Cry foul over crafty funding games

The sports grants affair reveals how low a government will stoop to win.

Illustration: Eric Lobbecke

After the political week he has had, Scott Morrison must wish he were still on holidays in Hawaii.

There is no easy way out for the Coalition government and the Prime Minister when it comes to this sports rorts affair. The situation has been made worse because their first instinct was to try to ride out the odium and spin their way around the scandal.

The Auditor-General found that the $100m grants process for community sporting centres was deeply politicised, with the cash going out the door right before an election. But this saga has become worse than just another example of pork barrelling by the political class. It’s the cover-up that followed the Auditor-General exposing what went on that has sunk Australian politics to a new low.

The flagrant attempt by Morrison and his spin doctors to try to obfuscate, arguing that there was nothing wrong in what transpired, was unbecoming. And the semantic word games they have played to try to justify the pork barrelling is deeply unedifying.

Let’s run through the festering details.

When the Auditor-General exposed the fact grants were being funnelled disproportionately into marginal seats, Coalition MPs were quick to argue back and their leader led the charge. The allocations were within the rules, the Prime Minister claimed over and over in a morning media blitz on Monday. Those organisations receiving the grants were eligible to do so, we were all told.

When asked directly if he or his office were involved, Morrison tiptoed around the question, never directly answering it, all the while insisting the rules weren’t broken so he couldn’t understand why everyone was so up in arms.

Maybe not everyone. He did do a 30-minute interview on Sky News on Tuesday evening and wasn’t even asked about the scandal.

Never mind that the Auditor-General’s report at item 11 highlighted that the guidelines of the grant scheme were breached. It found that “73 per cent of the approved projects had not been recommended by Sport Australia”. When I tweeted this fact, and that it rendered Morrison’s claim the rules weren’t broken untrue, one of his spin merchants got in touch with me rather quickly to argue the point. Not an uncommon practice, I should point out.

Apparently it was possible to be within the rules but breach the guidelines, he said. I felt as if I were in the middle of a Yes Prime Minister scene, only he wasn’t joking.

Hearing minister after minister diligently trot out the prescribed talking points emailed out this week — that the recipients were eligible — simply demeaned those who parroted the lines.

Eligibility was never the point in this sorry tale. The point is that the scheme was supposed to be merit based. That is what the guidelines stipulated. In fact, the ministerial code of conduct also says ministers will act in the “public interest”, so none of them should involve themselves in pork barrelling in the first place.

Time-poor volunteers to community sporting organisations filled out applications and painstakingly drafted and redrafted what they submitted, believing merit was the principle to which this $100m grants scheme adhered. Former netball great Liz Ellis expressed her disgust on television this week.

Worthy, indeed more worthy applications than those deemed politically important, missed out.

When Morrison used media interviews to claim the grants were virtuous because they helped build facilities so girls wouldn’t have to get changed behind the shed (his wording), he forgot that his government’s decision to shaft meritorious applicants meant needy community sporting groups missed out simply because politics won out.

All of which is to say nothing about the stories emerging of wealthy organisations in once-safe blue-ribbon seats being granted money. Or, indeed, the heads-ups we are finding out some organisations got from their local MPs. Or, worse still, Liberal candidates handing over the cheques rather than the elected Labor MP for the area. If that’s not a sign of how politicised this grant process became I don’t know what is.

Only once the realisation set in for Team Morrison that this issue wasn’t going away did the Prime Minister order the Attorney-General to look into what the Auditor-General found. Given that the Attorney-General serves at the discretion of the Prime Minister, that wasn’t exactly an independent investigation to put in train now, was it?

Nor was the request Morrison made of his Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet head, Phil Gaetjens, to investigate whether Bridget McKenzie, as sports minister at the time, violated the ministerial code of conduct. At least not in terms of the perception of independence.

The head of DPM&C is Morrison’s former political chief of staff. Until relatively recently his job involved making political decisions. Now he’s independent. The public has a right to be cynical. If McKenzie is cleared, people will shake their collective heads. If she isn’t, they should be even more cynical, especially if she becomes a scapegoat, the only head to roll.

The decisions of where and how to allocate the sports grants in the way the Auditor-General said was against the guidelines (not to mention deeply political) were made from within the political office of the Prime Minister. Not by the sports minister.

That’s right; Morrison’s senior adviser for infrastructure and sport, a former Nationals staff member, no less, was point man on the political divvying up of the grants. He was working closely with campaign strategists inside the Prime Minister’s office and the federal Liberal Party secretariat before presenting the allocations to McKenzie as a neatly wrapped-up final product. After which cabinet ticked and flicked the winning applications through to the implementation stage.

Maybe the Prime Minister wasn’t personally involved. We can’t be sure. My sources haven’t divulged that. Perhaps, even though Morrison is a former state party director who ran campaigns, he stayed out of this pork-barrelling process.

The saga proves how sick our democratic system is becoming. How dodgy public policy decision-making is. How political this government is prepared to be at the expense of the community it represents. How far it will go to win. How selective it will be in who it really serves. And when caught out, how slippery it is willing to get to wiggle out of a mess of its own making.

A fish rots from the head down.

Peter van Onselen is a professor of politics and public policy at the University of Western Australia and Griffith University.