Home Affairs report confirms Scott Morrison pressured department to reveal election day boat interception

A Department of Home Affairs report has confirmed the office of former prime minister Scott Morrison instructed the public service to publicly reveal the interception of a suspected asylum seeker boat on election day.

Key points:

• The report said public servants acted with integrity by refusing a request to release a media statement as the operation was unfolding
• Mr Morrison announced the interception to media on election day
• The Home Affairs Minister described the election day episode as "disgraceful and shameful"

The report prepared by Home Affairs Secretary Mike Pezzullo found uniformed Australian Border Force (ABF) and Australian Defence Force members, as well as public servants, acted with integrity by refusing a request to release a media statement while the operation was still unfolding.

A departmental statement was eventually issued minutes after Mr Morrison announced the interception in his final press conference as Prime Minister, but the report concluded officials refused requests to post it on social media or send it directly to journalists.

Home Affairs Minister Clare O'Neill says the election day episode was "disgraceful, shameful and characteristic of a national government which frequently pursued political interests above the national interest".

The latest chapter of the coroner’s report unsurprisingly finds the Coalition government was a particularly diseased body when it was put down on May 21.

The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO), acting as council assisting the coroner, on Thursday reported on one of the cancers eating away at the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison/Joyce/McCormack/Joyce government – the corruption of the $1.15 billion Building Better Regions fund.

The ANAO report shows, yet again, that the Coalition in general and the National Party in particular weren’t just pork-barrel rollers, weren’t just up for a little rorting. They were flagrantly corrupt in their handing of public money.

It is one unacceptable thing to fiddle funds a bit to steer cash a favoured electorate’s way. It is on another scale again to design multibillion-dollar schemes to avoid due process, to avoid proper accountability, to use Commonwealth money for party political ends, to buy votes with handouts and gifts at the cost of ignoring genuine need.

That is precisely what the Coalition did almost from the day Tony Abbott became prime minister. The daddy of all the funding corruption, the Community Development Grants scandal, was designed on Abbott’s watch to specifically avoid public service oversight and effectively hand billions of dollars to government MPs to splash around their electorates without any concern at all for whether taxpayers were getting value for money.

https://thenewdaily.com.au/finance/finance-news/2022/07/30/coalition-corrupt-anao-report/