When it comes to rorting and theft of taxpayer money, there’s safety in numbers. And this kind of abuse is entrenched in one of the sleaziest governments we’ve ever seen.
The rorting of taxpayer money by the National Party in the Infrastructure portfolio is now so normalised that no one gets outraged by it any more — which is just the way the Nationals, who are the arch thieves of Australian politics, like it.
Rosie Lewis in The Australian today describes the latest rort: the Building Better Regions scheme, round four of which saw grants flow strongly to Coalition electorates and nearly $58 million flow to the electorates of Michael McCormack and three of his Nationals colleagues.
Lewis drew attention to what is a recurring feature in the way the Nationals rort grants programs: by imposing “ministerial panels” over the top of independent assessment of grant applications by public servants. This isn’t the first time a “ministerial panel” involving McCormack has been found rejecting approved projects and substituting rejected ones or ones linked to Coalition donors. Indeed, the predecessor program to “Building Better Regions”, the “Stronger Regions” program, also had a ministerial panel that rejected departmentally approved projects and substituted unapproved ones.
Read more about the latest abuse by the Nationals…
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