Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, I thank, on behalf of the Greens, Mr Jenner, for bringing this matter of great public importance to parliament.
I was reminded at the release of the Public Accounts Committee’s report this week of the opportunity to reflect again on the Liberal’s election shonkiness, and on the dedicated work of the Greens, journalists and others in the community, who are doing everything we can to uncover the appalling approach they took to pork‑barrelling during the 2021 election.
People who are watching may not remember the Liberal’s Local Communities Facilities Fund, which is now notorious. Once upon a time, its existence and the approach that the Liberals used was a complete secret, and it is thanks to the long work of the Greens and journalists that we were able to finally uncover the internal Liberal Party documents that arrived inadvertently from the office of Madeleine Ogilvie MP, and, through them, uncover the truth about the Local Communities Facilities Fund.
It was as a result of many questions, many RTI requests, questions in parliament and in budget estimates and deep‑dive journalism that the truth finally came out. The Local Communities Facilities Fund was a pork‑barrelling slush fund set up by the Liberals in the early days of the 2021 state election campaign. Liberal candidates were told about it by Liberal Party office bearers, but the program was never publicly announced. Neither the fund nor the individual projects it funded were ever listed on the Liberal Party website, despite subsequent claims that they were all available for the community to see on Facebook pages and so on. The work was done to show that they were never listed on the Liberal Party website and made public, and none of those individual projects were costed by Treasury.
The Liberals used the local communities facilities fund to promise millions of dollars of public money to over 200 organisations during the 2021 state election campaign and the decisions about which ones were ultimately funded were made by a Liberal Party policy team that was set up for that purpose.
There was no proper, merit-based government assessment process to look at the range of applicants, and there was no process to manage even basic conflicts of interest, like whether the candidates who made the promises had close family members who would benefit from the projects they were promising to fund.
It was dodgy because it was a shameless attempt at indirect electoral bribery, and because Liberal MPs used it to direct funding to groups that they were personally connected to. The evidence will show, as Ms White has said, the record is replete through the media and on Hansard that nine Liberal Party MPs were subsequently found to be connected to the projects that were funded through the local communities facilities fund. Some of the lowlights include, Ms Ogilvie who obtained $150,000 for a rowing club where her daughter was a member, and Mark Shelton who obtained funding for the third election in a row for a football club where his family are office bearers.
The dodginess of the local communities facilities fund did not stop at election day and this is the point. It went on to contaminate the work of government ministers, and their officers were involved in an unholy train of trying to make a pretence that this had all been covered and approved for by the previous budget that had gone through parliament.
After the 2021 elections, more than half of the local communities facilities funds were secretly funded and the post-election secrecy about the fund is troubling with the lack of transparency around it. There is a lot more that could be said, but we have an obligation to represent our community. Yes, we have to be able to make promises, but they must be promises that are put forward to government agencies to do merit-based testing because, ultimately, secrecy for the members of contribution funds is damaging to democracy.
Time expired.
