Ellen Whinnett: Rorts row needs some plain speaking
In all the debate over Bridget McKenzie’s resignation, questions remain over how two senior bureaucrats came to such different conclusions over the rorts affair, writes Ellen Whinnett.
Opinion
Don't miss out on the headlines from Opinion. Followed categories will be added to My News.
In the excitement over the resignation of Bridget McKenzie and the kamikaze coup attempt by Barnaby Joyce and Matt Canavan this week, another serious problem was coming into focus.
That’s the competing and incompatible position that two of Australia’s most senior public servants now find themselves in as a result of the sports rorts affair.
On January 15, Commonwealth Auditor-General Grant Hehir strongly criticised former Sports Minister McKenzie’s handling of the $100 million community sports fund, noting she had ignored the recommendations of the independent Sport Australia and instead funnelled money to clubs in marginal Coalition seats and those targeted as winnable.
Two weeks later, the head of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens, ran his eye over the program at the request of his boss, Prime Minister Scott Morrison, and found there was no political bias. While the men used slightly different criteria, they were essentially looking at the same thing. So now we have the Auditor-General finding serious flaws with the program and the DPM&C secretary finding the reverse.
Hehir has decades experience in the public service, is a former secretary of the Department of Treasury and Finance in Victoria and NSW Auditor-General and was appointed by Liberal PM Tony Abbott to the Commonwealth job in 2015. Gaetjens, too, has decades of experience as a senior public servant, worked for APEC and was secretary of the NSW Department of Treasury and Finance. His CV also includes stints working for the Liberals, including 10 years as former treasurer Peter Costello’s chief of staff. He was also Morrison’s chief of staff from 2015-2018, before being hand-picked by him to run the federal Treasury Department, then being elevated to head of DPM&C.
Gaetjens found McKenzie had breached the ministerial standards, but it was really on a side issue: when she failed to declare membership of a couple of clubs that she later awarded money to.
At issue is this: Hehir found while Sport Australia had put together a list of recommendations and given each application a merit rating, McKenzie had run a “parallel assessment using other considerations’’ which took in different criteria, including which seat the club was located in.
Sixty-one per cent of the grants had gone to clubs which had failed to reach the 74/100 cut-off merit rating established by Sport Australia. As the election ticked closer, 73 per cent of grants were awarded to the clubs which failed to reach the merit threshold.
In polite bureaucratese, Hehir found: “The award of grant funding was not informed by an appropriate assessment process and sound advice. The successful applications were not those that had been assessed as the most meritorious in terms of the published program guidelines.’’
Gaetjens, on the other hand, found the guidelines allowed for ministerial discretion and there was no undue political consideration given. Morrison said Gaetjens had found: “The guidelines in relation to the matter of the Auditor-General’s report clearly and publicly identified the Minister as having final approval authority and the right to consider other factors’’.
The PM conceded there “may be differing views about the fairness of the process”. But, he said Gaetjens had found “the Minister used the discretion she was afforded”.
“Accordingly, the Secretary concludes, ‘I do not believe there is a basis for you to find that the Minister had breached standards in that respect’,’’ Morrison said.
“He goes on to note that he did not find evidence that this process was unduly influenced by reference to marginal or targeted electorates. And he said, ‘I find no basis for the suggestion that political considerations were … the primary determining factor.’’
Quizzed by journalists, the PM doubled down, saying: “(Gaetjens) made a very clear finding which said that the Minister actually did not take as a primary consideration … those political factors, so he’s actually rejected that as a position.’’
Labor has now established a Senate Select Committee inquiry into what it calls the government’s “industrial-scale pork-barrelling’’ of the funds. They’re also taking aim at Gaetjens and Labor Leader Anthony Albanese sought to move a motion in parliament yesterday accusing Morrison of “ignoring the damning report of the independent Auditor-General concerning his corrupt sports rorts scheme, and is instead relying on a secret report by his former chief of staff”.
Despite the government’s robust defence of McKenzie and the program, they know they’re in strife over it and have agreed to fund a new round of grants to appease clubs which missed out. They’ve also agreed to an Auditor-General’s recommendation to make their approvals process fairer and more transparent.
We don’t know precisely what Gaetjens said in this whole palaver because the PM won’t release his report, so we only know what Morrison says he said.
“He notes the data indicates that applications from marginal or targeted seats were approved by the Minister at a statistically similar ratio of 32 per cent compared to the number of applications from other electorates at 36 per cent,’’ Morrison said, optimistically, on Sunday.
You know a PM’s in trouble when he falls back on what’s known as “lies, damn lies and statistics” to get out of a jam.
Ellen Whinnett is national politics editor.