Rort? What rort? Bridget McKenzie is back, her $100m slush fund a dim memory

It took less than 18 months for Bridget McKenzie to return to the ministry. The Victorian Nationals senator took the fall for the sports rorts affair last year, and is the only member of the Morrison government to ever face a consequence for any sort of misconduct.

Her penance was brief. By aligning herself with Barnaby Joyce’s coup, McKenzie is back in cabinet, as minister for regionalisation, regional education, regional communications, drought and emergency management. It’s a tongue-twisting grab-bag of portfolios lumped together to reward a coup loyalist. And it means her role in administering a $100 million slush fund that screwed many in the regions she’s meant to be fighting for is all but forgotten.

An introduction to McKenzie

At a late-night sitting in 2012, Joyce called McKenzie, then a first-term senator “a flash bit of kit”. Joyce was accused of being drunk (he admitted to a few drinks, but denied inebriation) and forced to apologise.

But it’s no surprise McKenzie is on team Barnaby, riding his coat-tails back into cabinet. Throughout her career, she’s been a pragmatic political chameleon with a firm eye on the ministry. As a mature-aged student and single mother of four, she became president of the Deakin University student association — and back then her politics were different.

McKenzie was a self-described “agrarian socialist” who opposed voluntary student unionism and the Iraq War. In other words, the kind of politics one needs to succeed on any university campus. More than a decade later, those who knew her back then were shocked at her rigid opposition to same-sex marriage — despite having a gay brother.

By now McKenzie had the kind of politics one needs to succeed in the National Party.

She’d also developed a reputation as a bit of a gun nut, taking press gallery journalists shooting in a bid to convince the metropolitan elites that rural firearms owners weren’t all “rednecks” and terrorists”.

The sports rorts fall girl

Guns would ultimately lead to McKenzie’s downfall.

By 2020 she was Nationals deputy leader and agriculture minister, bumped up from the sport portfolio after the election. In mid January a damning report from the Australian National Audit Office concluded that McKenzie had funnelled money in a $100 million community sports grants project away from eligible clubs towards ones in marginal and Coalition target seats just before the 2109 election.

The program was probably unconstitutional, and spending the money probably exceeded McKenzie’s power as sports minister. For days she dug her heels in, even after reports emerged that she’d given money to a shooting club she was a member of. Even when a colour-coded spreadsheet she’d used to run the rort made its way to the media.

She initially described sports rorts as a “case of reverse pork-barrelling”. But after the headlines got worse for McKenzie, Prime Minister Scott Morrison slowly walked back his support. Just over two weeks after the ANAO’s report dropped, McKenzie was gone, taking the fall just as it was becoming apparent Morrison’s office was deeply embroiled in the sports rorts. There were 136 emails between the two offices relating to assessing grant applications.

But McKenzie’s sidelining let the government off the hook. She resigned not over the program but on advice from Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Phil Gaetjens, which found her undisclosed gun club membership was a conflict of interest.

Gaetjens, who was previously Morrison’s chief of staff, came to a totally different conclusion about the project to the ANAO. He decided that based on a look at limited evidence there was no pork-barrelling to marginal electorates.

McKenzie’s resignation meanwhile, made it look like the government had acted quickly and booted the one bad apple, even though serious questions about the PMO’s role lingered.

Then the pandemic hit, and our attention shifted.

Yesterday, with the country again distracted by COVID-19 outbreaks, the bad apple came back.

Should Bridget McKenzie have been allowed back into federal cabinet? Send your opinion to letters@crikey.com.au, and don’t forget to include your full name if you’d like to be considered for publication.