What we learned: Monday, 15 August
And with that, we will close the blog for the day. Here’s what happened today:
Anthony Albanese is seeking legal advice on the former PM Scott Morrison reportedly secretly swearing himself in as the minister for health, finance and resources during his time in office.
A spokesman for governor general, David Hurley, said Hurley had appointed former prime minister Scott Morrison to administer other portfolios, and that such appointments do not require a swearing-in ceremony.
NSW treasurer, Matt Kean, said former deputy premier John Barilaro’s appointment to a $500,000 trade role in New York “should be scrutinised”.
Kean also labelled David Elliott “embarrassing” after Elliott accused Kean of harming negotiations between the government and rail union in its long-running industrial campaign.
Minister for government services, Bill Shorten, said a multi-agency investigative team will be set up to combat fraud in the NDIS.
NSW Labor frontbencher Walt Secord stood down from the shadow ministry after last week admitting he had been “too blunt and too direct”.
Queensland’s police commissioner will front a commission of inquiry into police responses to domestic violence this week after questions were raised about her absence from the public hearings.
Twenty-seven people died from Covid around the country today.
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Lack of scrutiny of NDIS leading to rorting of system ‘has to stop’, Bill Shorten says
I wanted to just rewind a bit (it has been an understandably hectic day) to Bill Shorten’s appearance on ABC’s Afternoon Briefing, where he also discussed fraud within the NDIS system.
Shorten said he was at a a loss as to how the previous government missed such a “shocking abuse of the system”, and said only a multi-agency taskforce could recoup some of the rorts:
What happens is that, all too often, service providers can put in an invoice and no one checks if the service has been done, no one properly scrutinises the price, it is automatically paid sight-unseen.
There are 100 people working on the back-office data analytics, but this fraud comes from many forms, from the extreme criminal version and over-servicing, and all the providers are more frustrated than anyone else because it gives service provision a bad name.
[The NDIS’s] problems are caused by people who are not disabled, not caused by the conscientious disability service providers and hundreds of thousands of disability care workers. This is [from] some people who have been operating in a wild west, [with a] lack of scrutiny and that has to stop.
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Constitutional law expert says former PM’s secret portfolios ‘just bizarre’
Earlier this afternoon, constitutional law expert Anne Twomey was on the ABC discussing the former PM’s secret portfolios, and she said it was a “bizarre” situation:
Oh, well, look, frankly [it’s] just bizarre. The secretness of it is the weird thing. I mean, it’s not strange that [Morrison] might want to have a second person who was able to take over if the first person was incapacitated, etc. But there are ways of doing that anyway. And ordinarily if you do something like that, the basic rules are you announce it to parliament because parliament needs to know who is responsible.
Also, you can just make changes to the administrative arrangement orders, which is the other way of doing this. So that’s a way of saying – OK, in relation to the Biosecurity Act ... the minister for agriculture can seize powers and the minister of health can seize other powers. You can change that by just going to the governor general, having a council meeting and saying, yes, the prime minister can also exercise these powers.
I went through every single administrative arrangement order this morning and it’s just not there. So what an earth is going on? I don’t know, but the secrecy involved in this is just simply bizarre. I mean, you know, you just wonder what is wrong with these people that they have to do everything in secret and they can’t fess up to what they’re doing. Because if they had done it and made it public, [it] probably would have been seen [as] pretty reasonable for people. But hiding it? That’s weird.
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