Funding eligibility claims refuted by Auditor-General

Letters to the editor

[FORUM] It takes some chutzpah for Lucy Wicks to reiterate Scott Morrison’s lie, that every project funded by the CSI program was eligible for funding (edition 183), when the Auditor-General has specifically said that 43 per cent of grants were to ineligible clubs.

In this, as in other affairs, the Government’s policy seems to be just “deny and keep on denying, no matter what the evidence is”.

But this won’t make the sports-rort stench go away, and Wicks should take some care in associating herself with wholehearted defence of the patently biased decisions that were made.

The pathetic attempt to make out that protestors want to deny sportswomen adequate facilities when the exact opposite is, of course, the case, indicates the desperation with which the Government is trying to cover up this fiasco.

Only the feebleminded could imagine that former Minister Bridget McKenzie, who has been made the scapegoat in the affair, initiated the notorious coloured spreadsheets that provide such damning evidence of wrongdoing.

This kind of documentation could only have originated in the highest office, possibly from somebody who later had the comforting job of reporting that there was nothing to see here, although, the report itself has been kept a secret, so nobody can say what its contents are.

What will Ms Wicks say if somebody thinks to question her on the even more egregious misuse of funds for swimming pools in Liberal urban electorates, when the funds were primarily intended to be allocated in regional areas of the country?

Email, Feb 25
Bruce Hyland, Woy Woy