Were Sports Rorts another reason Labor lost the 2019 Election? Part 1.

Introduction.

Following the loss by the Labor party of the 2019 federal Election, I wrote a paper about why the Labor party lost that Election. I asked a good friend and Labor Member, John Collins to write it with me. John agreed and we set about writing a proper and in depth analysis of why Labor Lost.

My background (in Australia) was in Industrial Marketing, a discipline which involved a lot of in depth analysis of the Product, the Price of the product Promotion of the product and Place the product is promoted.

John and I did a ton of analysis. At all times we tried hard to look at the the project objectively and without our particular ideological bents. We tried hard to look at where Labor had lost, when everyone was saying it was an election Labor just couldn’t have lost.

As we continued our analysis of the Political product, we realised that Labor had a huge policy platform. A platform they had been developing for a considerable time. We realised that it was unconventional, because it didn’t actually group it’s policies under the normal headings of Industrial Relations, Foreign affairs, Health, defence etc. There was a colour coded page of policy statements. One hundred and seventy three of them in fact. But they weren’t coded. The same colour wasn’t used for Specific areas and it was just a mass of data.

We also realised the content and thought that had gone into those policy ideas was really well thought through. They ticked the “Labor values” box 100%.

What Labor didn’t do and in my view always fail to do was to work out a comprehensive yet simple message strategy. It is my view that they are doing it today……still.

So John Collins (my co author) and I decided that Labor left a Vacuum and we all know vacuum’s suck. In this case it sucked in all of the ornately Political messaging of the Coalition parties with their slick election machine. We called the paper “Filling the Vacuum”

But we didn’t stop there, we also presented it to Our State and Fedreal MP’s in a 30 page presentation.

In that presentation we talked about 4 specific areas where labor failed.

1. They failed to understand their market.
2. They failed to analyse their market
3. They failed to develop a strategy
4. They failed to Develop a comprehensive Messaging Strategy

The Worst part of the whole 4 was that they didn’t have a strategic outlook or an analytical outlook.

In fact we recommended that Labor should have two messaging strategies. One a long term message about the fight by the Unions and the Labor movement for social justice over the years and secondly, specific messaging about Election policy but tied in with the long running message.

Because this vacuum of messaging exists, it allows the Coalition parties to come in and fill the heads of the electorate with alternative message.

In this election and the past 5 elections I can remember the long run Coalition message. “Labor is no good with money, Labor is run by the Unions and that the unions are thugs.” This then morphed into a message about Bill Shorten (no one likes him because he was a Union Boss and he was a thug and everyone should be scared of him).

The other theme in the last election was that Labor is coming to Tax everyone. Coming for your Franking credits and therefore going to make your life harder. That allowed the Tim Wilson’s of this world to chair a franking credits inquiry, held mainly in areas where self funded retirees resided and came and stacked the witnesses.

A quick search on the internet showed that the Parliamentary budget office had done a costing of Labor’s policy for Senator Leyonhjelm. Over 10 years. With and without Aged pensioners (The ones on the governemnt pension). They showed the cost to the budget to be $51 billion and that the recipients of that tax break were made up of the following people, loosely termed retirees, but never explained properly either by Labor or by the Press.

When you finish your full time working life you can either go on a state pension which is paid for from Tax payers funds, you can live off your own super as a self funded retiree or you can live of a Private or Industry super fund which you have contributed to over a period of your life.

Many of those super funds have investments and when the dividends are distributed to shareholders, they are fully taxed paid, if you don’t have a Tax liability then that tax, already paid is refunded to you.

The parliamentary budget office basically showed that this would cost the budget $51 billion for all those retirees cohorts, but if you took the pensioners out it would only cost $49 billion. They even quantified the numbers. There were 360,000 pensioners who had Franking credits and Labor exempted them from the policy (half way through and too late for the scuttlebutt to take hold) The other $49 billion was made up of 870,000 retirees in the other cohorts.

Failing to explain the breakup of retirees and who it affected cheesed off the 3.7 million people on pensions, when it only affected 10% of them anyway and they were exempted after a furore in the press.

A complete failure to analyse the marketplace, segment it and then message around that segmentation, to basically refute the lies that were told by the other Political party.

That was our main finding, the lack of suitable long and short term messaging. What we found was that basically the Liberals and Nationals are superb at Politics but they are very poor policy makers, Whereas Labor are excellent policy developers but rubbish at Politics.

Many people don’t like the supine Labor, but there is another lesson to be drawn from it. That lesson is that they are not about getting into the gutter politics that the Liberals play, but that reluctance also keeps Australia from having decent and forward thinking, socially just governments.

I thought that that was the end of the analysis and sent it to anyone who asked. So when Sports Rorts appeared in the press I was interested as to what advantage such rorting gave to Coailition.

I hadn’t particularly bothered about the Sport’s Infrastructure scheme until I saw a Tweet, which basically said. “nothing to see here, they all do it” Now this tweet was written by a well known Journalist and I was a little annoyed that such a thing would be said with Zero evidence.

That sparked me into action to find out about these grants and who they went to. After all the press coverage was just rubbish really. They don’t go into the detail and they really don’t know a lot about the story themselves because they are generalists. Unkind? I don’t think so.

So I downloaded the Auditor-General’s report and read it.

https://www.anao.gov.au/work/performance-audit/award-funding-under-the-community-sport-infrastructure-program

From this I found out that The Australian Sports commission (Sport Australia) is not a Government department and is therefore not subject to the Commonwealth Grant rules and guidelines.

I also found out Sport Australia was set up under the Australian Sports
Commission Act 1989 (ASC Act) and this allows Sport Australia as a separate body corporate to make Grants and enter into contracts.

Sport Australia thus made their own set of guidelines under the auspices of the Board to award the funding granted to Sport Australia as grants to individuals.

The person who approved the grants in these guidelines was the Minister for Sport.

The Audit report asks a fundamental Question about the Legal authority of the Minister under the Act to grant that approval. Also whether the Board of Sport Australia had the power to confer their powers to make Grants, to the Minister.

The press entirely missed this point about legality under the Sports Administration Act. There is another question mark about the Commonwealth’s power to actually grant money to Sports infrastructure under the Australian Constitution.

So as well as the allocation of funds in a greater proportion to Coalition Electorates (again which had no evidence to it from the press) there was more than one story.

Then a spreadsheet was leaked to the ABC which showed that the Minister’s office had been tracking the granting of funds to “Marginal” and “Targeted” seats and that it was colour coded.

Once again this information wasn’t given to the general public. Just what the journalist thought about it. In my view a very unsatisfactory state of affairs. I like the detail and the facts all in the same place, not dribbled out as some sort of sensational thing written in such a way as to entertain rather than inform.

So I went to the Sport Australia web site and found the Grants under this scheme. All 684 of them worth $100M and downloaded them into a spreadsheet.

https://www.sportaus.gov.au/grants_and_funding/community_sport_infrastructure_grant_program

This also gave me access to the guidelines developed by Sport Australia and the assessment criteria. I learned in the Audit report that there were two assessment processes in train. The proper published one by Sport Australia and another one in the Ministers office.

So in order to have a base of facts to work from, I spent 4 days googling each Grant in the 684 and then finding the associated post code. I was then able to use the Australian Electoral Commission web site to find out which electorate the grantee was actually in. I then found out which political party won that electorate and did an analysis.

Here is that Analysis.

Spreadsheet Analysis of Sports infrastructure grants. Prepared by V.O’Grady 2020. The total of all 684 grants was $100,272,870

Coalition total Grants	419
Coalition total GrantValue	61,751,371
Coalition Percentage grants	61.26%
Coalition Percentage grants Value	61.58%
Independent total Grants	43
Independent total GrantValue	6,892,089
Independent Percentage grants	6.29%
Independents Percentage grants Value	6.87%
Labor total Grants	223
Labor total GrantValue	31,629,410
Labor Percentage grants	32.60%
LaborPercentage grants Value	31.54%

It’s pretty clear that With a Parliament of 151 seats with

44 of them Liberal

23 LNP

10 National

6 independent and

68 Labor

There is a massive misapplication of grants to the Coalition seats. It is also clear that some of the ministers answers to the allocation of funds and particularly the proportions claimed do not pass muster.

Here is a graphical representation of the allocation of Grants.

And here is the same allocation showing Political Parties and seats.

This graph is particularly interesting as it shows the Liberal party with 44 seats was allocated $35 million , whilst the Labor party with 68 seats was allocated 4 million less, yet they have 24 more seats. Meanwhile the Nationals and the LNP who have 33 seats between them were allocated only $6 million less than Labor.

So we have a clear misapplication of funds between Political parties, which is strange because the AEC always make sure that the electors in Divisions (electorates Range between 90 to 120 thousand electors) so roughly the same numbers. Also the Political parties are only 9 seats difference in a 151 seat Parliament.

I sent my spreadsheet to several of my friends, one of them being a friend in Canberra who also decided to do an analysis. This analysis being of the funding of Sport Australia grants programs for the last 10 years. Below is a graph of Steve’s analysis.

2019 funding year (an Election year) was allocated an extra approx $100 million in funds for grants. Strange how that is also the value of the Sports Infrastructure grants program which was the subject of the Auditor’s audit.

Where are we up to now?

Well the Senate established a Senate select committee on the administration of Sports grants and that is running as I type.

There have been numerous submission to it. Some of the most interesting are from Legal experts from Sydney and Melbourne universities which also Question the legality of the scheme and the legality of the Commonwelath government to even grants grants to Sports infrastructure.

Here is the link for you to go and read some of the fascinating evidence given by the players in this game of politics.

https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Administration_of_Sports_Grants

Much of that evidence is contradictory and there is a lot of interaction between The Ministers office and the Prime Ministers Office. Most interesting of all is the inclusion of other grants streams in the process and the way particular grants in particular seats are added and swapped at will.

On other thing is that the Minister says she signed the last round of approvals on 4th April, but changes were made even on the day that the Election was called. 11th April. That is not allowed.

This is better than Hercule Poirot or Agatha Christie’s other stories, it does involve the stench of skullduggery. And there is much more to tell.

In Part 2, I will go onto describe how I was asked to help with another spreadsheet analysis of a grant stream which was 10 times as big. This one posed some problems but with an IT expert friend and going back to work mode, we did it. We actually analysed $2 billion of grants and the way they were allocated will astonish you dear reader and along with my Market analysis, I can maybe really reveal how the Coalition managed their miracle. But as always that is up to you to decide.