If anyone has forgotten, Bridget McKenzie is a rorter. When sports minister, she and her office used taxpayer funds in pursuit of the Coalition’s marginal seat strategy in the 2019 election, dictated by Scott Morrison’s office. She did so without legal authority to allocate the money. The whole program she rorted was designed to be rorted, which is why it was run out of the Sports Commission, which wasn’t subject to the normal anti-rorting rules.
Worse, McKenzie was an incompetent rorter. She got found out by the Auditor-General, who forensically revealed her rorting. And she lost her job over the rorting, because she failed to declare a conflict of interest.
In a government that is the most corrupt we’ve ever seen in federal politics, which regards pork-barrelling and rorting as standard political practice, and which is led by a man with a frequent and irresistible compulsion to lie, imagine being so bad you actually lose your job. That’s Bridget McKenzie.
Darren Chester is also a member of the Nationals, and like McKenzie hails from Victoria. Since being restored to the frontbench after Barnaby Joyce resigned in disgrace over sexual harassment allegations in 2018, Chester has been minister for veterans’ affairs. In March, he racked up three years in the portfolio. It’s been a tough gig, made unnecessarily tougher by the bloodyminded refusal of Scott Morrison and Christian Porter, then Attorney-General, to hold a royal commission into veterans’ suicides until Morrison caved in this year.
Chester was left to lead the government’s inadequate response to a horrific and growing toll of deaths among our former and current servicemen and women — a toll we’re not even sure of the full magnitude of, giving assessments of numbers vary from between less than 500 to more than 700 since 2003.
The delivery performance of DVA for veterans has also been hampered by long-running problems with its IT systems and their crucial integration with those of Services Australia. Chester secured $120 million in this year’s budget to overhaul the systems and their interaction with other line agencies.
It says a lot that, despite having a target painted on his back for so long by Morrison over the royal commission issue, some veterans’ families want Chester to remain in the role. Chester also yesterday scotched suggestions he might defect to the Liberals given Joyce has returned to the leadership, saying “I’m absolutely committed to run as the pre-selected National Party candidate in the seat of Gippsland at the next federal election.”
The Nationals have a profound dearth of frontbench talent — one that contributes to the overall shallowness and incompetence of the Morrison government, especially since Mathias Cormann left. Chester is one of the few competent ministers in the government, and not too many are likely to ever have stakeholders pleading that they be left in their portfolios. Once again sending Chester to the backbench wouldn’t merely be an act of truly petty vindictiveness by Joyce — whose own failures as minister for agriculture have been repeatedly shown up since he was forced onto the backbench in 2018 in areas like water and animal welfare — but would inflict disproportionate damage to the government’s ministerial talent base.
Promoting McKenzie in his place would redouble the damage, and signal that the most egregious abuse of power and rorting of taxpayer funds was perfectly acceptable. If the return of Barnaby Joyce to the deputy prime ministership is a moment when Australian politics scraped the bottom of the barrel, McKenzie is through the bottom and into the dirt beneath.
Then again, veterans in marginal seats might find themselves lavished with funding ahead of the next election.
“The Nationals have a profound dearth of frontbench talent…”
That points to one reason Chester must go. Seen from his colleagues’ point of view, Chester’s relative ability, good sense and achievements look like the posturings of a smarty-pants or a clever dick. He makes them look bad. It hurts their feelings. It’s intolerable.
There’s another possible explanation. There’s a well-known theory in revolutionary politics that the conditions for revolution can be fostered far better by eliminating good people from government rather than the bad. For example, assassinating a notoriously biased, cruel and vindictive judge is far less destabilising than killing a highly respected fair-minded judge. The determination of this government to appoint truly dreadful ministers and remove those who are any good suggests a similar strategy. This is presumably aimed at destroying any belief in or support for our current system of representative democracy so that it can be replaced by something unburdened by such pesky irritations as a parliament with an uncompliant cross-bench, and so on. Something more like Myanmar, perhaps.
It’s not as if there are not agent provocateurs, from both state apparatuses and political machines, out in the wild, doing their verminous best to undermine reform minded people.
Everyone knows the joke that when spooks release files under the 30/50yrs rules, the majority of members of subversive organisations turn out to be plants.
Another one to add to the list of Labor’s (fingers crossed ) policy announcement 4 days before the election – ICAC with teeth and we will retrospectively target; Joyce, Taylor, McKenzie, Scummo himself, Joshy, Porter, Robert, Fletcher, Hawke, Hunt, Ley, Price, Sukkar, Tehan, Tudge, Andrews, Dutton, Laming.
I should have gone through a list of people who don’t need to be investigated
When Labor leader Bill Shorten made the pledge to establish a federal version of the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) in a speech to the National Press Club in January, and said there was a need to ensure potential corruption in politics and the public service was properly investigated.
But months after that proposal, Attorney-General Christian Porter has told Labor the Government will not be adopting the proposal.
“The Government continues to consider ways to further strengthen and improve the national integrity framework and a national body is one mechanism being considered, and the Government remains open-minded about further reforms that could improve our current arrangements,” Mr Porter said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-05-23/labor-federal-icac-proposal-knocked-back-by-government/9791674.
The list now of those not to be investigated in the cohort of the Lying Nast Party and the APS would be even shorter.
And when there is legislation for a federal ICAC bill it should contain
a statute for strong compulsory powers to appear before such a body
a statute that will enable such a body to track back on matters deemed actionable
must include specific protection for whistleblowers with heavy penalties for companies, and in both federal and state bodies, organisations and individuals that act to suppress or penalise whistleblowers
Unfortunately, Labor is not so squeaky clean that they would do that lest they catch themselves.
And that is why our body politic is utterly unfit for, any, purpose.
In the same vein, it is why “Labor” has nodded through EVERY piece of Draconian security & surveillance legislation presented – the vain hope that one day they’ll wander, unhindered into office and have all those wonderfully repressive laws to repression dissent.
From memory Ms McKenzie was not demoted for industrial scale rorting but ostensibly for a minor misdemeanor concerning a gun club. This confusion of the issues had two intentions, the first was to create a false impression of how squeaky clean LNP Ministers must be; gosh, a teddy bear and it’d be the death penalty. The second was that a minor transgression would enable a later resurrection (as has occurred).
Yes, and I suspect that being sacked for the gun club transgression, may have also been a way off stifling any further investigation, into who else may have been involved in the sports rorts.
More Rorting?
Bridget McKenzie buys $2 million house as second Melbourne investment property
By Latika Bourke
Records show Senator McKenzie, who styles herself as a gun-toting champion of the bush, settled on a near-beachfront two-bedroom cottage in Middle Park in the lower house seat of Macnamara this month. It is her second Melbourne property purchase.
Senator McKenzie’s internal enemies nicknamed her the “Senator for Elwood” when it emerged she was living in Melbourne and not the bush, which the Nationals claim to represent.
The embattled Agriculture Minister, who is facing calls for her sacking and is being investigated over sports grants, refused to say if she planned to resume her city-dwelling life when she was contacted by The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age.
Records obtained under freedom of information laws highlight the cost of Senator McKenzie’s urban life.
For example, she charged taxpayers nearly $1000 to visit rural Western Victoria as a backbencher in April 2015.
The driver assigned to her was forced to work a 15-hour day, clocking on at 6.15am and knocking off just after 9pm, having spent 12 hours escorting the then backbencher 466 kilometres between Melbourne, Buangor and Stawell.
MPs and Senators are only allowed to use Comcars for Parliamentary business and Comcars are not available for MPs who “could reasonably use their private plated vehicle,” or extra allowance.
But Senator McKenzie insisted it was more cost-effective to get to Buangor and also said it was safer for her to be driven the distance by someone else as she had arrived back at Melbourne Airport at 9pm the day before.
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/bridget-mckenzie-buys-2-million-house-as-second-melbourne-investment-property-20200123-p53twh.html
AB – “suspect”? I wish I was as confident of winning Lotto as I am of the circumstances which you only suspect.
Yes, I know, but I’ve been indoctrinated into the qualified language of research papers. Plus, you never know when a right wing free speech warrior, will decide to sue an independent publisher, in regards to BTL comments.
They think we’re dumb not to notice. Time to resurrect that sports rorts properly methinks.
Darren Chrster is not “one of the few competent ministers on the government”, he is the only competent minister in the government.
I don’t think he’s competent – but perhaps you could make a case that he’s a little less incompetent than the rest of them. Not a high bar to clear.
He actually seems like a decent bloke though…
Oh, I don’t know. There’s….there’s…..there’s…..Oh, I don’t know….
Sooo is rural and regional voters going to DO anything at the next election or stay rusted onto a party who has demonstrated time and again it’s lack of interest in it’s constituents until election time. Many examples are out there, I live in the country and I know what’s truly going on. Sorry for all the undervalued women being shafted by their own currently to feather their own nests.
Dazza’ Chester has certainly inherited the over 100yrs of CP/Nat rusted on in East Gippsland/Gippsland..East Gippsland has more chance of burning out from ACC bushfires than the Nats are ever being voted out