A showdown is looming in the sports grants saga, with the former head of Sport Australia to give parliamentary evidence into the scandal-plagued $100 million pre-election program.
It comes as Prime Minister Scott Morrison refuses to release a controversial report by his department head, Philip Gaetjens, that claims the awarding of grants was fair.
Kate Palmer is a respected sports administrator who left Sport Australia in January after the board indicated it wanted to test the market for her role.
It is understood Ms Palmer remains deeply disappointed at the way the program was administered by the office of then-minister Bridget McKenzie.
The former chief executive of Sport Australia has agreed to give evidence at a Senate hearing into the politically-compromised program.
The previous hearing of the committee featured Liberal senator Eric Abetz seeking to confirm that all recipients were eligible to receive funding, only to be told by the Audit Officer they weren't.
Ms Palmer will be able to give her view about whether the awarding of grants was fair, or whether it was politically motivated.
Labor senator and committee chair Anthony Chisholm said he was looking forward to hearing from Ms Palmer.
"We want to get to the bottom of these decisions and hear from Sport Australia to understand the true political involvement in this scheme from Minister McKenzie and the Prime Minister's Office."
Senator Bridget McKenzie, who managed the scheme as sport minister, resigned from the frontbench after being found to have breached ministerial standards by Mr Gaetjens for failing to declare memberships to shooting clubs.
However, Mr Gaetjens found the overall awarding of grants was not in breach of ministerial standards. He has declined to release the report.
Instead, he made a statement to the senate inquiry saying Senator McKenzie "did not act in breach of the standards with respect to fairness".
Unresolved issues
On Wednesday, the Prime Minister said, "the information that people are seeking I think has been well set out by the statement".
However, several issues remain unresolved, despite Mr Gaetjens's statement.
One involves the infamous spreadsheet, prepared by the minister's staff, which colour-coded projects according to the political party that held the electorate.
Mr Gaetjens notes "there was a significant period of time between the date of the adviser's spreadsheet referred to in the ANAO Report (November 20, 2018) and the dates of the final approval processes (Round 1 - December 11-21, 2018, Round 2 - February 5, 2019, Round 3 - April 3, 2019)".
While the first spreadsheet was created on November 20, 2018, and used by Mr Gaetjens for analysis, Brian Boyd from the ANAO noted during the Senate committee hearing, there were "dozens of versions" of the spreadsheet.
Why Mr Gaetjens did not obtain more than one of them is not clear.
The ABC has seen a version of the spreadsheet prepared in December, with a considerably smaller list of projects marked "successful" than the document used by Mr Gaetjens for analysis.
Mr Gaetjens noted he made his "best efforts" to obtain information "necessary to provide a sound basis for my advice to the Prime Minister".
The Audit Office found distributional bias towards marginal and target seats in the awarding of the grants, but Mr Gaetjens disagreed.
Instead, he found the rate of success for non-recommended applications in marginal seats was lower than the rate for other seats.
The ABC shared some data from the leaked spreadsheet with the Grattan Institute to help interrogate Mr Gaetjens's findings.
Danielle Wood, Budget Policy Director at Grattan, said the Gaetjens submission "provides some analysis relevant to the question of politicisation but it is partial".
"The Gaetjens analysis does not look at grants by value in the electorate, a significant shortcoming given that from a 'political impact' perspective dollars spent is likely to matter more than the number of grants.
"It is unclear from the submission whether Gaetjens did this analysis and didn't report it or he did not consider it relevant to the question at hand."
The next committee hearing is scheduled for Thursday.
