There’s a reason why the knackerless NACC doesn’t care about grant corruption: politicians don’t want it to. Albanese also wants to export the model, Michael Pascoe writes.
So if it’s good enough for Scott Morrison, the National Anti-Corruption Commission, the badlands of Papua New Guinea and wilder corners of the Solomons, it’s good enough for Anthony Albanese. Let the inherent corruption of grants selectively doled out by politicians roll on.
I’m not sure which is more infuriating: the gross hypocrisy of the Labor Government practising what it used to lambast the Coalition for, or that it is directly providing the dosh for Solomon Islands MPs’ electorate pork-barrelling.
In PNG’s Tok Pisin, “mani bilong grisim ol vota” spells it out more honestly than the euphemisms our politicians prefer, translating as “money to grease voters”. That PNG practice, itself hiding behind official-sounding titles like District Services Improvement Program, has had a crippling corrupting influence on PNG.
But never mind a million Kina here or there to grease a Highlands electorate when Australia can buy an entire government for a bit less than $100m carved up between 50 Solomon Islands MPs for their “development priorities”.
Just spare me any protestations about the way Beijing tries to win friends and influence people in the South Pacific.
Pigs in mud all look the same to me.
Rorts galore
Oh well, at least most of this quickly abused backsheesh is likely to be spent in the Solomons, unlike the couple of hundred million dollars taxpayers are gifting to Australian NRL clubs and players as part of $600m PNG Chiefs “diplomacy”.
Also infuriating is the ineptitude of Australian media equating Albo’s $560m mani bilong grisim ol vota with Bridget McKenzie’s piddling $100m “sports rorts affair”.
A Perfect Slime: Scott Morrison’s slippery Sports Rorts report just the fix for Bridget McKenzie
No, Labor is more closely following the Coalition’s multi-billion-dollar Community Development Grants scandal with its invitation-only rorting of taxpayers’ funds.
Hey, what’s half a billion compared with Morrison’s $2.5B? Easy answer: about $2B, but it’s early days yet in Labor displaying the same lack of ethics as its predecessor. At this pace, Labor will spend just as much destroying whatever public trust is left in political integrity.
The Centre for Public Integrity’s analysis of Labor’s grandly-titled Major and Local Community Infrastructure program found what it was always going to find when disbursing funds is left to politicians seeking votes:
the money goes to where the politicians think it will most benefit the politicians.
Albanese had just one possible defence for continuing the Coalition’s grants corruption. If he had been honest instead of practising his now standard barefaced obstinacy, the Prime Minister could have said, “Yeah, fair cop, it’s crook, but we’re just trying to balance the ledger after the other mob’s innings.”
The Rigs are Getting Bigger: Michael Pascoe on Community Development Grants rorts
Golf anyone?
Albanese has attracted personal attention via the Marrickville Golf Club’s invitation to receive $6m. A minor but memorable and instructive element of the Morrison government’s corruption was its abuse of grants, schemes and wheezes to grease golf clubs in Coalition electorates.
Of $22.3m the Morrison gang slipped to golf businesses, just 2.2% ended up in Labor electorates.
Thus, given those Treasury keys, Labor has jumped into the trough. And no, there is not a single Coalition MP in any position to criticise their Labor colleagues in pork.
A threefold tragedy
Firstly, with grants being driven by political ambitions, those in greatest need of Federal funds are less likely to get them.
Secondly, this reinforces the electorate’s belief that “they are all like that” – unethical, corrupt, only interested in power for power’s sake.
Concern over integrity or lack thereof was one of the key factors that delivered the ‘Teal’ wave. Now, disgust with the major parties is a driver in One Hanson’s rise, a desire to blow the place up.
Thirdly, Labor and the Coalition having no remorse, wanting to continue to abuse public trust, ensured that the NACC would be knackerless.
Labor and the Coalition designed it that way.
Lacking the leadership to test the boundaries set by the pollies, the NACC has gone so far as to effectively write a “how to rort” guide for the government. One of Commissioner Brereton’s last acts was to find that as long as a rorted grant was spent on the specified rort, it was AOK with the NACC.
Not that any other media has bothered reporting that, so let me repeat a couple of paragraphs from that story.
A reason for having a NACC was to do more than the Australian National Audit Office can do, e.g. the ANAO found the National Party’s $1.15B Building Better Regions fund stank to high heaven, but could do no more than tell us that.
By way of comparison, there is the benchmark set by the NSW ICAC’s Operation Jersey investigation, which found:
“Defined as ‘the allocation of public funds and resources to targeted electors for partisan political purposes’, the ICAC concluded that pork barrelling can, under certain circumstances, involve serious breaches of public trust and conduct that amount to corrupt conduct.”
That’s a standard too high for the Federal Labor and Coalition parties that have the NACC they can be comfortable with.
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Michael Pascoe is an independent journalist and commentator with five decades of experience here and abroad in print, broadcast and online journalism. His book, The Summertime of Our Dreams, is published by Ultimo Press.