Week 3 – Audio Lesson: Listen & Read

Refer to lesson PDF for transcript with highlighted vocabulary (download here).

Pete: Anyway, so how’s the week been dad? What’s been going on? What is the goss? What’s your goss? 

Ian: My goss isn’t much really. It’s just been watching a bit of tennis. Doing a bit of work. I was teaching last night. There’s not much else going on other than the corona virus seems to be the thing that’s… even though it’s not happening in Australia much, there’s a few people that seem to have been infected, but it’s been the headlines throughout the week.

Pete: Yeah, I haven’t seen much else on, right? There’s been pretty much as that in the news constantly. And then just political stuff which we sort of try and avoid because it’s pretty boring… 

Ian: Ah, yeah.

Pete: …most of the time. 

Ian: It’s the same political story that just won’t go away. You know?

Pete: Yeah.

Ian: The sports funding rort just won’t go away. But that’s probably not terribly interesting to your listeners.

 Pete: Well, do you want to mention that quickly just so that people know what it is when you say, “sporting funding rort?”

Ian: Well, the last year there was a $100-million grant created by the federal government and smaller sporting bodies, so not the major sporting clubs and associations, but smaller bodies, could apply to the Department of Sport to get grants for capital works to improve the sporting facilities for their club. And it appears that this was occurring at the same time that we were leading up to a federal election. And it appears that there were a lot of those grants given out to sporting clubs in seats that were either Liberal/National Party, the current government, and then the government that won the election or were very close. And so, it was you know, there’s a lot of accusations of pork-barrelling. And so, it’s been backwards and forwards, a lot around that.

Pete: What do you mean when you say “pork-barrelling”?

Ian: “Pork-barrelling” as in funding projects that will increase the likelihood of people voting for you at the next election.

Pete: Yep. It seemed very dodgy, right? And I was surprised to sort of say this to Kelly, because we’re always talking about Brazil and the sort of corruption that happens in Brazil politically. And, you know, she’s moved here. She’s lived here for four, almost five, years. And I’m like, there’s still corruption here. It’s just a sort of different kind. It’s not as overt and it’s much more subtle.

Ian: Yeah, the corruption here is political rather than personal. And there’s a lot of countries in the world that can be accused of political corruption, but in many cases, they are where politicians are lining their own pockets. They’re actually taking money for themselves. In this case, the accusation was that they were… they were granting government money to organisations in areas that were more likely to vote for them.

Pete: And who was it? Which… Was it the sporting body or something was the corporation or the group or…?

Ian: Sports Australia, which is the body that would ultimately oversee these, were being instructed on how to give the grants out.

Pete: Yeah, because they’re the ones who…

Ian: And they have a set of criteria that you had to apply under and then they were weighting the applications and rating them according to those criteria. And it’s been demonstrated that a lot of people got grants that were ranked quite low and people that were ranked higher were not given grants and it… Funnily enough, a lot of the people who weren’t given grants were in safe Labour seats. They were the opposition. 

Pete: And didn’t she give a bunch of money to one of the clubs that she attends?

Ian: Yeah, that she was a member of. Now, mind you, she’d only been a member of it for four days.

Pete: Yep.

Ian: But yeah, she had joined the club. And then, funnily enough, the club gets money a week later. 

Pete: It’s still just astonishing for me, that sort of stuff happening, because you’re kind of like, “how do you not see that this is going to come out?” This is going to see the light of day eventually and your career’s over. You know, or…

Ian: Oh, yeah. And look, it’s one of those classic things, I think, where clearly governments are responsible for granting the money, but once $100-million grant had been handed over to Sports Australia, they were the ones who then managed the applications. They should have been the ones who were granting the money. So, you hand it over to the various government departments to do the administration of it, which means that you can’t be accused of bias. So anyway, that’s a weird one. But it’s one of those ones where it just won’t go away. Every day there’s a new headline of somebody saying, “Oh, and you think that’s bad…”