Federal rules to stop pork barrelling are being avoided and there is no independent oversight of ministers who make grants, says Sydney University’s Anne Twomey.
Ministers can easily avoid Commonwealth rules designed to stop election pork barrelling and there is no central oversight to ensure robust scrutiny of grants, Sydney University law professor Anne Twomey says.
“Ideally, if you put the two systems together, the good bits of both, you’d get a pretty good system.”Professor Twomey said there was a “grey area” when dealing with a promise that might have good public interest reasons for a project or grant, but where there were political reasons for doing it. “The other problem is that there’s nobody actually policing it, so there’s no scrutiny of it. And it’s also really difficult to find these, particularly for transparency purposes.”
Very little of the documentation was actually published, which meant it had to be obtained under Freedom of Information rules, which is timely, costly and hard to aggregate. “So if you actually had a parliamentary committee whose role was to scrutinise the explanations and the documents, and let it be known when particular ministers have failed to take it seriously and give proper explanations, and embarrass them into actually doing the right thing, then I think it would be much better.
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