While interesting, it is of secondary importance.
A rugby union club in Adelaide’s eastern suburbs won a $500,000 grant for new female change rooms under the Coalition’s sports grant program despite not fielding a women’s team since 2018 when it was embroiled in a sexism controversy.
There will be multiple instances of poor decision-making, favouritism and nepotism in this sorry affair.
This is what is important.
The auditor general report found that 73% of grants awarded in the third round had not been recommended by Sport Australia based on a merit-assessment process that considered community need and increased participation.
It’s the fact that 73% of the grants were not recommend which means someone else, presumably McKenzie, decided on the grant.
The basis on which the 73% of the grants were made will never be known.
The suspicion is that this decision was made on political grants, namely the allocation of funds to marginal electorates.
But it is also another important issue. There will be a large number of clubs whose grants were recommended who will not be getting money as result of the Minister’s intervention.
These people have every reason to be extremely angry.
And they will be all the more angry when they see the examples of McKinsey’s largesse.
The list of the 73% of grants that the Minister approved should be made public.
That way it will be possible for us to see if the grants made to Camberwell Hockey Club ($38,000) ,East Camberwell Tennis Club ($90,000), Kew Little Athletics ($92,450), Grace Park Hawthorn Club ($25,000) and Hawthorn Malvern Hockey Centre ($500,000) were recommended by Sports Australia because all of these sporting clubs are in Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s electorate of Kooyong.
When a total of $745,000 is allocated to one electorate, it is reasonable that some degree of transparency should prevail.
Tim Haslett's Blog 