It always pays to read the fine print.
Last month’s report by the Australian National Audit Office into the now notorious sports grants scheme wasn’t happy reading for the Government. But there was one line the Prime Minister latched onto.
It was a line in the opening “summary and recommendations” section, a mere nine pages in.
“No applications assessed as ineligible were awarded grant funding,” said the auditor-general.
Scott Morrison held onto this line for dear life. It appeared to be a small life raft in a sea of political grief.
Despite accusations of brazen political interference, colour-coded spreadsheets and pork-barrelling, the Prime Minister argued all the projects were at least “eligible”.
The Coalition, he insisted, hadn’t gone as far as Labor’s Ros Kelly with her infamous whiteboard in handing out cash to ineligible projects.
Setting the record straight
Along the way, no-one seemed to notice the Prime Minister had taken the auditor-general’s quote and amended it ever so slightly to suit his own purposes. See if you can spot the difference.
Where the auditor-general said, “no applications assessed as ineligible” received money, the Prime Minister said, “every single one of the projects that was approved was eligible”.
The difference between the two quotes may seem semantic and most didn’t spot it. But the audit office did.
After spending 10 months forensically investigating this scheme, officials at the audit office knew plenty of ineligible projects were awarded funding.
These officials aren’t allowed to give media interviews, nor respond, when the Prime Minister openly rejects the central finding of their report.
So when called before a Senate inquiry, the audit office team took the first opportunity to set the record straight.
Liberal senator Eric Abetz put the eligibility question to the executive director of the audit office, Brian Boyd.
“You did find that no ineligible project or application was funded?” he asked.
“No, Senator”, Mr Boyd replied, “that’s not what we found.”
This was not the answer an incredulous Senator Abetz expected.
The fine print can be found deep inside the report
Boyd went on to reveal a whopping 43 per cent of projects awarded funding were ineligible and explained in some detail what happened.
Sport Australia examined hundreds of applications from local sporting clubs. Some were eligible, some were not.
As Boyd told the inquiry, five new applications and four amended applications came in “after Sport Australia had finished its assessment work”.
These new applications, which had not been properly assessed “were ineligible under the guidelines and they were funded”.
The bottom line appears to be this: these late addition projects weren’t assessed as ineligible, because they weren’t assessed at all, at least not by Sport Australia.
They certainly weren’t assessed as eligible.
The fine print on all this can be found deep inside the auditor-general’s report, as its officials helpfully pointed out to the Senate committee.
In addition to these late applications, it turns out a further 280 grants weren’t eligible either because the sporting clubs had begun construction work before funding was approved.
In eight of these cases, remarkably, the work was all done and dusted before the minister gave the sign-off.
This truth bomb hasn’t changed their tune
As highlighted in chapter four of the audit office report, “this situation suggests that — particularly in respect of the eight completed projects — those selected for funding under the program may not have required Australian Government funding in order to deliver their projects”.
For weeks the Prime Minister has argued, even in Parliament, that all projects funded under this discredited scheme were eligible.
This is now plainly at odds with the finding of the auditor-general.
Not that this truth bomb has changed the Government’s tune.
Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack continued to insist yesterday that projects funded under the scheme “were all eligible”, ignoring the glaring new evidence from the audit office that 43 per cent were not.
Finance Minister Mathias Cormann was more nuanced, arguing that “no project which received funding, under this sports grants program was assessed as ineligible at the time the decision to allocate funding was made”.
Morrison will have to change tack
That’s a long way from the Prime Minister’s blunt statement that “all projects were eligible”.
Perhaps the secretary of the Prime Minister’s Department, Phil Gaetjens, came to a different conclusion to the auditor-general on this eligibility question, just as he apparently did on the overall politicisation of the scheme.
We’ll only know if the Gaetjens report is made public.
Until then, Morrison must either attempt Cormann’s more convoluted technical description of what went on or admit he was wrong.