The Coalition doled out the first $19m from its $50m “safer streets” program during the last election campaign, targeting what it said were crime “hotspots” with federally funded CCTVs and lighting.
After the September election, the audit office had a look at how that money was distributed. It was not impressed.
It noted that the guidelines for the program had been approved by the minister for justice after the fact, in early May 2014, and provided for “multiple funding rounds, with the first being a closed and non-competitive process aimed at delivering election commitments”.
It found that “in the main, the program guidelines provided a reasonable basis for the implementation of the first funding round” but added that “the administration of the merit assessment process ... was handled particularly poorly” by the Attorney General’s Department because it was not a competitive process but rather a “closed, non-competitive process” designed only to assess the already-promised projects.
The department had often made “generous assumptions” about the quality of the proposals, including whether they were actually “located in crime ‘hotspots’” whether “the project would result in reduced levels of crime without this being evident from the application” or whether “the grant would provide a value-for-money return to the commonwealth notwithstanding (for example) that the department was unaware of the number of CCTV cameras that would be installed for the amount of grant funding sought.”
Oh, and almost all the grants went to Coalition electorates.
On top of all of that, as reported on The Mandarin, political historian Robert Carr has questioned whether the CCTVs are actually being installed in “hotspots” at all, and pointed out that they often leave local councils with an expensive bill for upkeep and operation.
But in an election campaign, it’s all about “feeling safer”, and – you wouldn’t believe it – applications for the second round of the safer streets program (the other $29.4m) closed in February and the successful projects are being announced around the country right now. Not since Deirdre Chambers arrived at the Chinese restaurant has there been such a coincidence.
This week Tony Abbott announced 23 CCTV cameras in Cooroy, alongside the candidate seeking to replace Warren Truss as the local member for Wide Bay.
Another 14 (worth $237,000) were announced for Chinchilla, with LNP candidate for Maranoa, David Littleproud, prominent in the reportage, and George Christensen unveiled plans for another $750,000 worth of CCTVs in the “crime hotspots” of Airlie Beach.
And if that $30m wasn’t enough, the Coalition has announced another, separate $40m “safer communities fund” which will pay for still more CCTVs and lighting as well as enhanced security for schools facing security risks because of racial or religious intolerance.
And that’s been rolled out too, $300,000 going to Cowper this week, for example.
It’s true these aren’t huge figures, but CCTVs also aren’t the only smaller funding promises being made by both major parties around the nation.
In fact, both Labor and the Coalition have well-developed internal processes to handle what some might describe as electoral pork.
On the Coalition side, each lower house MP or candidate submits three wishes for their electorate to a central (Aladdin-style) desk. Those contesting marginal seats might expect to get two or three of their wishes granted.
Safe-seat holders often miss out altogether, although the Nationals member for Parkes, Mark Coultan, secured $25m for a cancer centre at Dubbo hospital this week, and he holds the seat with a margin of almost 20%.
Labor, similarly, has a central “election commitments” process, although no pre-determined number of wishes. And Bill Shorten has been touring the country doling out this local largesse. On Friday it was $44m in tourism infrastructure for Tasmania, earlier it was $1.2m to upgrade ovals in the Brisbane electorate of Griffith, $1m for a sports complex in the northern NSW electorate of Richmond or a “reaffirmation” of his promise to spend $100m on a Townsville sports stadium. The Coalition has declined to match that commitment, which one economist claimed was a “boondoggle” but which the locals love.
But even if the hospital and the walking trails and the sports stadia are all deserving projects, that’s not really the point.
The problem with this practice is exactly what the audit office pointed out with the first round of “safer streets”, and in all the other reports it has written on this issue before.
Election largesse is usually spent in marginal seats, even if the need is far greater in safe electorates. It is often spent on things that aren’t even the federal government’s responsibility, CCTVs for example. And since the funding has been promised with great fanfare, the public servants who have to tick it off after the election are often put in a very difficult spot.
This is a controversy that has burned for years – usually with the victorious party insisting that making election promises is a normal part of the political process and the losing side saying it is all a terrible rort.
In 2004, I wrote about promises the Coalition had made across regional Australia, from the then little-known regional partnerships program, some of which had not been applied for, contravened written guidelines, and many of which had never been properly assessed. One grant was to a historic railway line that was bankrupt. Another was to an ethanol plant that was never built.
The Howard government insisted that what Labor dubbed “regional rorts” was all just normal election-campaign behaviour, but an audit report finally released in the dying days of the 2007 campaign begged to differ, with a raft of damning findings, including that departmental recommendations against funding some of the projects had been overturned by Coalition ministers.
I also wrote about the sports rorts affair, way back in 1993, when the auditor general could find no documentation at all to explain how then Labor sports minister, Ros Kelly, had distributed $30m in sporting grants. She eventually said that she had done it on a “great big whiteboard” in her office. (I actually saw the whiteboard and it was really pretty small). The opposition, led by John Hewson, insisted it was a pork-barrelling exercise and she eventually resigned.
When the “regional rorts” affair was at its height the then Labor finance minister, Lindsay Tanner, said the whole program was misconceived.
“The federal government has no role in dribbling out endless small grants for things that are the responsibility of local councils. Funding these things federally is a scandal and it diverts commonwealth resources from the things that should be priorities,” he said.
When the “sports rorts” affair was at full steam, the then young shadow minister, Peter Costello, said “if governments get the idea that they can spend $30m to buy elections, that is the end of open, fair and honest elections in this country”.
I think Tanner and Costello were both right. Over the years there have been numerous attempts by the audit office and the Department of Finance to impose guidelines. But 23 years later it seems as though not all that much has changed.
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