Analysis
Posted
Pessimists (and why wouldn't you be one these days?) might look out their windows today and see a political landscape this week where we face even more existential threats than normal.
There's climate change, there's a coronavirus — COVID-19 — which is clearly not good, but has the political advantage of being an opportunity to help restore the Government's reputation for dealing with a crisis.There is the collapse of the share market.
And then there is the spectre of the holiest grail in Australian politics — the budget surplus — being about to vanish (even before, of course, it actually ever materialised).
The Government holds on, with almost religious fervour, to the idea that it may, somehow, still be blessed with a surplus: not thanks to its good management, but the miracle of the iron ore price.
Like the arrival of the coronavirus, which the Prime Minister keeps reminding us he couldn't foresee or control, the iron ore price is also out of his control.
The surplus idea isn't just an embarrassment of 12 months
If the surplus doesn't turn up, the coronavirus may provide some cover for the Government's egg on face over its "Back in Black" rhetoric at the budget last year.Before turning to things that the Government does control, it is worth briefly noting how the whole return to surplus idea isn't just an embarrassment of the past 12 months, but an idee fixe which has dominated the political landscape for more than a decade.
It cursed Labor through the global financial crisis, and became an unfulfilled boast of the Abbott opposition and government, which ultimately helped take the shine off its policy competence and led to the machismo of its first disastrous budget.
Through not much actual good housekeeping by any of the subsequent forms of the Coalition in power, we were gradually heading back to at least budget balance.
The bitter dangers of budget politics
At best, the mirage has moved a little further away. At worst, the Government will look foolish and Labor will have its day of retribution over surplus failure.The only longer term question is whether the budget surplus will be quite as politically weaponised in future.
The bitter dangers of budget politics, you would think, might make governments a little more careful about how they spend money, and how they manage things that they do control, like observing the law.
But while we continue to watch sanctimonious parsimony from MPs explaining why they can't give the unemployed enough money to eat, the ongoing saga of the sports rorts scandal — and a broader picture of pork-barrelling on an industrial scale — shows them not only cavalier in the way they spend our money to achieve their own political goals, but apparently not all that fussed about niceties such as the law and the constitution.
A quick recap: the grants scheme at the centre of the storm is the $100 million Community Sport Infrastructure grants scheme.
Labor is now raising questions about the $3 billion Urban Congestion Fund.
That's on top of questions about the $841 million Building Better Regions Fund, where 94 per cent of the grants were to electorates held or targeted by the Coalition in the months leading up to the federal election.
Programs in the spotlight
The auditor-general appeared in another parliamentary inquiry on Friday to discuss the $220 million Regional Jobs and Investment Package, which his report found had serious flaws, with ministers rejecting 28 per cent of the recommended applications and approving 17 per cent without recommendation.
There's the $300 million Drought Communities Program, where the Government has also ignored its own criteria in awarding grants with almost half the councils not meeting the funding criteria.
Schemes like the Stronger Communities program — where small grants are selected by MPs, or applicants are invited to apply by their local MP — have been criticised.
And, as the ABC's 7.30 highlighted this week, the Female Facilities and Water Safety Stream program — which was supposed to help provide facilities like changerooms for women in regional areas — was used to give $10 million to that well-known regional facility, the North Sydney Swimming Pool.
Similarly, there was controversy last year engulfing the Community Environment Program, after it emerged a Liberal MP had announced tens of thousands of dollars' worth of grants to community groups in a highly marginal seat before applications for the program had opened.
Questions of legality and constitutionality
All in all, you'd have to say we don't actually know the full extent to which the Morrison Government used various funding programs to target particular electorates in the lead-up to last year's election.What we do know is that a growing number of some of our most eminent constitutional lawyers are saying that, at least in the scheme at the centre of the storm, there are serious questions of legality and constitutionality involved.
Professors Cheryl Saunders and Michael Crommelin from the University of Melbourne have written to the Senate committee investigating the sports grants, noting there have been two different arguments put up to support the legal basis for the grants.
Saunders and Crommelin argue there are constitutional problems with both. They further argue the grants also are vulnerable on a range of administrative law grounds.
It should be noted that Sport Australia told the Senate committee this week that it had obtained advice from an eminent QC which confirmed that nothing that Sport Australia had done was a problem.
There seemed to be an ominous silence about the actions of the minister.
An existential threat of a different kind
But back to Professors Saunders and Crommelin and their pesky interest in the constitution and the law."Compliance with constitutional and legal requirements is necessary for reasons of the rule of law," they said in what you would hope was an obvious observation.
"The worrying example of the sports grants and other similar Commonwealth grant programs that have come to light in recent weeks illustrates how and why compliance with these requirements also is important for accountable, fair and transparent government and for minimising waste of public money.The University of Sydney's Professor Anne Twomey goes even harder, telling the committee it is "inquiring into a very serious matter involving unlawful government spending of public money on a significant scale".
"We cannot emphasise strongly enough the significance of the constitutional and legal issues we have raised.
"The Australian constitutional system relies heavily on the integrity and effectiveness of governing institutions.
"These are jeopardised by the sports grants and similar programs, exacerbating the erosion of trust in public institutions which already is a matter for concern.
"The committee's inquiry offers a watershed moment in which to take stock of Commonwealth spending practice before it gets further out of control."
"Governments, like citizens, are obliged to obey the constitution and the law, and this is not happening.
"If Members of Parliament are concerned by the increasing disengagement of the public from the political system and the lack of respect for politicians, then this is a potent example of precisely what causes it."
It sounds like an existential threat of a different kind, and one in which politicians have self-interest and can control. If only they would.
Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.
No comments:
Post a Comment