Just when you thought it couldn’t, political integrity has dropped another notch.
I thought we reached the low point in our rorting degradation last year when Gladys Berejiklian was metaphorically caught with her fingers in the paper shredder over $252 million worth of politicised council grants.
The NSW Premier effectively said: ‘Yeah, it’s crook, you might not like it, but that’s the way it is, so too bad’.
But on Sunday federal Finance Minister Simon Birmingham went further when confronted with the Morrison government’s $660 million #carparkrorts. According to the leader of the government in the Senate, it’s all our fault, “it’s what electorates expect”.
At least Ms Berejiklian was capable of admitting to the pork barrelling.
Senator Birmingham stuck with obfuscation, deflection and claiming black was white on the ABC’s Insiders program, topping his performance with the ultimate self-serving justification: “The Australian people had their chance and voted the Morrison government back in.”
Never mind the Coalition has been running an increasingly questionable series of rorted grants schemes to buy votes, win friends and influence people with schemes now totalling billions of public dollars.
There is an unspoken covenant between taxpayers and government that when we pay taxes, we expect that money to be used first, foremost and always for the good of the Commonwealth, hopefully in an efficient manner.
It is not to empower shiny bums to keep polishing the Treasury benches by splurging billions in key seats with inefficient and iniquitous boondoggles.
For 18 months now on these pages, we have been cataloguing the Coalition’s bastardisation of various grants schemes, starting with the particularly egregious $100 million #sportsrorts up to the daddy of them all, the $3-plus billion (and still growing) Community Development Grants, with stops along the way for the Building Better Regions Fund, the Local Roads and Community Infrastructure Program et al.
‘If you’ll rort one grants scheme, you’ll rort ‘em all’ is the lesson we’ve been taught by the government.
Continues here https://thenewdaily.com.au/opinion/2021/07/05/government-rorts-funding/
