Car park scandal: same staffer from prime minister’s office was involved in sports rorts
The same staffer in the prime minister’s office who was engaged in the notorious sports rorts affair was also involved in deciding which projects were funded under the $660m commuter car park fund.
In evidence to a parliamentary committee on Monday, the Australian National Audit Office outlined how the federal government awarded funding under the scheme by preparing a list of 20 top marginal seats, and inviting the sitting MP to nominate projects for funding.
The senate hearing comes after a damning audit report found that not one of the 47 commuter car park sites promised by the Coalition at the 2019 election was selected by the infrastructure department, with projects selected by the government in a process that “was not demonstrably meritbased”.
Labor has described the grants scheme as “professional rorting”. Brian Boyd from the ANAO told the senate hearing that Treasury had pushed for an open and competitive tender but the infrastructure department rejected this approach.
He confirmed that the office of the then urban infrastructure minister, Alan Tudge, had begun the process with a “Top 20 marginals” list, with the sitting MPs, candidates and duty senators asked for input.
Boyd said the canvassing process was run through Tudge’s office in conjunction with the prime minister’s office.
“Ministers and two ministerial officers handled the canvassing process,” Boyd said.
“It started as initially being Top 20 marginals, the key thing was to touch base with the Top 20 marginals.”
Under questioning from Labor senator Katy Gallagher, Boyd confirmed that the staffer working in the prime minister’s office on the project was the same person who had been involved in the administration of the sports rorts
program.
“The PMO one was the same person,” Boyd said.
He said the audit office found that there had been no implementation plan for the program, which was risky and unusual given the commonwealth did not normally fund car parks. He also said there had been limited consultation between the federal and state governments about which projects were most meritorious.
“There was no procedures in place as to how you would assess the eligibility of a car park,” Boyd said.
“There wasn’t an open transparent, competitive approach to people saying here are good candidates to be considered but equally there wasn’t then a government to government approach where states are … responsible for this infrastructure.”
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He also said that in some cases, funding had been earmarked for certain electorates when a project had not yet been identified, with the party affiliation of seats used to decide the carveup of funding.
“In quite a number of cases they would have ‘here’s the electorate, here’s the project, here’s the dollars’ but in some cases they didn’t yet have the project identified.”
One electorate was canvassed for a commuter car park that did not have a railway station.
The audit found that some projects appeared to have been successful with the only paperwork backing up the grant being a press release, which Boyd said was “certainly not a common practice”.
Later in the hearing, infrastructure department officials defended their handling of the program, which they said used national partnership agreements to deliver projects announced by the Coalition in the 2019 election campaign.
The secretary, Simon Atkinson, noted the commuter car park fund was not a grant program and said it would be “unusual” to have an open competitive process for a national partnership agreement.
Officials were unable to say how many car parking spaces will be funded by the program and revealed that $890m of the larger $4.8bn urban congestion fund remains unallocated.
The department blocked requests for their legal advice and versions of the project spreadsheets, explaining the latter were “deliberative matter” considered by cabinet. They indicated they would make a public interest immunity claim to prevent release.
Officials denied having seen the “top 20 marginals” spreadsheet, although deputy secretary, David Hallinan, said one version of the spreadsheet provided to the department by the minister’s office had electorate information, which it then removed.
Atkinson said he had seen previous instances of a program in which not one project was selected by the department – including under previous governments.
“It’s not a new thing for prime ministerial media releases to be regarded as authority for a [project selection] decision by the prime minister,” he said.
The ANAO report found that nationally, 77% of the car parks were in Coalition-held electorates and a further 10% were in the six non-Coalition held electorates where candidates’ views were canvassed.
One car park in a Labor-held electorate 300 metres from a boundary was incorrectly recorded in the project selection documents and the department’s system as being located in the neighbouring Coalition electorate. Its funding was announced by the federal Coalition MP.
About 64% of the projects were in Melbourne, 2.5 times the number in Sydney, despite Infrastructure Australia rating Sydney’s roads as the busiest. Most of the Melbourne sites skewed towards the south-east, not the most congested roads in the northwest.
In Victoria, Coalition electorates were twice as successful as Labor electorates at winning funding – with seven of the 11 eligible Coalition electorates scoring funding (64%) compared with five of Labor’s 16 (31%).