Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to take note of the minister's failure once again to provide the Philip Gaetjens report. This government is flying in the face of repeated motions from the Senate to table this report but also running scared from the fact that the community now sees them for what it is and what it has done. We have sports rorts 1 and sports rorts 2, we've got the infrastructure programs and we've got environment programs. Quite frankly, I think we need to look at all the government's funding programs, because it's quite obvious that there has been a systematic approach across these grant programs to make sure that they are targeted to the seats they want to win and/or keep. All of these programs need to be looked into—the dates they started, the dates when the new round started—because they all stink. There is a stink over so many of them now. We need to make sure that we look clearly at all of those programs. Maybe it's in the government's mind that the community and this place have already found out about a number of them. What else is going on?

The idea that political considerations were not a determining factor when deciding which clubs got funding is simply ludicrous. The ANAO report Award of funding under the Community Sport Infrastructure program found:

The award of funding reflected the approach documented by the Minister’s Office of focusing on ‘marginal’ electorates held by the Coalition as well as those electorates held by other parties or independent members that were to be ‘targeted’ by the Coalition at the 2019 Election. Applications from projects located in those electorates were more successful in being awarded funding than if funding was allocated on the basis of merit assessed against the published program guidelines.

That's from the ANAO report. To ignore the merit based assessment of sports Australia for almost half of the successful applications and instead decide to award grants based on political gain is a clear and unforgiveable misuse of taxpayers' money. Senator McKenzie's decision-making process was completely unsporting, with clubs in safe seats hampered in their chances of winning a grant. In my home state of WA, 32 applications missed out on about $12.1 million in funding. Anne Twomey, professor of constitutional law, recently said:

From a lawyer's perspective, there seem to be at least three areas in which rules are likely to have been broken.

The first concerns the legal obligation on ministers, when exercising administrative powers, to act within the scope of their powers and to behave in a manner that is procedurally fair.

…   …   …

The second legal issue is whether the minister had any power at all to make these grants. The Audit Office's report expresses significant concern about this.

Then she said:

The third rule that may have been broken is the constitution itself. The Commonwealth Parliament may legislate only with respect to subjects listed in the constitution (known as "heads of power"), such as external affairs, defence or banking. There is no head of power with respect to "sport".

Mr Morrison and his colleagues have nothing but contempt for fairness and a level playing field, which is ironic given that we're talking about sports grants here. The government has hidden the Gaetjens report from the Senate. It's failed to comply with a previous order to produce the document and with this order, and it's more and more of the government saying: 'Let's make this a cabinet document. Let's put it on the trolley and wheel it through cabinet; then it's a cabinet document'.

How did the PMO and the Liberal Party coordinate in the lead-up to the 2019 election in allocating sports grants—and other grants, as it's now becoming widely known? Was the Prime Minister aware of his office's role in this scandal—and it is a scandal. What does the Prime Minister know and what does he have to hide by not enabling that report to be tabled? The public deserve answers to these questions. These are key questions of transparency and accountability. Australians expect this transparency and accountability from those in power and they are not getting a fair deal from this government. The more they see coming out about the other grant programs that have similarly been used for electoral gain, the more disenchanted they become. This level of shameless lack of transparency and this consequence-free approach to granting are unprecedented, and that's saying something.

I urge the minister to release the full Gaetjens report immediately so that the community and this parliament know what went on and we can start restoring confidence in this institution and in the government—governments I should say, not this particular government, because I think they're past that. But we actually need to make sure that the Australian community does have confidence and faith in this institution and in governments into the future. This lot can start doing that by coming clean, telling people what happened and making sure that it doesn't happen again. It has abused the power that it has in making these decisions in this particular circumstance and in all the other grants and programs that we now know were used and abused in a similar way in order for them to try to cling to power.

It was at the expense of transparency, at the expense of our democracy and, importantly, at the expense of those sporting groups that put in applications in good faith only to learn that they wasted their time. I've had people tell me how much time they took to fill in these applications in good faith. When you're a community based organisation, you know how long it takes. People are doing it in their own time and have to scramble around to get it written after hours. If you're running a sports club, you're doing all that. Having run community organisations myself in the past, I know how long it takes to fill in these documents—it's a considerable amount of time that you commit—only to have them colour-coded and filed. If you're in a safe seat, then it doesn't matter—down to the bottom of the pile. That's an appalling way to treat people in this country.