Don Farrell (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

No, no; I'm talking about South Adelaide here. They're a feeder side to the Adelaide Crows, as you should know, Senator Ruston.

Senator Ruston interjecting—

Well, I can't disagree with that, of course, my uncle having played for West Adelaide in the 1945 team. I was there in '83.

An honourable senator: You were a child.

Alas, I wasn't, Senator. But—

Senator Abetz interjecting—

No, I'm fully here, Senator Abetz, and you know you are embarrassed to be part of a government that would rort the system.

But let's get back to South Adelaide—more premierships than they had female toilets. How was their application assessed? Well of course it was assessed very highly because it met all of the criteria that the government said they were interested in following through on. But what happened? No, they didn't get the grant. They were on the original grant tick—they'd ticked all the boxes. They'd been examined by Sport Australia. They should have got—should have got!—the money that they needed to improve female sporting facilities in the south of Adelaide. And they missed out, replaced by a grant in another seat which the government was trying to win.

As I say, we will get to the bottom of this. We've got a sports rorts committee. Senator Rice is obviously on it. We've got Senator Chisholm and Senator Nita Green. Bit by bit, moment by moment, they'll get to the bottom of what happened here, because what we know is that industrial-scale rorting took place—

An honourable senator: Shame!

It is a shame. It's so disappointing to all those volunteers and all those female participants who thought they were entering an honest, aboveboard scheme to allocate much-needed sporting funds. Finally they discovered, of course, that that wasn't what happened.

The Prime Minister might think that the pandemic will smother all of the interest in this topic for Australians. Well, he's wrong. Australians still want to know what happened here. The Labor Party, with the Greens, will continue to pursue this issue and, bit by bit, we'll extract the truth. We've gone a long way—we've found out a whole lot of information that we didn't know at the start of this process—and we will get to the bottom of it. We will find out exactly what the Prime Minister and his office did to override all of these recommendations from Sport Australia. I'm not saying that these other clubs didn't deserve applications, but there was a priority listing and that is what we should have followed through on. That's what the government should have followed through on. Had Labor been elected, of course, that's exactly what we would have done—we would have followed the advice of Sport Australia to give the money to those clubs that most deserved it. The great disappointment and the great sadness of Australian sporting communities is that that didn't happen.