Andrew Bolt: Why Bridget McKenzie must resign
The sports rort scandal has finally exposed Bridget McKenzie’s treatment of devoted volunteers as shameful — and proven why it should not be tolerated. The government’s reputation can’t be restored until she resigns, writes Andrew Bolt.
Opinion
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The worst thing about the sports rorts scandal is that the Morrison government treated hundreds, if not thousands, of volunteers with such cynical contempt.
Those volunteers — mums, dads, coaches and administrators in sports clubs around the country — thought their government would play by the rules.
So they spent hours and hours working on their application for grants from the Community Sport Infrastructure Program, thinking Sports Minister Bridget McKenzie really did want to help the most deserving.
The Coledale Waves Soccer Club, for instance, had 10 volunteers work for 200 hours on a plan to use a grant to get more women playing and to level its ground.
As one of those volunteers, Lisa Miller, told the ABC, the ground was so hard and uneven that “my club alone has had about 14 major injuries in the last two years”.
In club after club, volunteers worked on those forms, trusting that their arguments mattered to McKenzie.
The Kyneton District Soccer Club had four people work for 100 hours or more to argue for money to upgrade its pitch which is so rough that games have had to be switched to other grounds.
They made a great argument. Sport Australia, which assessed all 2000 applications, rated the Kyneton club’s at 87 out of 100, with 74 the minimum for a grant.
The Gippsland Ranges Roller Derby made an even stronger case. It has tried hard to be more welcoming for gays and lesbians and Sports Australia said its application was just about perfect: 98 out of 100.
All those volunteers were doing their best for their players and their community, but what they didn’t realise was that Bridget McKenzie wasn’t playing fair.
She looked at their forms — even that near-perfect one — and chucked them in the bin.
None of those clubs — and another 47 whose application were rated 83 or higher by Sport Australia — got a cent from McKenzie.
See, what none of them knew was that they’d been suckers in a dirty game.
As they’ve since learned from leaks and an inquiry by the auditor-general, McKenzie didn’t much care about their outreach programs or their broken changerooms or even their busted ankles.
What she cared about was winning last year’s election.
In her office, she and her staff listed the applications on a spreadsheet with colour coding, so they could tell which came from government seats they needed to save and Labor seats they thought they could win.
So bad luck the Gippsland Ranges Roller Derby. Its application may have been near-perfect, but the club is in the safe Nationals seat of Gippsland, which the government was never going to lose.
So why would McKenzie waste the money?
And bad luck the Coledale Waves Soccer Club. It’s in the Labor-held seat of Cunningham.
Bad luck, too, the Kyneton District Soccer Club. It’s in the safe Labor seat of Bendigo.
So which lucky clubs did get a slice of McKenzie’s $100 million?
Well, surprise! Two thirds were in government seats. What’s more, half the money in the first round of grants went to clubs in marginal seats the government needed to win.
That’s because more than 90 of 223 grants in that round went to applications Sport Australia had given a fail mark. McKenzie had basically torn up its list of the most worthy clubs.
By the third round, on the brink of a tight election, McKenzie was so off the leash that the auditor-general found “73 per cent of the approved projects had not been recommended by Sport Australia”.
One of her grants — the maximum $500,000 — went to the Pakenham Football Club in La Trobe, a must-save marginal seat for the government, even though the application had a miserable score of just 50.
Yes, you can tell me that all governments pork-barrel. But if we allow that excuse then we’ll always be ripped off; and there’s something extra shameful this time around.
It’s not just that McKenzie went on a spending spree that may not even have been lawful, with the auditor-general warning it “was not informed by an appropriate assessment process” and “it is not evident … what the legal authority was”.
What really infuriates me is that McKenzie treated so many volunteers — the best of us — as fools and deliberately wasted their time in a rorted game.
That is how you trash respect for government. That is how you make even good people cynical. That is how you teach children in all those clubs that playing fair is for losers.
When is Bridget McKenzie resigning?