Honouring the ministerial standards. That’s what Prime Minister Scott Morrison said was being done yesterday as Senator Bridget McKenzie handed back her ministerial badge after revelations about the sports rorts scandal. Honour. Transparency. Accountability. Those words rolled off his tongue as though saying them somehow righted all wrongs. It doesn’t.

Senator McKenzie and her office behaved poorly when she was sports minister in distributing $100 million of grants to sports clubs by weighing up if they were in marginal electorates. Mr Morrison reinforced that behaviour by digging in, dawdling and diverting, when he should have acted with determination. He should have dismissed Senator McKenzie from the ministry immediately after the Australian National Audit Office report on the matter was released.

There was no need for a further report, the one Mr Morrison commissioned from the secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens. There was no need to dress Senator McKenzie’s failure in the guise of a breach of the standards requiring disclosure of interests. There was no need to go as far as calling for the Gaetjens report. The misconduct was apparent on the face of the audit office report. Auditor-General Grant Hehir was scathing of the way the grants were doled out. In its examination of which clubs got what, the Auditor-General’s office found “bias”. Political bias.

To be sure, Senator McKenzie breached the most basic standards requiring ministers to disclose potential conflicts of interest because, as revealed by this newspaper, she awarded $36,000 to the Wangaratta Clay Target Club when the club had given her a complimentary annual membership. But in truth, taxpayers’ money was parcelled up and doled out in an effort to prop up the Coalition’s prospects at the May 2019 federal election. Senator McKenzie torpedoed the concept of “merit”, which was the abiding principle behind the grants system, and made it into one where clubs in marginal seats were deemed more meritorious than others. That is what is most unacceptable. The debasement of trust. The mismanagement of taxpayers’ money. This, from a government that keeps calling for restraint in spending.

To keep saying, as Mr Morrison does, that all the recipient clubs were “eligible” is beside the point and an insult to the intelligence of voters. They know what happened here, and they suspect it goes on all the time. That is what is so dispiriting and demoralising about Mr Morrison’s approach to this sports grants scandal. The Prime Minister so far has given no indication that he understands how profoundly this has damaged the government’s standing and the voters’ trust in institutions.