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

I'll take that intervention. Yes, it was shocking. It was a shocking use of public money, which was simply designed to re-elect a failing government. But that was not the end of it. We've seen the safer communities rorts, where something as important as community safety was seen to be secondary to the political needs of the government of the day. Then, of course, we've got the building better regions rorts, where a handpicked ministerial panel decided to award funding to hundreds of projects, overriding the recommendations of the relevant department. Of course that was very much a feature of the sports rorts program—well-established, well-thought-out proposals by the sports department that were overridden by the minister, and, I think, for certain the Prime Minister, overridden by the Prime Minister's office, and we've seen that with building better regions. But of course the pick of the crop is the Commuter Car Park Fund. Some $660 million was decided on the basis of projects being in the top 20 marginal seats list. That's how they decided to spend the $660 million. I don't think we have seen all of the spreadsheets from that particular round of rorts, but we do know that they were going in and out of the Prime Minister's office.

The ANAO is a terrific organisation. We've been talking about gold medals over the past few weeks. They should be given a gold medal for the work that they have done, particularly Mr Brian Boyd. He's done a terrific job in exposing all of these rorts. It's a gold medal performance, I would say. We've discovered all of these things because of the work that they have done. We don't have an ICAC in this country, but we do have an ANAO, and, for the moment, they are doing a wonderful job. I look forward to speaking on the antirorting bill at another time, but I mention it because this bill seeks to redress some of the same issues.

We need stronger transparency and accountability measures, because under this government rorts are through the roof and commonplace. You might say to yourself, 'How did the government get itself in this situation?' There is a simple explanation for that: it was because they didn't expect to win the last election. They didn't expect to win it, so they never thought they were going to be held accountable for the way in which they spent this money. Of course, they have been caught out, but things haven't gone far enough. This bill will push things further, increase transparency, increase accountability and make sure Australians know exactly what this government is up to. The Prime Minister thinks he can get away with this. He's got the cover of COVID, so there's no responsibility.

I'd like to flesh out some of these rorts and why we need this transparency and accountability. Let's go back to sports rorts. In relation to the sports rorts scandal we saw the spin, the denial and the blame-shifting. The Australian National Audit Office reported on the Community Sport Infrastructure Program, and I'll quote from their report:

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.

What does this mean? In simple terms, it means that the former minister, Minister McKenzie, rejected applications to the program that scored as high as 98 out of 100 in Sport Australia's independent merit assessments. Many of those very worthy applications came from regional communities where sporting clubs are often the hub of the town. You'd be familiar with them down in Tasmania, where you come from, Madam Acting Deputy President Brown. Many were for modest amounts needed just to provide safe and usable facilities. But, instead of awarding grants to those clubs, the minister outright rejected them. The ANAO told the Senate inquiry into sports rorts that there was, broadly, a shift from applications located in safe and fairly safe coalition electorates to applications located in marginal coalition electorates and targeted electorates held by the ALP and the Independents. This is the very definition of industrial-scale pork-barrelling. Even to this point in time—Madam Acting Deputy President, I know you'll find this amazing—the government has still failed to apologise to and compensate the communities that lost out on these sports grants. It's two years into this scandal, and the government continues to refuse to knowledge the damage it did and compensate those communities. (Time expired)