(Image: Private Media)

Finance Minister Simon Birmingham didn’t even try to defend the Coalition’s pre-election rorting of a scheme to build commuter car parks.

“The Australian people had their chance and voted the Morrison government back in at the last election and we are determined to get on with local infrastructure, as we are nation-building infrastructure,” Birmingham told the ABC’s Insiders yesterday morning. 

Birmingham said the quiet part out loud. The government no longer cares about getting caught pork-barrelling, so long as it wins elections. And so long as it can ride out any brief political fallout, and wait until a distracted electorate forgets, it knows it won’t suffer any real consequences. That’s why, a day before the latest Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) report dropped detailing the government’s blatant misuse of the Urban Congestion Fund, Bridget McKenzie, briefly sidelined over her role as the architect of sports rorts, returned to cabinet.

As Labor have been quick to point out, the program, worth $660 million, dwarfed sports rorts. And this time the rort was arguably even more brazen, documented in typically blunt, deadpan fashion by the ANAO. Morrison signed off on 27 car parks the day before calling the election, and putting the government into caretaker mode. The government consulted with ministers, MPs and candidates when deciding how to spend the funding. All up, 77% went to Coalition-held seats, 87% if you include target seats. 

As the list of rorts gets longer, the sums bigger, the misuse of taxpayer money more brazen, so too does the utter indifference from a government now comfortable in the knowledge it will face no consequences. In fact, aside from Birmingham’s bullish defence of the program, there’s been almost total silence from the government. 

Following the report’s release, Urban Infrastructure Minister Paul Fletcher quickly put out a statement noting the government agreed with the ANAO’s recommendations. He later told the ABC the result of the 2019 election made it all OK. 

“The great majority of these projects we took to the 2019 election, so we came to government with the authority of the election,” he said.

But Alan Tudge, the minister responsible at the time, whose contributions to cabinet have largely involved a constant stream of gaffes with occasional culture-war screeching, hasn’t said a word.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who was heavily involved in signing off on projects, spent most of last week hiding in the Lodge. He hasn’t yet faced a single question about the rorts. 

Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar, whose Melbourne electorate of Deakin was one of the biggest winners from the scheme, tried to blame the state government for the lack of progress on building the projects back in May, but has since said nothing. Neither has Jason Wood, another minister whose Melbourne marginal got a rush of funding. 

The government knows this latest round of rorting will be easy to move on from. The ongoing chaos around COVID-19 outbreaks and the vaccine rollout pushed it off the front page from the very start. And unlike sports rorts, there aren’t a bunch of aggrieved suburban sports clubs (quiet Australians with flooded footy pitches) to give the story a colourful sense of injustice. Opposition senators will huff and puff at estimates, but won’t get close to blowing the government away.

Birmingham knew all this when he fronted Insiders yesterday. So did NSW Deputy Premier John Barilaro, who this year spun his government’s pork-barrelling as “investment”.

“You want to call that pork-barrelling, you want to call that buying votes, it’s what the elections are for,” he said.

When another election rolls around in the next 12 months, the government will funnel millions more in taxpayers’ money toward marginal seats. And if they win, and get caught red-handed, they’ll mount the same defence, pointing to the result as justifying all the grubbiness that helped clinch it. And so the rotten cycle continues.