Bluff and bluster politics: Scott Morrison drags Phil Gaetjens into the mire

Prime Minister Scott Morrison has either done the head of his department a great disservice, or Phil Gaetjens has done himself one.

And pity the man, he will now find himself having to answer for the political mess that is the sports grants affair at as many inquiries and hearings as the Senate and the parliament can muster.

Morrison has refused to release the Gaetjens report into Bridget McKenzie's role in allocating $100 million to hundreds of sports clubs ahead of the last election. Morrison's refusal is in keeping with the bluff and bluster form of politics that Australians will be getting used to from this Prime Minister.

The central finding of Auditor General Grant Hehir was that McKenzie's office essentially ignored the rankings done by Sport Australia and ran its own process, sorting applications not on merit but by who held the seat and whether the seat was marginal or being targeted in the election.

The auditor found that marginal and targeted seats were more successful in winning funding than they would have been under a merit system - an extra $6 million went their way. He found that 417 of the 684 grants went to projects that didn't meet the merit threshold, and three-quarters of those were in targeted or Coalition electorates.

That's it in a nutshell.

Inexplicably, on Sunday Morrison quoted Gaetjens as saying, "I find no basis for the suggestion that political considerations were the primary determining factor." Morrison said Gaetjens "did not find evidence that this process was unduly influenced by reference to marginal or targeted electorates".

What can those statements mean? The auditor found precisely the opposite and noted McKenzie's office even used a colour-coded spreadsheet to aid her analysis by which party held the seat. Perhaps the words "unduly" and "primary" are the ones that bridge the gap. Perhaps Morrison is verballing his departmental head. It is all the more difficult to understand given that McKenzie's then chief of staff told the audit office that one of the things they had taken into account was "distribution by political party".

The other snippet Morrison was prepared to release from the Gaetjens report was this: "He notes the data indicates that applications from marginal or targeted seats were approved by the minister at a statistically similar ratio of 32 per cent compared to the number of applications from other electorates at 36 per cent."

This sentence is not entirely clear, but assuming Morrison is comparing like with like, Gaetjens has apparently discovered a lower approval rate for marginal and targeted electorates than others across the three rounds. There is no easy way to square this with the auditor's findings, partly because Morrison is not releasing Gaetjens' analysis.

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The auditor found that in the first round of funding, projects in marginal and targeted electorates applied for 36 per cent of funding and received 47 per cent. He found that 41 per cent of the projects approved in this round were not recommended by Sport Australia. The picture was worse in rounds 2 and 3 as the election neared, when more than 70 per cent of approved projects were not among Sport Australia recommendations.

The auditor also found that nine of the 10 electorates to receive the most funding were marginal or targeted electorates, and nine of 10 seats that received the least funding were held by Labor.

Gaetjens' job is not to provide a smokescreen for the Prime Minister, but in his selective use of whatever Gaetjens found, Morrison is implicating the departmental secretary in the mire.

When the audit was released, we said it would be a miracle if McKenzie was still a minister by the time parliament resumed this week. She is gone, but not for the reasons she should be, reasons that are stark on any reading of the audit report. She has been forced to resign because of a conflict of interest over her membership of a gun club that won funding. This is an issue, but it is not the fundamental issue, and does not feature in the auditor's report.

The fundamental issue that will now swallow parliament and its inquires in the same way Angus Taylor's false document dominated the final months of last year is that the minister made decisions about a competitive grants process using public funding based on which party held the electorate and by what margin.