The list of projects to be funded under the Coalition's controversial sport grants program was changed by the Morrison Government hours after last year's election was called, Parliament has heard.

• The final list of approved projects was changed after Parliament was dissolved
• Labor is demanding the Prime Minister explain why changes were made after the election was called
• The Coalition maintains the program was managed appropriately

Labor is using every opportunity during Senate estimates to grill the Government and senior public servants over the management of the pre-election grants process.

The revelations from a Senate committee late on Monday increase pressure on the Coalition over the $100 million sporting infrastructure scheme.

The National Audit Office's scathing report into the program in January found it was politically biased.

Auditors revealed worthy applications were binned in favour of projects in politically important seats.

The committee heard last-minute changes took place on April 11, 2019 — the day Scott Morrison called the election and both houses of Parliament were dissolved.

Sport Australia received a final version of a spreadsheet of projects for approval at 12:43pm, more than four hours after Parliament was shut down.

The update added nine projects, and removed one.

The Prime Minister's Office was sent the same spreadsheet 8 minutes earlier.

The now-infamous colour-coded spreadsheet linked clubs which should receive funding with the electorate they were in.

These changes were seemingly made after 8:46am that same morning, when an earlier version of the spreadsheet had been sent to Sport Australia.

The Government had gone into caretaker mode at 8:30am.

Read more:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-03/govt-added-projects-to-sports-ror...

A lot of column inches have been devoted this week to the continuing sports rorts drama, with the most recent revelations making it very hard for the Prime Minister to deny his office was deeply involved in the malodorous affair.

That would be why Scott Morrison flat out refused to answer a question about the issue on Friday, ostensibly to keep the focus on the financial support the government is providing to keep the economy afloat as it is swamped by the twin effects of the drought/bushfires and coronavirus.

Let’s be clear – where political corruption exists, it should be exposed and cleaned out. The Labor Opposition and the media have every right – in fact an obligation – to apply the utmost scrutiny to the government’s corruption of its grant-giving processes.

Australians need to know their government is spending taxpayer dollars for blatant political purposes, even if voters in some electorates are indirect beneficiaries of the largesse.

However, there is a second important point that needs to be remembered, one which can make it difficult to bring governments to account for such misbehaviour. Voters are frustratingly selective when it comes to becoming enraged about political malfeasance.

This selectiveness is based, in the first place, on our very low opinion of politicians. We expect them to lie and we’re not surprised when they rort the system. The only time we get angry is when the rorts only benefit the politician – such as the abuse of travel allowance.

In the case of ‘sports rorts’, there are hundreds of communities enjoying new or improved sports facilities, and they are probably finding it a bit hard to get angry about how that benefit was funded.

As I’ve written several times in the past, even though voters believed John Howard lied about the ‘children overboard’ affair, they still trusted him to do what was in the nation’s interest, particularly when it came to the economy. When that trust evaporated over Mr Howard’s WorkChoices policy, voters had no hesitation in turfing him out.

Another way of looking at how voters trust, or don’t trust, politicians is explained in the compelling new book on the ALP Party Animals, by my colleague Samantha Maiden.

Veteran Labor campaign strategist Peter Barron notes in the book that Australian voters are notoriously risk averse, while former ACTU head, Chris Walton, argues that elections are usually won and lost on one question – who is the radical?

“Generally you will find whoever is able to paint the opponent as radical wins,” Mr Walton says.

So voters’ trust in politicians is not so much about who do we trust to tell the truth, but who do we consider the lesser risk, or who do have confidence in to do the right thing by the nation?

This knowledge is what gives Mr Morrison the conviction that he can get away with refusing to answer a question on sports rorts. Journalists might rightly seethe about the injustice, but most voters will remain comfortable and relaxed if they believe their trust in PM Morrison to manage the ‘risks’ remains well-founded.

The PM now realises this trust was shaken when he mishandled the summer bushfires. It’s been further eroded as the delivery of promised financial support for individuals and communities affected by the drought and bushfires has been interminably slow, adding to the active distrust of welfare recipients caught up in the robo-debt debacle.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/03/06/paula-matthewson-sports-rorts/

Read from top.

At a press conference today [FRIDAY, MARCH 6, 2020], there was a question that Scott Morrison refused to answer. He refused because the latest development in the sports rorts affair reflects very, very badly on him and his government. Also, because there is no good answer.

What the prime minster did not want to talk about is that the former minister for sport, Senator Bridget McKenzie, this morning threw someone under a bus.

In her first statement in several weeks, McKenzie more or less demonstrated that she is no longer willing to have her name dragged through the mud over the continuing scandal. She would be entitled to feel that she did the honourable thing by resigning. For some reason (yet to be determined), she has now decided that someone else should share the blame.

In Senate Estimates this week, it was revealed that on April 11 changes were made to the final list of sports grants recipients. McKenzie today wrote that she did not make any changes after April 4. The reason that this is a major problem for the government is that at the time McKenzie was the minister responsible. And if she wasn’t making the decisions, who was?

She didn’t say.

“I did not make any changes or annotations to this brief or its attachments after 4 April 2019,” she wrote. “My expectation was that the brief would be processed in a timely and appropriate manner. Nevertheless, changes were made and administrative errors occurred in processing the brief.”

The issue now is not just that funds were allocated according to the political objectives of the government, or that the corrupted process involved the prime minister’s office. Or even that some of the projects were ineligible, according to grant guidelines. It has also moved beyond the fact that public monies were being spent according to these political objectives while the caretaker conventions were supposed to apply. The biggest issue now is that we have a minister admitting that while she was legally responsible, she had nothing to do with decisions that were made in her name.

If we accept McKenzie’s statement, the only possible explanations for what occurred on April 11 are these: that someone in her office was independently making changes in her name without her approval; or that the prime minister’s office was dictating these changes.

Morrison, it should be recalled, has regularly sought to distance himself and his office from the controversy, insisting that McKenzie was the sole decision-maker. But given that there were more than 100 emails between the prime minister’s office and McKenzie’s office (and who knows how many phone calls, text messages etc.); and that the prime minister’s office was coordinating the colour-coding of spreadsheets according to political objectives, Morrison’s assertion is, to put it mildly, unlikely to be absolutely truthful.

Given, too, that the PM’s office made direct requests to McKenzie’s office about which projects should be on the final list of grant recipients, on April 11, as Audit Office executive Brian Boyd told Senate Estimates, it’s safe to conclude that the person thrown under a bus by McKenzie this morning was… Scott Morrison.

The reason this is a major problem for Morrison, perhaps more so than everything else, is this: if the legal authority to disburse this Commonwealth money resided with McKenzie and Sport Australia, then another party dictating where this money was to be spent would, according to the relevant Act, be doing it unlawfully.

What’s more, the prime minister then recruited a public servant, the head of his own department, Philip Gaetjens, into an effort to cover it all up. (Gaetjens’ report, which unsurprisingly exonerated the prime minister, is yet to be made public.)

To be blunt, it’s likely that the prime minister’s office unlawfully directed the spending of millions of public dollars in a corrupted scheme to help boost his chances of re-election. Then tried to cover it up. It’s little wonder he doesn’t want to talk about it.

Read more:

https://www.themonthly.com.au/today/nick-feik/2020/06/2020/1583469207/ro...

Read from top.

Firefighters in North Yorkshire have tackled a blaze that broke out after a pig swallowed a pedometer which then combusted in its pen after excretion.

The fire crews were called to a blaze covering 75 square metres at four pigpens in Bramham, near Leeds, on Saturday afternoon.

The North Yorkshire fire and rescue service said the fire was caused by “nature taking its course” and copper from the pedometer battery reacting with dry hay and the pigpen’s contents.

The pedometer was being used to prove the animal was free range and had been taken off one of its fellow pigs.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/08/burning-calories-pig-starts-farm-fire-by-excreting-pedometer

Read from top.

By Mungo MacCallum

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has stopped even pretending to mount a coherent defence of his sports-rorts plagued administration.

From the moment the Australian National Audit Office report arrived, the verdict was damning. The system had been sabotaged, public funds had been subverted, and convention and even law set aside in the name of party-political advantage.

As more details emerged, Morrison’s already threadbare defences were swept aside as it was comprehensively and forensically proved they were not only misleading but were in fact deliberate untruths designed to conceal an egregious disgrace of the kind that used to shake and even topple governments.

We were told that all the grants signed off by the then sport minister, Bridget McKenzie, were eligible – until they weren’t. The government followed the caretaker convention – until it didn’t. The PM’s office was never directly involved in the decision-making process – until it was. This was all shown conclusively in evidence given in Senate Estimates.

But the prime minister is utterly unconcerned: he has his story and he is sticking to it, and that is all that needs to be said, or, more often, shouted across the parliament. The pork has been delivered; now for the porky pies.

What is delicately described as misleading the parliament – what most people would call telling barefaced lies – used to be a hanging offence. Ministers cannot usually survive it, and even their leaders are vulnerable – more than one state premier has been forced to resign when called to account, even when they have been guilty of little more than lapses of memory.

Morrison cannot plead that excuse: he knows very well what he is saying, and is not resiling from it. His actions are, quite simply, unconscionable. His malfeasance should be terminal, or at the very least seriously damaging, and his obstinacy should do no more than delay the inevitable backdown, as has happened so often in the past.

But he is not for turning, and this is probably more than blind pig-headedness. There is at least an element of the rat-cunning he has used to propel himself up the greasy totem pole while feigning to have done no more than take advantage of circumstances determined by others, the ones without his squeaky-clean hands.

In this scenario, Morrison calculates that once the initial corruption had been revealed, subsequent disclosures would not materially alter the issue – the smoking gun is already lying beside the blood-stained corpse of good government, so if he can finesse his way past this blatant misdeed, he will survive.

But finesse is the wrong word – he depends on bluff and bluster, which have apparently worked. The more the accusations escalate, the less interested the voters appear. They know the government is crook – many had factored that in before the scandal erupted, and those who hadn’t are hardly surprised.

Exactly how, where and when the government became crook is irrelevant: details about precise times and places only confuse the issue. As Morrison correctly surmises, voters have other worries, more pressing ones than the knowledge that their government is on the take – after all, aren’t all governments?

Cynical, dangerous and deeply dishonest. But it works. Such are the rewards of debasing democracy.

read more:

https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/mungo-maccallum/2020/10/2020/1583800456/foul-play

Read from top.