No Card, No Handicap

11 Comments

1. I am with the PM on this. He walks his dog there. So what I walk around the local golf course .I am not a member paid up or voluntary. McKenzie is a member of her rifle club. Totally different scenario.

2. As a member of the Executive Committee of an organisation that sometimes applies for grants and gets them, but not always, I don’t think that our membership have much influence on what grants we get. Sometimes we are advised about a grant – our local Federal member puts out a helpful Grants Bulletin quarterly, our Liberal State and Federal members do very little that is helpful in finding grants. One of our members subscribes to Grant Guru to keep tabs on what might be coming up.

   You would be surprised by the range of grants available – Wheen Bee Foundation, Bundaberg Rum Bushcare Grants …. At one time we were working alongside our local Golf Club and chasing grants to improve the environmental qualities of the local creek where it flowed through the Golf Course.

   Applying for a grant is usually a very onerous process, requiring a costed, worthwhile project. There is no place to list our important members. The grant bodies are mainly interested in having value for their generosity in terms of acknowledgement.

   Making a corruption scandal around Mr Albanese’s honorary membership as somehow influencing or in any way connected to the achievement of a successful grant simply shows the ignorance of the commentators who clearly have no knowledge or understanding of how community organisations get funding for important projects.

3. Cath, you’re right, and I’d go further: the membership is the weakest part of the story. Plenty of us walk a course we’ve never joined, and an honorary membership nobody told you about in 2012 is not a scandal. It’s a way in.

   And you’re right about McKenzie too. It is a different scenario. She was the minister and the decision-maker. That distinction is real, and the sketch says so in as many words.

   But it’s the other end of the thing that bothers me. Rutherglen Golf Club in Indi is more than a century old, its clubhouse seats sixty and needs replacing, and it was after eight hundred thousand dollars. It wasn’t invited to apply. Marrickville was, and got six million. Nobody has explained who drew up the invitation list, or why a five hundred and sixty million dollar programme was closed and non-competitive at all. Three dollars in every four went to Labor seats. Forty-five electorates got nothing.

   None of that requires the Prime Minister to have done anything improper. It just requires somebody to say how the players were chosen. That’s still the unanswered question, and the dog has nothing to do with it.

4. Lyndal, thank you for this. You know the system from the inside and everything you describe is accurate: the costed project, the onerous forms, the acknowledgement requirements, the member who watches Grant Guru so the rest of you don’t have to. And you’re right that nobody’s honorary membership gets a submission over the line. The membership is the thinnest part of this story and I’d not defend it as the charge.

   But the process you’re describing is the one that wasn’t used here. The Major and Local Community Infrastructure Program was invitation-only and non-competitive. You could not apply. The Commonwealth had to invite you first, and there is no published account of how it decided whom to invite. Your committee’s whole apparatus, the bulletin, the subscription, the costed proposal, would have been of no use whatever, because there was no round to enter.

   That’s the point, and your experience makes it better than mine does. Rutherglen Golf Club in Indi had an engaged local member working with them and still couldn’t get in the door, because there wasn’t one. Marrickville was invited and received six million dollars. The Commonwealth’s own rules say you use a competitive merit-based process unless another is agreed, and that you document why. That document has not appeared.

   So I’d put it this way. The scandal isn’t that somebody’s name was on a membership list. It’s that for this particular $560 million there was no list to apply to at all, and nobody will say who wrote the one there was.

5. Oh dear ….. I can see Thommo enjoying his comments on this COALition rant poorly disguised & masquerading as a Labor interview.

   Oops!! Silly me!! THAT was mythical Albo and the indominable Clark!!

   
   
   
   

6. Wonderful, David. Clarke and Dawe could not have done that any better.

7. Mostly Labor-held communities.
   This specific grant aside, look at the imbalance of grants during the LNP’s most recent tenure. A certain amount of redress may be required to even that out. And spare me the “two wrongs don’t make a right”; sometimes the second can help repair the first’s damage. The process, however, needs to be transparent, and that is the issue with which I’m most concerned here.

8. Thanks David, nice to see you back, and I concur with Michael, Clarke and Dawe, I believe, would be proud if it was one of their own.

   There are two questions I think Australians should keep in mind:
   first, was it corrupt behavour and so bad governance?
   second, putting aside the question of corruption, was it bad governance anyway?

   One could have sympathy with Labor if they were wanting to address the maladministration of the Coalition who favoured Coalition and marginal seats, but if I remember particularly Coalition seats.

   But that can only do so much lifting. If the Coalition’s pork-barrelling was unfair and created an imbalance in funding, then Labor needed only to make the grants needs-based to address that imbalance – they didn’t.

   From Michael Pascoe on MWM: “..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.”

   https://michaelwest.com.au/rorts-galore-why-is-albo-encouraging-grant-corruption/

   Blind Freddie could see that using any government using public funding for its own political gains is corruption.

   Labor, as pointed out in the interview, didn’t use a needs based criteria, it didn’t address all areas of need. What it did was played favourites. With an invitation only basis, and no competitive criteria, it quite possibly was handing out grants to mate’s projects.

   When the Coalition was called out by the Auditor General for breaking the rules, the whole pork-barrelling rort was rightly labelled as corrupt, unfair and bad governance.

   Labor may not have broken the rules but it is equally corrupt, unfair and bad governance.

   Ex-senator Rex Patrick makes no bones about it on MWM: “Pork-barrelling is corruption. It’s (major) parties using public money to buy votes for a ‘stay in power’ or ‘get in power’ advantage, and/or for individuals to ‘stay on a high MP salary’ or ‘get on a high MP’s salary’.”

   https://michaelwest.com.au/pork-barrelling-is-back-to-stay-its-corrupt-but-coalition-barely-calls-out-labor/

   The question of most importance in regard to Federal pork-barrelling is ‘what has a Federal MP got to do with funding golf clubs,or swimming pools, or rifle clubs, or building carparks? The answer is nothing, that’s a state or council responsibility, according to Parliament’s own education office. Under the second point in ‘Environment’: “state and territory parliaments—protection of the natural environment, approvals for new developments, waste disposal etc”

   https://peo.gov.au/understand-our-parliament/how-parliament-works/three-levels-of-government/three-levels-of-government-governing-australia

   Under a Westminister system of government, Federal government taking care of national issues, state government taking care of state issues, and councils taking care of local issues makes sense, well, to me anyway.

   Federal politicians running around making promises of funding for golf clubs, swimming pools, rifle clubs or carparks, is bad, ineffective governance – it shouldn’t be their place. Shouldn’t they instead defer that as a matter they will take up with their state counterpart, and perhaps lean on them. They should be able to make promises to fund the State government properly to tackle such issues.

   Pork-barrelling is bad governance, just as pumping money into marginal seats is bad governance. Does it ever end up addressing the greatest need? I don’t think so.

   If you’re thinking of voting Labor or Coalition at the next federal election, when you see your children/grandchildren studying, do you tell them: ‘What are you doing! don’t waste your time, learn how to borrow money and grease the palm of officials and voters’?

   Some say that people are shifting their support behind One Nation because they don’t see the two other major parties as serving them, and so they want to tear the system down. Perhaps insteading making excuses for corrupt behavour, Labor and Coalition supporters should ask themselves, how would people toying with the idea of supporting One Nation view Labor’s pork-barrelling, coming on the heels of the Coalition’s pork-barrelling?

9. I’m not that familiar with Clarke and Dawe, David – I’ve never been much of a TV watcher – but if they were as half as witty and entertaining as your tribute to them, then I was definitely missing out.

10. a silly over reaction – only issue lies with the ‘by invitation’ which is inexplicable
    in no way equals the corruption of the ‘sports rorts’

11. Carol Taylor, poor John Clarke is no longer with us, left for the Great Gig in the Sky some time ago.

    Dawe always did the straight guy but the team were excellent satirists.