Holding politicians to account

Thank you, Karen Middleton, for yet again doing what a media ought, investigating and asking the hard questions and pulling into the light buried Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) reports. To think that a man now in charge of our country was asked by the minister to resign from Tourism Australia and could ignore the processes in place to account for so many taxpayer dollars, breaching procurement guidelines on contracts worth $184 million and engaging in contracts before they were signed or had value-for-money assessments. As a researcher into poverty and exclusion in this country, and as a taxpayer, I watch how money is moved around to reward those with so much and be taken from those with so little.

Our most vulnerable have little money for survival as it stands, and with new processes that effectively exclude and demonise the poor – dealing with layer upon layer of so many impossible hurdles, often when they are at their most unwell, for example those with mental illness or poor mortality rates, such as our Aboriginal citizens – I despair. The level of funnelling of our taxpayer money to spurious thought bubbles of short-term problematic political fixes to hold onto power, in a vacuum of policy and evidence-based practice, is manifest. Thank God for sections of the media being independent and fearless and for statutory accountability offices such as the ANAO.

The question I also ask is how the political classes can get away with burying such public interest information for so long? How do they then go on to lead our country without any true reckoning and correction of their evident poor practice? Why as a public can we allow them to then vilify others who struggle to put food on the table or place a roof over their heads on a meagre amount of money that government, daily, is taking away?

– Liz Curran, ANU College of Law