PAUL MURRAY: Albanese’s $6m golf club scandal exposes a Prime Minister who can no longer hide from the truth

Is half a billion dollars still regarded as a lot of money?

After all, it’s a thousand million bucks split down the middle. There’s a lot of zeroes after the dollar sign: $500,000,000.

That’s enough cash to provide about 16,000 beds in Australian hospital ICUs or 330,000 of them in general wards. So quite a handy sum to address something like the health crisis.

And it’s how much money the Labor Party took from taxpayers at the last Federal election for a crooked pork-barreling scheme to help its candidates get elected.

It will eventually cost us more than $560,000,000 when the final bills are paid.

A lot of time and effort has been spent this week trying to prove the Prime Minister misled Parliament in justifying a personal promise of $6.05m for his local golf club under that rorted scheme when he claimed it was for essential sewerage works.

It was never for sewerage. He lied about that. And has been forced to admit it — sort of.

But all his critics needed to do was go back to the statement Anthony Albanese issued the Sunday before last year’s election when he made the grant promise as Labor MP for Grayndler:

“A re-elected Albanese Labor Government will secure the future of the Marrickville Golf Club as a much-loved community sporting precinct with a $6.05 million investment towards its upgrade.

“Work will include expanding outdoor areas for greater social and community enjoyment as well as providing pedestrian and bike access so people can more easily get to and enjoy the precinct.

“Patrons and guests will enjoy better indoor amenities with clubhouse renovations and the provision of community meeting and function rooms.

“Sustainability will also be a focus with stormwater to be harvested, irrigating the golf course and the local sporting fields like Mahoney Reserve and Beaman Park, while boosting the health of the nearby Cooks River.”

There was no mention of sewerage works. The stormwater harvesting was not associated with a later NSW Government program to fix the club’s sewerage connection, which Albanese tried to conflate into his mangled and deceitful response.

I found his release online in about five minutes last week and watched with mounting disbelief as he created the sewerage furphy. Which died in a ditch.

Albanese’s election promise was a straightforward piece of populist pork-barrelling for a golf club just 200m from his suburban home where he walks his dog when they’re not in The Lodge entertaining crude comedians.

And it wasn’t for a nicely rounded $6m, but very specifically for $6.05m. So he surely knew something about how that figure was so precisely calculated.

“Consistent with past practice, election commitments will be delivered in line with the Commonwealth Grants Rules and Principles,” Albanese said as some form of propriety caveat in the Labor Party press release.

However, under those rules and principles, an MP proposing such a grant would need to comply with the Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 and the PGPA Rule, which cover conflicts of interest.

Being an honorary member of the golf club or living close by would require an MP to declare a conflict of interest when involved in decisions about such grants.

Albanese qualified for both conflicts of interest but declared neither.

And having, as Prime Minister, said the grant “will” be made if his government was re-elected, Albanese could hardly argue that he was not involved in the decision-making.

Who was going to knock back the PM when he had decreed Royal Marrickville was getting the cash if he was re-elected?

Albanese has a habit of digging a bigger hole when he runs into political trouble by refusing to admit mistakes and then lying his head off to deny his wrongdoing.

And this time he’s buried himself.

Not only was the whole scheme identified by a leading constitutional lawyer as an example of “grey corruption”, but Albanese’s role in it has now branded him an habitual liar.

Every step the PM took in this debacle has been wrong.

The worst was his attack on independent MP Helen Haines for questioning the scheme just days before her brutal maiming outside her electorate office. Caught out, he tried gaslighting Australians that he was paying her a compliment.

But this dirty deal was crooked from the start. As the Centre for Public Integrity pointed out in a report issued last month, the promised grants were heavily focused on Labor-held seats.

“Around 73.2 per cent of funds ($409.1 million) went to electoral divisions held by the ALP, compared with 22.6 per cent to Coalition-held divisions and 4.3 per cent to others,” the report said.

However, the non-Labor seats which were promised cash were overwhelmingly those in which Labor had a prospect of winning. And the grants were promised by Labor candidates to get votes.

One peculiarity of this Major and Local Community Infrastructure program is that it was not an existing scheme with a pool of budgeted funds. It was only created after the election.

Most importantly, grants were by invitation-only through Labor’s campaign HQ, not the government. That’s the hanging offence.

“There has been no other public explanation of why a closed, non-competitive process was adopted for the MLCI Program, nor any published information on how eligibility to be invited was determined,” the Centre for Public Integrity report said.

“This is contrary to the Commonwealth Grants Rules and Principles’ recommendation to use competitive, merit-based selection, or to record departures from that approach.”

They’re the very rules Albanese’s announcement used as a fig-leaf propriety caveat. Oops.

“For every dollar spent in a coalition-held seat, more than $3.20 was spent in an ALP-held seat,” the report said. “Marginal seats in which the ALP was competitive received disproportionately high funding.

“ALP safe seats also received less than their proportionate share by around $12.8 million.”

That’s other than in Albanese’s very safe seat of Grayndler where his $6.05m grant was well over the national average of $2.47m.

Why? Because he could. That simple.

Of the 226 projects that got a Labor Party invitation, only 18 were in WA, but targeted at sensitive seats where the government was facing a serious challenge.

The marginal seat of Tangney got the most, the biggest of the three announced by Labor MP Sam Lim standing alongside Albanese a month before the election.

It was $10m for the Canning Vale sports complex.

Hasluck, another tight Labor marginal, got two projects worth $5.09m, one of them announced by Labor MP Tania Lawrence just two days before the poll. Last-minute nerves?

Why would Labor pay for election campaign advertising when it could promise taxpayer-funded pet projects to buy votes from community organisations?

After the CPI report dropped, Haines — who campaigned on integrity issues and the need for a Federal ICAC — denounced the grants program and Albanese’s role in it.

“I feel very, very angry actually, and deeply disappointed, that we have a government who are using a grants program such as this for what they call election commitments . . . but what in plain language we know is pork-barrelling,” she said.

The Victorian MP questioned what assessment determined an invitation for the Marrickville Golf Club, but not one at Rutherglen for which she had long sought funds.

“There are golf clubs, football clubs, all sorts of sporting organisations in need of infrastructure support and funding, so why the golf club in the electorate of Grayndler was any different to those is a question that really needs to be asked of the prime minister,” Ms Haines said.

In fact, Marrickville was the only golf club in the 226 Labor-invited projects. And it was proposed by a Labor mayor who is one of Albanese’s closest factional allies.

For her troubles, Haines copped the full Labor treatment, generated from within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. If not for the horrific assault on her, Albanese might have got away with it.

The so-called “dirt sheet” distributed to selected Canberra press gallery journalists catalogued funding requests made by Haines and suggested lines of inquiry.

“It questioned whether Haines had received undeclared gifts, held business interests, accepted political donations or maintained personal relationships with organisations that could potentially benefit from government funding,” the Daily Mail’s Peter van Onselen disclosed.

When pinned about it, Albanese refused to admit the document came from his office: “Helen Haines is a good local member. She put forward applications like other members do for grants, and that’s what good local members do, and Helen Haines is a very strong advocate for her community.”

On top of that outrageous chutzpah, he then decided to fabricate a new reason for seeking the funds. Sewerage was a perfect metaphor for what he offered the public.

The pattern is now set. Our Prime Minister lies compulsively and never admits his manifest failings.

Albanese can’t hide any more. Everyone can see him for exactly what he is. Totally diminished.