ANDREW GILES MP
SHADOW MINISTER FOR MULTICULTURAL AFFAIRS
SHADOW MINISTER FOR CITIES AND URBAN INFRASTRUCTURE
SHADOW MINISTER ASSISTING FOR IMMIGRATION AND CITIZENSHIP
MEMBER FOR SCULLIN
How we get to work each day has a big impact on the quality of our lives.
Most mornings, the biggest challenge isn't getting the kids out of bed, it is finding a park at the train station. This is a frustration shared across our cities and their suburbs.
So it's easy to see why so many Liberal MPs made so much of promising extra car parks at train stations before the last election.
They were responding to a real pressure point in people's lives. In fact, the original idea was Anthony Albanese's, the Liberals just stole it.
Unfortunately, however, it turns out the Liberals were never interested in making Australians’ commutes easier. This is all laid out in the recent report from the Australian National Audit Office, which details a desperate and dysfunctional government prepared to do anything to hold onto marginal seats.
The scandal has everything: ineligible projects, rampant under delivery, the political targeting of projects and secret spreadsheets shared between the then-minister and Scott Morrison's office; 87 per cent of funding was directed at Liberal or marginal seats and ineligible projects were funded.
Ten projects aren't even near a train station, six have already been cancelled and not a single project was proposed by the department or came about through a competitive merit-based process.
The projects that were funded were chosen through a secret spreadsheet, passed between the offices of ministers and the Prime Minister. And $660m of taxpayer money was spent with no other purpose than the Morrison Government's political survival.
This is sports rorts on an industrial scale, and an even worse scandal, for two reasons.
Firstly, in terms of its scale and significance. This is part of a $4.8 billion program to make our cities and suburbs more liveable. Spent properly, $4.8 billion could reshape the daily lives of millions of Australians.
Secondly, this program shows the Morrison Government has learnt from sports rorts, but they have taken the wrong lesson. Sports rorts came to light because it could be shown worthy sporting clubs had missed out, despite scoring highly on the criteria. Here, they cynically had no criteria and offered no opportunity to make an application.
We need to get to the bottom of this. Which means the Morrison Government must come clean.
Suburban commuters deserve the truth and so does every Australian who wants a government of integrity.
This opinion piece was first published in the Herald Sun on Wednesday, 14 July 2021