5d ago

Pork Barreling NOT Illegal

Send us Fan Mail A whiteboard with no record. A spreadsheet colour-coded by party. A briefing note that said to get the cash out the door "in the most politically advantageous way". For 33 years, auditors have found grant money leaning towards the seats that mattered, under governments of both sides. Billions of dollars. And not one person has ever been charged with pork barrelling, because federally there is no specific offence. This episode explains how pork barrelling works, walks through six programs from 1993 to today, and asks the three questions any grant program should be able to answer. Was there a merit process? Did the decisions follow it? Were the reasons written down? Nobody in this episode is accused of breaking the law. Every finding is the finding of the official body that made it. CHAPTERS 00:00 Not illegal 00:51 How the barrel works 03:55 Act 1: The whiteboard, 1993 06:21 Act 2: The clock, 2004 08:16 Act 3: Same rules, other side 09:30 Act 4: The spreadsheet, 2019 11:27 Act 5: A different watchdog, NSW 13:44 Act 6: Identified by government 17:02 Your checklist SOURCES House of Representatives Standing Committee on Environment, Recreation and the Arts, report on the Community, Cultural, Recreation and Sporting Facilities Program, February 1994 Australian National Audit Office, audit of the Community, Cultural, Recreation and Sporting Facilities Program, 1993 ANAO Report No. 14 2007-08, Performance Audit of the Regional Partnerships Programme ANAO Report No. 9 2014-15, on rounds three and four of the Regional Development Australia Fund ANAO Report No. 23 2019-20, Award of Funding under the Community Sport Infrastructure Program ANAO Report No. 47 2020-21, Administration of Commuter Car Park Projects within the Urban Congestion Fund NSW Auditor-General, Integrity of grant program administration, 8 February 2022 NSW State Archives and Records Authority, report under the State Records Act, 2021 NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, Operation Jersey report on pork barrelling, August 2022 NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, Operation Keppel report, 2023 Public Governance, Performance and Accountability Act 2013 (Cth), sections 8 and 71 Commonwealth Grants Rules and Principles 2024 Major and Local Community Infrastructure Program guidelines Centre for Public Integrity, analysis submitted to the Senate inquiry, September 2026 Commonwealth infrastructure department, submission to the Senate inquiry, 2026 Act 6 is as at October 2026. A Senate committee is due to report on the program on 18 November 2026. If you find an error, tell me and I will correct it and note the correction here. Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Watch, listen and follow: auditthispod.com/links Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This Corrections and tip-offs: auditthismedia@gmail.com

Oct 19

Nobody Said How Much

Send us Fan Mail Victoria paid out $11 billion in COVID-19 business grants, on the integrity commission's own count. In November 2021 the department's own integrity team put a number on how much of it had gone to businesses that should never have been eligible. The number was $251,965,500. The report that reached the Minister four months later said $18.31 million. At seven minutes past two on the afternoon of 30 November 2021, the line carrying the larger figure came out of the draft. The note beside the deleted row reads "To be removed a [sic] requested by [the Dep. Secretary]". The threshold for telling the Minister was $5,000. This episode follows what the commission found four years later: $257 million paid to more than 9,000 businesses that failed the eligibility test, $108 million of that to businesses reporting no turnover, and about $8 million recovered. Its conclusion is that the department minimised the issue, discredited the analysis that identified the suspected loss, and obscured the decision to withhold the information from the Minister. The commission made no finding of corrupt conduct, and no adverse comment about the incoming Minister. It found that three officers were denied procedural fairness. It has not made recommendations in this instance. Nobody has been charged and nobody has been prosecuted. The department's response records that no officer adversely mentioned is still employed there. The Auditor-General published a line of its own in November 2023: it is likely that fraud occurred and, to date, remains undetected. Every figure and every quote is from the public record. The full source list is in the video's description. The narration is an AI voice. Audit This follows Australian public money to the end of the paper trail. Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This Corrections and tip-offs: auditthismedia@gmail.com

Oct 11

Subject to Government Approval

Send us Fan Mail Australia planned twelve submarines. By Defence's own count it spent $3.4 billion on the program, and it never got a submarine. Twenty days before the cancellation, the head of the program emailed the Secretary of Defence. The largest defence project the country had ever taken on was still inside its original cost estimate, though it would need some of its contingency. On the morning of 16 September 2021, Australia announced it would be getting nuclear-powered submarines. The French ones were cancelled the same morning. The government's reasons, in its own words, were the changed strategic circumstances of the region and the advantages of nuclear propulsion. Defence's position is that the contracts ended because requirements changed, not because of how either company performed. This episode follows the money: what was spent, what was written off, what it cost to settle, and the older submarines whose upgrade had been planned around the cancelled boat's equipment. It starts with eleven helicopters: more than $1.4 billion spent, and less than $50 million back. Every figure and every quote is from the public record. The full source list is in the video's description. The narration is an AI voice. Audit This follows Australian public money to the end of the paper trail. Everything Audit This: auditthispod.com/links Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This Corrections and tip-offs: auditthismedia@gmail.com

Oct 6

NDIS Fraud: The Ten Worst Cases and Who Caught Them

Send us Fan Mail Last financial year, the NDIS paid out $51.5 billion. Before paying, the agency's staff checked about 0.4 per cent of the money by hand. Four dollars in every thousand. This episode follows the National Disability Insurance Scheme from the promise of 2013 to the reset of 2026: the open front door, the 280,000 providers paid in a single quarter, the price limits that became the price, and the agency's own description of its fraud controls, "catastrophically weak". Then it counts down the ten worst convicted NDIS fraud cases on the public record, and asks who actually caught them. It is not a story about participants or families. It is a story about how the scheme was built, and who was on the door. Built entirely from the public record. Sources and the full video: https://auditthispod.com/links If it was worth your time, follow Audit This and give it five stars. That's how the next person finds it. Chapters 00:00 Four dollars in every thousand 01:46 Who walked through 03:33 The promise 05:14 Day one 07:14 The front door 09:55 Who got paid 12:20 The ten worst 12:40 Number 10 13:28 Number 9 14:22 Number 8 15:34 Number 7 16:28 Number 6 17:23 Number 5 18:32 Number 4 19:18 Number 3 20:34 Number 2 22:15 Number 1 24:15 Who caught them 25:21 Eight cents in the dollar 29:23 The report card 31:41 Eight per cent 32:37 The door, finally 35:12 The ledger Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This Corrections and tip-offs: auditthismedia@gmail.com

Oct 4

The File Said So

Send us Fan Mail Two private colleges in Melbourne reported lessons that were never taught, and Victoria paid for every hour of them. On the 5th of July 2015, the timetable at one of them listed six classes. The footage from that day shows one person entering the building. He was there to clean it. This episode is about what happens when public money is released by a document rather than by a person who has seen the thing the document describes. The state paid on hours the provider reported as delivered, monthly, through a portal, and nothing in the payment step required anybody to confirm that a class had happened. It starts with eleven roofs that never had a solar panel on them, and it ends with $2,007,487.75 that left the Victorian budget between March 2014 and July 2015. A jury convicted four people after a trial in 2018. Both colleges were suspended in August 2015 and neither registration exists today. CHAPTERS 00:00 Eleven roofs with no panels on them 02:08 Eleven envelopes 03:47 Two colleges, and a state that paid by the hour 04:27 What the enrolment was worth 06:42 What a college looked like 08:01 An hour is the easiest thing in the world to write down 10:03 Ninety days, and the checks the provider did itself 11:53 The audit they knew was coming 13:34 One set of answers 15:10 Twenty three days 17:01 Four minutes, thirty eight seconds 19:07 Over-inflated 20:39 Thirty four cents each 22:54 The ledger 25:05 Nobody counted the chairs The subsidies were Victorian, paid under the Victorian Training Guarantee. The offences were Commonwealth, because the conspiracy ran through a Commonwealth official and regulator. $48 million was identified for recovery across 62 investigations in the eighteen months after the state started looking. Identified is not recovered, and no public figure exists for the years before anybody looked. The surveillance material, the audit call and the twenty three days are from the ABC's investigation and are credited on screen where they appear. Every figure and every quote is from the public record and is sourced on screen. Nothing in this episode is footage. Every scene is drawn, and no face is shown. The narration is an AI voice. SOURCES The Queen v Arora & Ors [2018] VCC 1563, County Court of Victoria, 21 September 2018 DPP (Cth) v Sharma & Ors [2019] VCC 1851, County Court of Victoria, 14 November 2019 2014 to 2016 VET Funding Contract, Schedule 1, Victorian Department of Education and Training VET Funding Review, final report, September 2015 Victorian Training Market Report, full year 2015 and full year 2016 Australian Skills Quality Authority media release, 5 August 2015 Clean Energy Regulator prosecution, Melbourne, February 2023 ABC News and 7.30, Paul Farrell, 6 November 2019 Audit This follows Australian public money to the end of the paper trail. www.auditthispod.com/links #AuditThis #AusPol #PublicMoney Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This Corrections and tip-offs: auditthismedia@gmail.com

Sep 29

Taken To Be

Send us Fan Mail Under one line of federal law, a spare room in Canberra counts as a hotel. Not like a hotel. "Taken to be commercial accommodation", whether it is or not. This episode reads the rules that decide what federal politicians are paid and what public money they can spend: the salary, the electorate allowance, the car, the travel allowance, the office budget's shopping list, and the authority that was built in 2017 to watch over the expenses. In 2015 the government announced a review of the whole system. Eleven years and thirty six recommendations later, this is what the rulebook says. The spare room, the wreaths, the flags: none of it needed anybody to break a rule. This episode names no politician. It is about the rules, not the people who use them. Every fact in it comes from the public record. The narration is an AI voice. CHAPTERS 00:00 The spare room 01:42 The shopping list 03:47 The review 04:39 What the job pays 07:23 Fifteen words 09:13 Who checks 11:56 A blank sheet of paper 13:52 What they built 16:34 Nine years 18:25 Eight rulebooks 20:43 The ledger SOURCES The rules Remuneration Tribunal (Members of Parliament) Determination 2026, F2026L01115, 22 August 2026 Remuneration Tribunal (Members of Parliament) Determination 2024 Remuneration Tribunal, Statement of Decision, 11 June 2026 Remuneration Tribunal, Report on Ministerial Salaries 2026 Parliamentary Business Resources Act 2017, Compilation No. 6, 1 July 2026 Parliamentary Business Resources Regulations 2017, section 66 Parliamentary Business Resources (Parliamentary Business) Determination 2025, F2025L00135 Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority Act 2017 Australian Taxation Office, Taxation Ruling TR 1999/10 The money Department of Finance, Portfolio Budget Statements 2026-27, Outcome 3 Australian Bureau of Statistics, estimated resident population, 31 March 2026 Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority, parliamentarians' expenditure data, quarterly releases, July 2024 to June 2026 (calculations by Audit This) Salary rates in force in 2026 for the Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand; Reserve Bank of Australia exchange rates Who checks Auditor-General for Australia, published correspondence, letter of 6 August 2015 Australian National Audit Office, Report No. 42 2014-15, Administration of Travel Entitlements Provided to Parliamentarians Australian National Audit Office, Administration of the Parliamentary Expenses Management System (performance audit) Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority, Annual Reports 2018-19 to 2024-25 Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority, published rulings, repayments register and Certifications page Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority, published protocol on referrals, 1 November 2022 The review, and what was built Prime Minister, media release and press conference, 2 August 2015 An Independent Parliamentary Entitlements System, Review, February 2016, including its Terms of Reference of 2 August 2015 Prime Minister, press conference, 13 January 2017 Department of Finance, appointment of the independent reviewers, 28 April 2026 The other parliaments Queensland Independent Remuneration Tribunal, Determination 38/2026; Queensland Members' Remuneration Handbook Tasmanian Department of Premier and Cabinet, routine disclosures of ministerial travel and entertainment costs Northern Territory Remuneration Tribunal, Report and Determination No. 1 of 2026, Special Inquiry, Salaries and Other Entitlements of Assembly Members Salaries and Allowances Tribunal (WA), Members of Parliament Determination No. 1 of 2026 Corruption and Crime Commission (WA), report on electorate allowances, December 2019 Parliamentary Remuneration Tribunal (NSW), Annual Determination, 28 July 2026 Audit This follows Australian public money to the end of the paper trail. Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This Corrections and tip-offs: auditthismedia@gmail.com

Sep 24

The Vast Majority

Send us Fan Mail In 2008, a new shape appeared on a map of New South Wales. A coal exploration area called Mount Penny, in the Bylong Valley. Years later, the minister responsible was asked, at a public inquiry, how he knew where to put it. He said he was pretty good at geography. When Mount Penny was granted, its boundary covered, in the corruption commission's own words, "the vast majority" of a cattle property a politically connected family had bought the year before, to retire on. And all of the two farms next door. Ian Macdonald, Edward Obeid and Moses Obeid were convicted in 2021 of conspiring to commit wilful misconduct in public office. Every appeal was dismissed, the last by the High Court of Australia on 4 February 2026. The family received $30 million. Thirteen years, a public inquiry, a criminal trial and two appeals later, not one dollar of it has ever come back. Built entirely from the public record. New episodes weekly. CHAPTERS 00:00 A new shape on the map 01:38 1906: the minister nobody could convict 03:28 The farm 05:54 The minister 07:36 How you open a coalfield 09:14 The bid that lost on purpose 10:54 What a shape on a map is worth 12:52 The room 14:55 Thirteen years 17:37 Where the money went 20:17 The valley SOURCES R v Macdonald; R v Edward Obeid; R v Moses Obeid (No 17) [2021] NSWSC 858 R v Macdonald; R v Edward Obeid; R v Moses Obeid (No 18) [2021] NSWSC 1343 Macdonald v R; Obeid v R; Obeid v R [2023] NSWCCA 250 Obeid v The King; Macdonald v The King [2026] HCA 1 Independent Commission Against Corruption, Operation Jasper report, July 2013 Mining Amendment (ICAC Operations Jasper and Acacia) Act 2014 No 1 (NSW) NSW Crime Commission, Jasper II report, 24 April 2025 ABC News, 1 February 2013 and 24 October 2021 Everything named in this episode is a matter of criminal conviction or the public record. Sources are above. If you find an error, tell me and I will correct it and note the correction here. Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This Corrections and tip-offs: auditthismedia@gmail.com

Sep 22

Free Because It Should Be

Send us Fan Mail Go and find your last payslip. There is a line on it you have almost certainly never checked. It says tax. Between 2014 and 2017 a payroll company in Sydney collected $141,291,923 in tax withheld from ordinary workers' pay. It kept $105,625,304 of it. Plutus Payroll advertised itself as free. It was free because the fee came out of the tax. Every worker got a payslip saying the tax had been paid. Fifteen people were sentenced. As at the date of this recording, the convictions of all five men at the centre of it stand. Dev Menon and Jason Onley have filed appeals against their convictions, and no appeal has been determined. This is also an episode about a gap in the law that a court had already described, in writing, eleven years before anybody walked through it. Built entirely from the public record. New episodes weekly. CHAPTERS 00:00 The payslip said the tax had been paid 01:12 1989: a bricklayer, and the gap a court described 04:08 The pitch, and a joke about tax that is 2,400 years old 06:06 The men who ran it 09:08 How the machine actually worked 12:14 "Lovely" 14:07 What the money bought 16:15 The room was wired 18:09 The blackmail 21:41 Squeaky clean 24:32 The ledger: fifteen sentences 28:06 The register, and what changed SOURCES R v Cranston [2023] NSWSC 1004 R v Cranston [2023] NSWSC 1008 R v Lauren Cranston [2023] NSWSC 454 R v Cranston (No 9) [2021] NSWSC 1413 R v Cranston (No 31) [2023] NSWSC 488 Menon v R; Onley v R [2025] NSWCCA 56 Anquetil v R [2025] NSWCCA 147 In the matter of Plutus Payroll Australia Pty Ltd [2019] NSWSC 1171 R v Walters [2001] NSWSC 640 R v Walters [2002] NSWCCA 291 R v Iannelli [2003] NSWCCA 1; (2003) 56 NSWLR 247 Australian National Audit Office, Report 32 of 2018-19 Australian National Audit Office, Report 15 of 2023-24 PwC for the Fair Work Ombudsman, June 2012 Senate Economics References Committee, "I just want to be paid", December 2015 Melbourne Law School and Monash University, February 2017 Australian Business Registry Services, Registrar statement, 30 November 2022 Australian Bureau of Statistics, Labour Force, employees plutuspayroll.com, techpilotfund.com.au and synep.com, archived captures, Internet Archive Wayback Machine, 2014 to 2018 If this episode has raised anything for you, Lifeline is on 13 11 14 and Beyond Blue is on 1300 22 4636. Audit This takes one Australian fraud and follows the money to the end of it. Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This Corrections and tip-offs: auditthismedia@gmail.com

Sep 14

Two Thousand Children, None of Them Real

Send us Fan Mail Between January and July 2017, two family day care services in western Sydney looked after 2,132 children. They claimed 398,936 sessions of care. That is more than two and a half thousand sessions of childcare every working day, for seven months. In one month alone they enrolled more than 1,600 children, about three quarters of their entire book, in about four weeks. Not one session happened. Not one child was ever there. The Commonwealth paid $9,274,016. Three years earlier, in a house on the New South Wales side of the Murray, one woman running one service put in 80 false claims and was paid $3,646,269.72. Fourteen children were named on them. The payment she used was the one set aside for children at serious risk of abuse or neglect. It could run to nine thousand dollars a week for a single child, the provider decided for themselves that the child was at risk, the provider set the hourly rate, and the decision to grant it could not be appealed by anyone. This episode is about how both frauds worked, which took no skill at all, and about the system that paid for them, which is the part that should worry you. A form the provider filled in themselves. A risk assessment the provider made themselves. A rate the provider set themselves. And a report by the government's own umpire, published in 2014, that set out in plain words exactly how the payment could be used. It ends with the Auditor-General. Over six years the Commonwealth identified thirteen million dollars lost to child care subsidy fraud, and recovered $116,707 of it, from seven cases. Episode one ended because nobody asked. This one ended because nobody went and looked. Built entirely from the public record. No speculation, no dramatisation, no guessing at what anyone was thinking. New episodes weekly. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open 0:55 The graduation ceremony 2:36 Act one, the payment 4:07 Act two, Albury 8:00 Act three, the jury room 11:30 Act four, the warning 12:41 Act five, sixteen hundred children in a month 14:49 Nearly ten sessions a day, for every child 17:30 The accounts are frozen 19:47 Act six, the part that is not about money 21:13 What that money was worth in caseworkers 22:30 Act seven, the sentences 23:45 Side by side 26:00 Act eight, it is still happening 26:52 What was never recovered SOURCES Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions, case summaries Australian Federal Police Australian National Audit Office, "Management and Oversight of Compliance Activities within the Child Care Subsidy Program", Auditor-General Report No. 42 of 2024-25, tabled 16 June 2025 Productivity Commission, "Childcare and Early Childhood Learning", Inquiry Report No. 73, 31 October 2014, Appendix B New South Wales Ombudsman, reports to Parliament on the child protection response to risk of significant harm reports Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee, inquiry into the Jobs for Families Child Care Package Australian Business Register Australian Bureau of Statistics, national, state and territory population Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This Corrections and tip-offs: auditthismedia@gmail.com

Sep 10

27 Million Dollars, Nobody Asked

Send us Fan Mail In 2011 a finance officer at Queensland Health sat down to do the most boring job in government. He found a payment he did not recognise, typed the vendor's name into a free government website, and eight seconds later he had uncovered the largest fraud in the state's history. Two and a half thousand kilometres away, a senior public servant in Western Australia had already been doing the same thing for three years. He would keep going for another eight. By the time anyone stopped him, Paul Whyte had taken about twenty seven million dollars from the department responsible for public housing. He pleaded guilty to 564 charges. Roughly twenty two million dollars has never been recovered. This episode is about how he did it, which is not clever, and about why nobody stopped him, which is the part that should worry you. A signature threshold. A cost centre with one owner. A tip that was not a crime and nearly went in the bin twice. And a warning, published by an auditor general six months before any of it was found, that said exactly what was about to happen. Built entirely from the public record. No speculation, no dramatisation, no guessing at what anyone was thinking. CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open 0:15 The most boring job in government 1:48 The birthday party 3:54 The warning nobody read 5:02 Western Australia 6:25 The committee room 7:15 Below your number, you sign 7:59 A mare called Mossnip 10:38 The tip 14:06 He owned the cost centre 14:51 The address on every record 17:10 The waiting list 18:05 Accountable, not responsible 19:18 The ledger 20:42 Side by side SOURCES Corruption and Crime Commission of Western Australia, "Operation Taurus: Exposing corruption in Department of Communities" Corruption and Crime Commission of Western Australia, public examination of Grahame John Searle, 22 June 2022, before Commissioner John McKechnie QC Supreme Court of Western Australia, sentencing of Paul Whyte before Justice Joseph McGrath, 19 November 2021. Twelve years, eligible for parole after ten. Queensland Audit Office, "Results of audits at 31 May 2011", Report No. 5 for 2011, June 2011 Crime and Misconduct Commission Queensland, "Fraud, financial management and accountability in the Queensland public sector: An examination of how a $16.69 million fraud was committed on Queensland Health", tabled 25 September 2013 Western Australia Legislative Council committee examination of the Housing Authority, Parliament House Perth, 19 October 2017 Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Audit This takes one story at a time and follows it to the end. Every episode is built from the public record: court transcripts, sentencing remarks, corruption commission findings, Hansard and auditor general reports. No speculation. No dramatisation. Watch on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@Audit_This Corrections and tip-offs: auditthismedia@gmail.com

Audit This

Episodes

Pork Barreling NOT Illegal

Nobody Said How Much

Subject to Government Approval

NDIS Fraud: The Ten Worst Cases and Who Caught Them

The File Said So

Taken To Be

The Vast Majority

Free Because It Should Be

Two Thousand Children, None of Them Real

27 Million Dollars, Nobody Asked

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