MALLEE was granted more than double what an electorate its size could be expected to receive under a sports grant program scrutinised by the National Audit Office.
The audit office report found up to 41 per cent of Community Sport Infrastructure Grants handed out by the Federal Government before last year’s election were allocated against advice by Sport Australia.
The report found there was a “distribution bias” towards “marginal electorates held by the Coalition”.
Member for Mallee Anne Webster initially said on Thursday the electorate had received 3 per cent of total Victorian funding under the program, but later corrected the figure to 4.8 per cent.
Mallee makes up 2.2 per cent of the Victorian population.
“In a sense we have received more than our population base, just slightly,” Dr Webster said at the initial press conference.
“I think you would be pushing to say we were pork-barrelled in any way.”
Former Mallee independent candidate Ray Kingston said on Twitter the process described in the report “makes a mockery of hard working volunteers at sporting clubs around Australia who assumed their hard spent time writing grants would see them being part of a impartial and fair process”.
He also questioned why Mallee only started receiving grants in the second round, which came after Dr Webster was chosen as The Nationals candidate.
Dr Webster responded: “I think the sport grants opened in the latter part of 2018 and it just so happened that I was preselected in the January and so the decisions about the sports grants were made in the March and the April.”
At the 2019 election, Mallee was considered to be more at risk for The Nationals than previous elections after the departure of former Nationals MP Andrew Broad.
Grants of $50,000 to Red Cliffs Golf Club and $8700 to Mildura West Cricket Club were made under the Community Sport Infrastructure Grant program and both were announced by Dr Webster during the election campaign.
Dr Webster said while she was advocating the grants, she was unaware of whether they were allocated on merit of the electorate’s applications.
“Of course I have nothing to do with the actual qualifying process of the grants.”
