Battleground marginal seats get more than a sporting chance

Bridget McKenzie’s $100m sports grant program is set to be scrutinised by Parliament.

‘We were treated with scant respect’: Fremantle Lawn Tennis Club president Laurie Apps. Picture: Marie Nirme

Bridget McKenzie’s controversial $100m sports grant program is set to be scrutinised by federal parliament, amid revelations more than a third of the funding went to the country’s most marginal seats.

The Nationals deputy leader stared down “ridiculous” calls to resign on Thursday in the wake of the Australian National Audit Office’s damning report into the virtual slush fund, which found ­applications were not always ­assessed on merit and the government was often biased in the projects­ it approved.

Labor is preparing to refer the program to the joint committee of public accounts and audit or create a separate inquiry if necessary, saying it had been misused by the Coalition to pork-barrel key ­marginal seats ahead of last year’s election.

Analysis by The Australian of the 684 successful grants shows $22.6m was awarded to 23 of the Coalition’s electorates held on a margin of less than 5 per cent ­before the May poll, while $12.1m went to 19 of Labor’s most margina­l seats.

That means about 35 per cent of the grants went to 28 per cent of lower-house seats. Queensland marginal electorates received the most grants funding, with $9.6m being awarded, compared with $8.8m in NSW, $6.7m in Victoria and $4.2m in Western Australia.

Senator McKenzie, who as the then sports minister used her own assessment process to award funding­, refused to apologise for her ­decision-making and the targetin­g of marginal electorates and other must-win Coalition seats under the program.

She claimed there was a case of “reverse pork-barrelling”.

“Originally there was something like 26 per cent of those projects­ recommended were heading into Labor Party electorates,” she said. “Thanks to my decision­-making as minister, 34 per cent of the projects delivered went into Labor electorates.”

Nationals deputy leader Bridget McKenzie and Prime Minister Scott Morrison speak to the media. Picture: AAP

The Ulverstone Soccer Club sits in the marginal Tasmanian seat of Braddon, which the Liberal Party took from Labor at the election. Former club president Alis­tair Ollington has no doubt the organisation was a successful recipient­ because of last year’s politic­al contest.

Mr Ollington spent about four days pulling together the club’s ­application and found out about six months later, in the middle of the election campaign, that it would get $210,000 to erect three new and much-needed lighting towers around the sportsground.

Labor matched the funding in an election commitment. “I would find it hard to argue that it was for any other reason than we were in a marginal seat,” Mr Ollington said.

“While I think it was a political issue, I don’t back away from the fact our code needed the grants that were processed. Our code of football is very much underfunded in comparison to other sports.”

The audit office found marginal and targeted electorates applied for 36 per cent of the funding sought across all applications and received 47 per cent of the total first-round amount approved.

 

More than 2000 applications worth nearly $400m were ­received and Senator McKenzie increasingly ignored Sport Australia’s assessments of which ones should be approved, as the election grew closer.

She did not rule out taking the same decision-making approach in the future and said the Auditor-General was clear no rules had been broken.

Nationals MPs said Senator McKenzie could land herself in deeper trouble, depending on what the parliamentary inquiry found and how hard Labor went in attacking the deputy leader, but insisted she was on safe ground for now. One Nationals MP suspect­ed the scandal surrounding ­Senator McKenzie’s parallel grant assessment process would have frustrated Scott Morrison — who has come under fire for his response to the bushfire crisis — more than her party colleagues.

“The last thing they (the PM’s office) need is this,” the MP said.

Government sources pointed to Labor’s pork-barrelling record, including that 48 per cent of funding under its regional development Australia fund went to applications that had not been recommended by the panel.

The audit office did raise questions as to whether Senator McKenzie had the legal authority to approve projects. “Every single one of those 684 projects that was funded was elig­ible,” she said.

“The ANAO report has made it very, very clear that this prog­ram delivered on its intent … Where suggestions for improvements have been made, the ­government has been working to implement that, and my advice is that Sport Australia has already been working hard to that end.”

Nationals leader Michael ­McCormack threw his support behind Senator McKenzie, saying she had made a significant difference to many of the recipient communities.

“This program will hopefully continue to benefit local com­mun­­ities all over the country, including in many Labor seats where MPs have been happy to receive sporting grants and publicly said so,” the leader said.

Former Nationals leader and NSW MP Barnaby Joyce said if Senator McKenzie’s actions were legal, then it was “tough luck” if people were upset with her decis­ions.

The Ulverstone Soccer Club’s current president, Sam Kingshott, said the light towers would ­increase space available for training sessions and allow night matches, boosting participation across its 10 teams for both men and women.

Mr Kingshott said any grants program should select successful projects based on strict eligibility criteria, such as who the project was helping, and how much grant money was required versus the total project cost and gender. “It was disheartening that our project was not approved in earlier rounds of funding,’’ he said.

“However, as a club, we were elated that the successful monies obtained in the Sport Australia infrastruc­ture grants was going into exactly what was required by our club in our application to progress soccer in the central coast community,” he said.

Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles said the Prime Minister was not making decisions about community sport but about how to save the Liberal Party.

“Scott Morrison owes an ­explanation to the hundreds of sporting clubs around Australia today about why he ignored their interests in favour of saving his own political skin,’’ Mr Marles said.

“What this demonstrates is that Scott Morrison is not a Prime Minister for all Australians, he’s just a Liberal Party hack.

“Not only is he loose with the truth, we now know he bends the rules for his own purposes. This is an absolute disgrace.”

At the Fremantle Lawn Tennis Club, in the Labor stronghold of Fremantle in Western Australian, there was anger that it missed out on grant funding before the election. The club, an ageing but much-loved venue for hundreds of residents which dates back to 1895 has been in dire need of a facelift and upgrade for years.

So president Laurie Apps and his club stalwarts got together with the City of Fremantle to work on a detailed grant request for $361,000. The club had glowin­g letters of support from the sports’ body Tennis West, and from two local politicians.

What surprised Mr Apps was that nothing came of the club’s painstaking process. The club didn’t appear on a first grant round list, but was urged to resubmit for the second round. Again no luck. One of the senior people at Tennis WA shrugged and told Mr Apps: “‘You’re in Fremantle, you’re in a safe Labor seat.”

“I raised the issue at Tennis WA’s AGM and I used the word ‘pork barrelling’ because that’s clearly what it was,” recalls an angry Mr Apps. “We put in an enormous amount of volunteer hours and we were treated with scant respect.’’

Additional reporting: Victoria Laurie