By now if you're double vaxxed, the government of SCOMO inc. is urging you to get the booster... 

After telling us that getting double-vaxxed would keep us safe, the booster will make us saferer, obviously, and accordind to Bill Gates, you will need your booster shot, yearly (or more?)... See 

The degradation of Australian politics continued this week with the Prime Minister doubling down on his core campaign tactics as he raised a middle digit to the concept of integrity in the use of public funds.

Confronted yet again with evidence of corrupt use of government grants, Scott Morrison stuck with the strategy he, his ministers and backbenchers have used ever since his #sportsrorts hit the Auditor-General.

Mr Morrison told the National Press Club 23 months ago that there was absolutely nothing wrong with corrupting community sports grants for partisan political purposes, nothing wrong with misleading hundreds of community sporting clubs, nothing wrong with wasting the time of thousands of volunteers applying for funds that would not be granted on merit.

“How good are sports rorts?” he may as well have shouted, never mind The New Daily’s collaboration with spreadsheet supersleuth Vince O’Grady to fully disclose the politically corrupt nature of those grants.

That was the start of a series of investigations and reports in The New Daily over the next 18 months detailing the corruption of billions of dollars of grants, the blatant abuse of power to effectively steal money from the best and most equitable possible uses and instead allocate it for base party political purposes.

‘Pork barrelling’ and ‘rorting’ became inadequate euphemisms for the scale of the problem.

Learned judges and silks have instead defined it as corruption. That could be of interest to a genuine federal anti-corruption commission.

No wonder the Morrison government tries to denigrate the NSW ICAC.

Showing contempt for ministerial standards has become standard procedure.

Finance Minister Simon Birmingham went on the record in July, implying the red-hot $660 million #carporks scandal was all the public’s fault.

“It’s what electorates expect,” Senator Birmingham sniffed.

This week the biggest racket of all, the multibillion-dollar Community Development Grants scheme, was back in focus as the Sydney Morning Herald and Age caught up with the sort of analysis The New Daily was doing last year and this.

Faced with the example of Peter Dutton’s LNP seat of Dickson scooping up 46 times the amount of federal grant funding that a neighbouring Labor electorate received, Mr Morrison on Wednesday cheerfully replied: “Dickson must have a very good local member”.

Yes, when caught, boast about it, deny and spin.

It’s the same utterly cynical tactic the government adopted over the scores of billions of JobKeeper dollars thrown at companies that didn’t need it. Spin and deceive. (And to its disgrace, the ATO was an accomplice in that little effort.)

Aside from raising both middle digits to the ideal of ethical government in general and nearly half the Australian population in particular, the Prime Minister’s Dickson response confirmed his 2022 election campaign tactics: More of the same – lie, deny and steal.

On cue, Josh Frydenberg’s MYEFO (mid-year economic and fiscal outlook) on Thursday contained a whopping $16 billion in decisions taken “but not yet announced” – ammunition for the election.

Some of that money might be for genuine non-party-political policy initiatives, but on the government’s unrepentant form, it looms as a massive slush fund for political bribery.

When behind in the polls and nothing to lose, the Morrison campaign went extraordinarily hard and often with corrupt grants for the 2019 campaign, an utterly unprecedented level of brazen rorting. Sorry, I slipped there – corruption.

Mr Morrison is in the same position this time, so more of the same is a given. The threat of a real ICAC could make him even more desperate.

You guessed it, we've updated our Morrison Lies dossier. They keep coming thick and fast!https://t.co/tyWubcNF8Y

— Bernard Keane (@BernardKeane) November 2, 2021

As for lies, what started out as a Crikey dossier on the Prime Minister’s proclivity to not tell the truth turned into a book by Bernard Keane.

As the man nearly said in Jaws, “You’re going to need a bigger book”.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/2021/12/17/michael-pascoe-morrison-election-tactics/

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Hours after a newspaper exposé shone another light on the Coalition government shamelessly funnelling discretionary grants to electorates it holds or wants to win, Labor leader Anthony Albanese warned of a “frenzy” of skewed spending before next year’s election.

He probably didn’t expect that less than 24 hours later, his prediction would be starkly laid out in black-and-white line items on Treasury papers.

Buried deep in the Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO), past the rosy projections of jobs growth and deficit reduction, beyond the optimistic claim that Omicron won’t derail Australia’s recovery, is a single line of numbers, potentially setting up an avalanche of taxpayer-funded but secret election sweeteners that Prime Minister Scott Morrison will wheel out over coming months.

Because while much of the focus is rightly on the numbers that are in the budget update, a few items that aren’t in there will potentially say more about how the next few months of electioneering will run.

At the bottom of page 202 of MYEFO, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg and Finance Minister Simon Birmingham note $16.123 billion in spending on “decisions taken but not yet announced and not for publication”.

In plain speak, it’s a mashup of two different reasons that a government might not detail exactly what it’s spending.

“Not for publication” refers to items that the government has, for sensible and understandable reasons, not released publicly; usually due to commercial sensitivities around contracts, this “nfp” category was applied to spending on vaccines and quarantine centres.

The second one is the more interesting though – decisions “taken not yet announced” – essentially boiling down to election spending promises the government has already signed off on, has baked into the budget, but decided not yet to publicise.

Presumably, so they can instead be announced with much fanfare before the federal election.

The two categories include $5.579 billion in spending in the 2021-22 year alone, and a total of $16 billion between now and 2025. The decisions that are “not yet announced” would likely be announced in the lead up to the 2022 election, timed for maximum electoral impact.

Strangely, the MYEFO papers – despite running to a hefty 346 pages – do not separate the two types of mystery spending, only lumping them together in one line, so it is impossible to say how much was allocated to the election war chest and how much to the standard commercial sensitivities.

Labor’s Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallagher slammed the hushed-up spending as “secret slush funds” and “politically motivated rorts and waste”.

Treasury officials, wandering the halls of Parliament House’s press gallery after journalists began asking questions about the numbers, claimed the split was about half for each category.

But asked multiple, direct questions about the split in a press conference, neither Mr Frydenberg nor Senator Birmingham gave that explanation, both claiming they were unable to break down the number any further.

Nine journalist David Crowe asked if it was a fund for a “secret spendathon”. Mr Frydenberg denied that claim, but did nothing to actually demonstrate how it was anything other than true.

He protested that the category also included extra “contingency” funding in case of announced decisions running over budget, calling it a “conservative” accounting strategy. Fair enough, regarding the “nfp” items, which might make up half of that $16 billion.

But the other half, the “not yet announced” decisions, is billions in public spending on election promises, and the taxpayer won’t actually be told what their tax dollars have funded until the Coalition thinks it’s politically expedient to do so.

“What we see from this government is rort after rort … we’ll see a frenzy in the lead up to the election campaign from this Prime Minister,” Mr Albanese claimed in Tasmania on Wednesday.

The budget bottom line shows a nearly $100 billion deficit in 2021-22, improving to $57 billion in 2024-25.

This is a vast improvement from the economic forecast in May’s budget, which is welcomed.

But over that same period, the Coalition government has squirrelled away $16.1 billion in public money on decisions it can’t, or doesn’t want to, tell the country about (yet).

Even if the figure is only half that, as claimed by Treasury officials, then the equivalent of nearly 15 per cent of Australia’s 2025 deficit is solely down to election promises.

Burying such blatantly political spending deep into a government document, at a time of eye-popping deficits and debt, is quite remarkable for a Prime Minister who claims to be so laser-focused on the budget bottom line (remember the days of “back in black”?) and who will spend the coming election campaign scaremongering about Labor debt.

Instead of using those billions of dollars in public funds to pay down the debt and tackle the deficit, the Coalition is instead socking it away in its election war chest, presumably to shower marginal electorates with campaign sweeteners.

Read more:

https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/2021/12/16/secret-coalition-spending-election/

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