Labor’s management of the $1 billion Regional Development Fund degenerated into complete farce during Senate estimates on Tuesday evening.
Reports have emerged of the government losing applications, the non-compliance rate for applications was over 60 per cent, and the Department is not even aware of widely reported issues in the media.
For a while there I thought the Labor Party was the Government, but apparently we seem to know more than them.
I was startled by the admission of the Department’s senior officers that they had no knowledge of conflict of interest investigations regarding the Hepburn Shire Council, even though the government is planning to send $2.7 million to this council for the redevelopment of the Clunes Museum.
· On 28 September 2011 The Hepburn Advocate reported that the “Hepburn Shire Council management was named and shamed in a Victorian Auditor-General's report tabled in parliament on September 14.*
· On 3 October 2011 The Ballarat Courier reported that “The Local Government Inspectorate is investigating a $2.7m federal government grant to the shire for redevelopment of the Clunes museum.”**
· On 6 October 2011 The Ballarat Courier reported that the CEO of the Hepburn Shire Council had resigned partly in response to the Victorian Auditor-General’s report and the controversy over the $2.7 million federal grant.***
The Department was also unaware of resignations from RDA committees because of claimed bias in the funding of the Regional Development Australia Fund’s first round:
JOYCE: So you are not aware of the resignation of Councillor Loughnan [Roma Mayor] from the process?
Tony Carmichael: No RDA Committee members have resigned with respect to RDAF applications.
This is despite Steve Lewis in the Daily Telegraph reporting on 8 October 2011:
Rob Loughnan, a Queensland mayor, has resigned from his RDA advisory committee and said he was "devastated" that not a dollar went to Queensland regions west of the Great Dividing Range.****
The Department admitted that they spend “approximately $35,000 a month” on media monitoring. Until May 2011 they had spent $387,000 monitoring media but clearly that did not extend to Google searches.
It was also revealed that 349 of the 553 round one funding applications were non-compliant (a non-compliance rate of 63 per cent), a rate that was described as “considerably higher than we would like”. Minister Crean has ordered a review to improve this compliance rate for the next round of funding.
Seemingly because of this high rate of non-compliance “a number of” submissions required resubmission with a JP signed and witnessed statutory declaration attached. The Department refused to say that they had “lost” applications instead explaining the situation as:
Ms Fleming: I just want to be clear about this terminology that's termed lost documents. They're not necessarily lost documents they're lodgement problems of documents. So they are not lost in our system they are just recorded differently or in part but they're not lost.
Clear as mud.
****http://www.news.com.au/anger-over-rural-grants-scheme/story-e6freuzi-1226161653364