Senate debates

Wednesday, 26 February 2020

Documents

Community Sport Infrastructure Grant Program; Order for the Production of Documents

10:36 am

Photo of Nick McKimNick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Australians are actually losing confidence in the political process in this country, and that's been a trend that, unfortunately, has been underway for some time. But they still do have some basic expectations of government, they do expect their government to be competent and they do expect their government to be fair. Of course, the government's handling of this program has been neither competent nor fair.

I want to talk primarily about the lack of fairness in the way that this government has handled this program—a program, remember, that is not funded with money that is owned by the government. It is funded by money that has been given to the government by the taxpayers of our country and that the government are temporary stewards of. I want to be very clear: the lack of fairness in this program is not a bug. It's actually a design feature of this program. This was deliberately done. This program was deliberately designed to allocate taxpayer dollars in an unfair way, to organisations some of whom did not submit their applications on time, some of whom revised already submitted applications post the date for the final acceptance of applications, and many of whom submitted applications that, through the fair and rigorous non-political assessment, were rated as not being eligible for funding because other programs had a greater need. Yet a large number of programs that were either ineligible by dint of missing application time frames or were simply not worthy enough relative to other applications ended up receiving funding.

This government was totally sprung. It was totally busted by the ANAO, the Audit Office. What was the government's response to being totally busted in a scathing report from the ANAO? The Prime Minister asked Mr Gaetjens to provide him with a report, which he says happened. I say 'he says happened' because, of course, neither this Senate, despite having repeatedly asked for it, nor the people of Australia have seen Mr Gaetjens' report.

One other thing that people legitimately expect from government in this country is transparency. In other words, they expect to be able to see, hear and therefore understand why government is making the decisions that it does. And yet here we are again in the Senate debating the government's refusal to provide a report, the Gaetjens report, that this Senate has repeatedly asked for. And we're getting all kinds of spurious excuses from the government as to why this report has not been provided. Of course, cabinet in confidence is one of the claims that the government has made. One of the issues that Mr Gaetjens' report allegedly specifically covered related to whether former Minister McKenzie was in breach of the Ministerial Code of Conduct.

I'll make the blindingly obvious comment here—and I've been a minister, albeit in a state government and not a Commonwealth government, so I do have personal experience of this—ministerial commissions come from the government. In the context of Commonwealth ministerial commissions, those letters patent come from the Governor-General. They are a matter between the Prime Minister, as the senior adviser to the Governor-General, the Governor-General themselves and the relevant minister. They are not a legitimate matter for cabinet. Ministerial appointments are not cabinet decisions. They are ultimately granted by the Governor-General on the advice of one person and one person alone—and that is the Prime Minister. It's abundantly clear in decisions that this Senate has reached in the past that simply wheeling a document through the cabinet room on a trolley is not enough to provide a legitimate foundation for a claim of public interest immunity, as the government is making here. It's not enough. So the Greens reject the government's assertion that Mr Gaetjens' report is covered by cabinet-in-confidence provisions.

I have to say Mr Gaetjens' reputation is copping an absolute pounding here, and rightly so, because he has allowed himself to be politicised. He is the most senior public servant in the country, and public servants right across this land in the Commonwealth Public Service have a legitimate expectation that the Public Service will not be politicised. It is one of the principles that underpins our democracy—frank and fearless advice from the Public Service to the government of the day. But what we're getting from Mr Gaetjens is anything but frank and fearless advice. From what we know of his report, it was effectively a whitewash. We demand to see that report. The Senate demands to see that report.

Of course, no-one is getting up and arguing that community sporting organisations should not receive assistance from government, when they need it and deserve it, and where it is done in accordance with a fair, rigorous, unbiased process—far from it. What we are saying here is that taxpayers money should not be allocated by government with the primary intent of ensuring its re-election. That would constitute corruption, and this is a process that has been corrupted. We don't have a Commonwealth anticorruption agency in this country, so we can't ask an independent umpire to have a look at this. The independent umpire that would be best placed to have a look at this corruption doesn't exist. We thank the National Audit Office for the work that it has done, but what it's done in this report is uncover the tip of an iceberg, and there are many other grants programs that we believe have been manipulated by this government in order to achieve electoral outcomes.

Make no mistake: this government thought they were going to lose the last election and they were prepared to do, in the words of a former member of this parliament, 'whatever it takes' to win the election. Well, it turns out that 'whatever it takes' involved corruption. It involved buying votes with taxpayers money. It involved not funding worthy community organisations that had been found to be worthy by an independent process, and instead funding organisations that were politically close to the government, that were in marginal seats that the government needed to hold, and in one case at least, organisations that the relevant minister was a member of. (Time expired)

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