going to follow—guidelines and criteria and a list of recommended projects from Sport Australia that they thought didn't suit their purposes. 'We're going to have a completely separate list to shore up our chances at the election.' In sports rorts 2, there weren't even any guidelines. It was even more blatant. There were no guidelines; it was just: 'Where do we want to spend money in order to try and get the community on side?'

We cannot let this stand. It's the duty of the Senate to hold this government accountable. Odgers sets it out well when it talks about the functions of the Senate. One of the Senate's roles is:

To probe and check the administration of the laws, to keep itself and the public informed, and to insist on ministerial accountability for the government's administration.

So, in refusing to provide this information, in insisting on a cover-up, the coalition is actually undermining democracy a second time. Of course, what we've heard the government say in numerous responses to this is that every party does it. They'll talk about the 1993-94 sports rorts scandal with Ros Kelly. That one featured a whiteboard; this one features the colour-coded spreadsheet. The truth is that the coalition was outraged by that scandal when it occurred. This is how John Howard, at the time the Manager of Opposition Business, described it. He said it was:

… the most appalling political corruption—I repeat, the most appalling political corruption—that I've seen in this parliament over the last 20 years. There has been nothing more pathetically blatant than the behaviour of this minister in handing around taxpayers' money without any trace of responsibility and without any guideline other than the maximum and at all times the total political convenience of the Australian Labor Party.

It sounds a bit familiar, doesn't it? Just swap parties. That was appalling political corruption then and this is appalling political corruption now. It's not good enough to just say, 'Oh, they do it too.' It's not good enough to just talk about another scandal that happened 20 years ago.

Under the female facilities and water safety stream of the program, the largest single grant was $25 million for the Attorney-General's marginal seat. Again, I remind you: this was a program that wasn't even open for applications. We have to reform the system. We have to end the use of grants as slush funds by the major parties to try and boost their election chances. I mean, it isn't just sports rorts or the newly reported sports rorts 2. In fact, under the current lack of rules, under the current corruption that is basically insidious across both major parties, we can look forward to sports rorts 3, sports rorts 4, sports rorts 5—going on indefinitely. It's not just sports, of course. The Regional Jobs and Investment Packages were also investigated by the ANAO, who found the ministerial panel approved only 28 per cent of the applications that had been recommended but approved 17 per cent of the applications that had not been recommended.

We need to reform this system. We need to have an independent anticorruption commission. We need to make sure that we really have the ability to investigate the corruption that is going on. It needs to be an anticorruption commission that's really got teeth, such as the one that the Greens have put forward, such as the one that was in the Greens bill that was passed by this Senate, which we tried to bring on for debate today. We know that different parties have got different priorities and we know that political parties should declare their priorities, and we support that. In fact, if the coalition had specifically announced a program targeting marginal electorates in the lead-up to the election, and that was what they said they were going to the election to do, they would have been within their rights to do that. It would have been upfront and honest: 'Look, we've got a sports program now that's going to specifically target marginal elections.' But they didn't do that, because there would have been an outcry if they had done that.

Instead, they lied to the Australian people and they told them that there was a level playing field for these grants programs. They lied to volunteers around the country—people who were spending their weekends, their evenings, writing grants; they lied to them. They lied because they said, 'If you spend all this time writing your grant applications, you will get funded.' They have lied to community sporting organisations around the country to make them believe that they've got the equal ability to get a grant when it's just not the case. The coalition government has made sure that there wasn't a level playing field. The coalition government was not engaging in sporting behaviour of fairness and the ability for different clubs, different teams, to access grants on a level playing field. We have to have the truth about this program and we must hold the government accountable for the lies that they have told the Australian public.

Debate adjourned.