

Mr COSTELLO (2.52 p.m.) —The sports rorts affair, which has been before the House now for a period of three months, has moved into a new and damaging phase for the Minister for the Environment, Sport and Territories (Mrs Kelly), who has been unable to give any answer of any sense to any question over the last three months and who today suffered the ultimate humiliation of having the Prime Minister (Mr Keating) stand up and answer a question that she had so obviously fluffed. Nothing could have illustrated more her weakness as a minister, the weakness of her position in the House today, than to see the Prime Minister getting up and reading out material that she had tried to fire off herself in her own gun with her own blanks—and miss. So we get the spectacle of the Prime Minister, in an ultimate humiliation of a minister, standing at the dispatch box, trying to fill in the pieces and justify what she has been doing. The episode of the Prime Minister springing to the defence of the lame duck minister was matched only by the feelings and responses of backbenchers. They stood there in utter disbelief of the fact that, after three months, she still cannot manage any defence, any justification, in relation to the sports rorts affair.

The sports rorts affair is no longer just a question of malappropriation, denial and cover-up. It is now a fully fledged cover-up. As was said before, it is a case of `mategate' where the minister for sports—part of the royal family engaged in a cover-up—is now like a spider pulling more and more people into this web that she has woven for herself. And today she has pulled in the Prime Minister. This minister will not only drag down herself over this affair; there is no question at all that she is now pulling down into the vortex of this absolute scandal all those who happen to be around her, all those who have attempted to cover it up, all those who cannot insist on ministerial standards, all those who cannot account to the Auditor-General, and all those who stand condemned by the actions that she engaged in as a minister in relation to this particular matter.

This sports rorts affair started off with a malappropriation that saw this minister, who had a two-year program of $30 million, blow the lot over a three-month period, clean out the whole fund that was supposed to still be going until July 1994, in a desperate effort to shovel funds out to marginal Labor electorates prior to the March 1993 election. She managed to get rid of the $30 million by the end of January, and the Prime Minister called the election on 7 February. She managed to delve out $326,000 on average to Labor marginal seats and to ensure that coalition marginal seats got exactly half.

She claims—this is her claim—that she personally deliberated on 2,800 applications, granted 726 of them, applied statutory formula, and did it without one single note. We might be able to replace the Medibank computers with her in future as a cost saving measure. She can sit down and take information from state, territory and local governments and prominent community leaders. She can have letters and faxes and delegations. She can decide to grant 726 applications, and she does not need a record to do it.

The other day when she was asked to table documents, she said that there were no documents to table, but that she was going to table her brain so that we could see how this is done. It is absolutely beyond belief. She managed to reject 90 per cent of applications that her department said were well documented, demonstrated community need and satisfied all the criteria. She managed to reject 90 per cent of them whilst she was granting applications that lacked relevant information, that had no adequate demonstration of community need and that did not satisfy many of the other selection criteria. The reason for that is that this minister at no stage was personally sitting down applying all of the criteria that she talks about—disadvantaged areas, outer suburban areas, Aboriginal populations or migrant populations. She was not doing that. She sat down with her Mackerras pendulum and worked out where the seats were and who needed the money, and she made sure that she shelled out the money in a last desperate gamble to try to buy the election. That is why this has to be stopped.

If governments get the idea that they can spend $30 million to buy elections, that is the end of open, fair and honest elections in this country. It is a great way of spending money and not having to declare it to the Australian Electoral Commission, because the donor is the Australian taxpayer. That is the way the minister has treated the Australian taxpayer—as the donor for an electoral fund. That was the first stage of the sports rorts affair—malappropriation.

The second stage was denial. The Auditor-General went in there and said, `There is no audit trail. I cannot work out how you made the decision. Where are the records?'. He said that it was an easy money scheme that could attract flies like a carcass. And, boy, the flies were attracted to this one. We had all the Labor members who were going out announcing it and all the Labor members who were getting the grants on the eve of the election. All the flies were gathering around the carcass, gathering around an easy money scheme. But today there is one real carcass; it is a minister that is hanging dead, swinging in the breeze, waiting to go. It is this minister who cannot justify this situation to the parliament, to the Auditor-General and to the people of Australia.

The department was concerned about this matter because it produced a minute dated 29 October 1992, noting that it was vulnerable and asking that the whole scheme be copper-bottomed. The department was going to the minister and saying, `We are in trouble here. This is a problematic scheme. Let's copper bottom the scheme'. But the minister was still in the mode of denial: `No, they will not catch me. No, we will not have to account. No, there is nothing to be answered. No, we do not have to come clean with the people and the auditor'. That was the second phase, the phase of denial.

Then we got to the phase of stonewall. The minister used to come into the parliament day in, day out. Whenever she is asked a question, she refers to her previous answers. When we go back to the previous answer, she refers to another previous answer, and that refers to another previous answer. But, at the end of the day she never gets to anything substantive, because there never has been an answer. There never is any factual foundation at all that relates to the questions that she has been asked and the concerns that were raised by the Auditor-General.

Let us make this clear: this whole thing started off with an independent report of an auditor in relation to $30 million of taxpayers' money. Every day that has gone by has been another day when this minister has failed to give an explanation for this $30 million worth of taxpayers' money. It has been a pitiful performance. She claims it has been needs based but she cannot produce one single document to show how she applied needs or how she overrode her department. She cannot produce one document that indicates she even considered those matters. She said that she has fully cooperated with the Auditor-General, but that has just moved the whole sports rorts saga into the fourth stage: the cover-up.

It is now clear from documents that have been produced under freedom of information that the minister was not cooperating at all. I make the point that we have the freedom of information documents from the Attorney-General's Department; we are still waiting on her disclosure. We have had a request with her department for quite some time, and we are still waiting for those documents. But these documents that were released yesterday came out of the Attorney-General's Department. They show that this minister was not cooperating at all. There is no question—it is all there in the documentary evidence. The documentary evidence says that on 10 June the head of her legal section wrote to the Attorney-General's Department asking for urgent advice on whether she had to give access to records and information to the ANAO.

The first question is this: if there were no records, why did she need that kind of advice? Who gets advice on whether they have to release non-existent records? Who goes to a lawyer and says, `Give me some advice on whether I should turn over something that does not exist'? Why was her department writing to the Attorney-General's Department getting advice in relation to that? The minister's defence is this: `Oh, my lawyer asked the wrong question. Actually, he was only supposed to ask whether we had to answer questions, not whether we had to turn over records'. That is her defence. Her defence is: `Look, I was not trying to get legal advice to protect the records. No, I was so innocent I was only trying to get legal advice to protect myself from answering questions'. She is doubly condemned out of her own defence.

We should bear in mind that her department has not answered the FOI request. We do not have the full documents yet; all we have is the documents that she drips out in her own defence. When she produces a document that supposedly defends her and proves that the lawyer was asking the wrong question and that she wanted advice only on how to prevent giving information, not on giving records as well, we find this unbelievable handwritten note from the FAS to the secretary to the department. This is the first document for the defence in support of this minister, your honour. The document states:

We have done all we can to convince the minister's office to respond to the Australian National Audit Office's request but we are not sure they will respond sensibly.

Well, the minister's department was so right. It knew what was going on in her office; it knew it very well indeed. The minister should not come in here as she did in question time and try to say that we were somehow dishonest. We released the documents that came out of the Attorney-General's Department which say that the minister was seeking advice on whether or not to release documents, and she got the advice she had to get it.

Even the minute the minister released damns her further, because it shows that in April her FOI coordinator had been asking the same question. So what is her defence? She says: `We had already asked a question earlier; we had already asked it once. The FOI adviser had got advice in relation to oral information'. The documentary record shows that the head of the legal section wanted the advice in writing. The minister cannot quibble with the fact that that document unequivocally shows that her lawyer requested advice in writing in relation to whether or not she had to hand across records. She should not come in with this rubbish—this absolute fantasy and farrago of fabrication—and try to divert this whole issue.

The minister should do herself a favour by coming in here one day and saying, `It's gone on long enough; I'm going to let go of it. I've been caught and its time that I stood up and took responsibility'. That is what she should be doing, but her defence is this: `Kaye Dal Bon got it wrong when she said we were vulnerable. The Auditor-General got it wrong when he said it was easy money, like flies to the carcass'—



Mr Peacock —Like flies to the caucus!



Mr COSTELLO —That is right. She is saying: `My lawyer got it wrong when he asked for advice on my behalf in relation to records. The opposition got it wrong when it exposed $30 million. I, the minister, was the only person who ever got it right'.

A far more plausible explanation is this: the department got it right when it said that the matter was vulnerable and needed to be copper-bottomed; the lawyer got it right when he went off on the minister's behalf and asked for legal advice on protecting her against the release of records; the Auditor-General got it right when he said that there was no audit trail in relation to this matter; the opposition got it right when it said this was a $30 million easy money scheme to buy the minister's way back into power; and that the person who got it wrong—wrong, wrong, wrong—was the minister. The explanation is not that everybody but the minister got it wrong; the explanation is that she was the person who got it wrong. Every shred of documentary evidence that has been turned up confirms it. It confirms the fact that the minister malappropriated money and that she has tried to deny it.



Mrs Kelly —That's outrageous.



Mr COSTELLO —The minister malappropriated it in the sense of not fulfilling her ministerial responsibility. She did not apply the required standards in relation to this money; she used it for partisan political gain. She denied the concerns that were being expressed about her. She then moved to stonewall on this matter in the parliament. She has now tried to cover it up. There is no question about it: she is not fit to continue in her office. If she had any decency, she would resign. If that Prime Minister who lamely tried to defend the minister in this parliament this afternoon had any decency, he would make her resign.