(Image: Gorkie/Private Media)

Scott Morrison and Alan Tudge might have been hoping that they would have left the year’s biggest corruption scandal — car park rorts — behind them in the winter break, but then press gallery began doing its job — something that the government seemed entirely unprepared for.

When Tudge crept out from under a rock to hold a media conference on Wednesday, Nine’s Jonathan Kearsley was waiting for him and chased him back to the ministerial wing demanding answers about his role in formulating a list of marginal seats where the car parks were to be allocated, in consultation with Scott Morrison. If the footage looked like a dodgy tradie being pursued by an A Current Affairs reporter, that was entirely appropriate, except that Tudge had rorted far more money than any tabloid TV crook ever has.

Yesterday it was Morrison’s turn to look like a spiv turning tail, as journalists peppered him with questions about his role in the rort, forcing him to shut down a press conference on what should have been a positive story on the government’s Closing The Gap implementation plan. Under fire from all sides, Morrison abandoned the presser so quickly he left Ken Wyatt far behind as he raced back to the sanctuary of the PMO.

Labor raised the scandal in question time, asking the current minister Paul Fletcher — a stand-out dullard even in this awful cabinet — about how the projects were selected. Fletcher’s response, which his staff must have declared, with high-fives, to be a comedy masterpiece, was to read from an old ANAO report about a Labor program. Except, what he read out illustrated how the government is trying to distract from the rorting of hundreds of millions of dollars.

“So the minister had the authority,” said Fletcher before, with the comedic timing of a rotted corpse, confessing he’d read the wrong report. “The minister was acting within authority.”

That echoed what Morrison had tried to say before retreating under fire. “Ministers were authorised to make the decisions and the minister made the decision,” he insisted.

Fletcher has talked about ministerial authority before in defending the rort. It’s part of a calculated distraction, albeit an inept one. There has never been any issue about the “authority” of ministers to allocate the Urban Congestion Fund wherever they liked — the legislation under which is was provided isn’t subject to any of the usual requirements relating to grant processes.

“Authority” was one the problems Bridget McKenzie faced when she rorted the sports grants — she had no authority to actually allocate the funds, and nor did her staff or the PMO (who actually did it). Only Sports Australia had the legal authority. But none of that applies to the car park rorts.

The problem isn’t who had authority, it’s that the fund was blatantly rorted for partisan purposes. Mindlessly repeating “the minister was acting within authority” is irrelevant. Tudge and Morrison can both run from questions like common crooks but their inability to mount any kind of defence beyond a rhetorical bait-and-switch says much about their guilt in a colossal rort.

Morrison’s effort to evade another scandal — the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins, the question of who knew about it within his office and ministry, and how it was treated — worked for a while, but that too is looking increasingly problematic.

On May 25, veteran Liberal staffer and Morrison’s hand-picked head of Prime Minister and Cabinet, Phil Gaetjens, told the Senate’s Finance and Public Administration committee that his report into the scandal would “finish as soon as possible. I can’t give you a correct time because I’m relying on people to return statements and issues like that, but there’s nothing that I think will be a delay of any significance. I would expect it to be probably weeks, not days –certainly not months.”

We’re now more than two months on and there’s no sign of any report. Crikey asked Gaetjens’ department when the report would be finalised. No response was forthcoming — a common tactic across a government that resents and routinely ignores media questions.

This was the report that Morrison blatantly lied to Parliament about when he insisted Gaetjens had not updated him about it, only for Gaetjens to be forced to reveal he had indeed updated Morrison that it was on hold.

Part and parcel of the corruption of the Morrison government is its relentless hostility to scrutiny and transparency. Along with being the most corrupt government in federal history, it’s the most secretive since Malcolm Fraser opened up a new era of sunlight with the first Freedom of Information laws. That received a blow yesterday when the Federal Court struck down one of Morrison’s particularly egregious efforts at secrecy, claiming “national cabinet” was a cabinet committee and thus subject to cabinet secrecy provisions.

The corollary of secrecy and corruption is incompetence: if your main goal in governing is manipulating the levers of government to serve yourself and cover your tracks, its inevitable that, when challenged to actually perform complex tasks of government, you fail. Think Donald Trump. Think Boris Johnson. And, to the extent that you can stomach the stench of corruption, think Scott Morrison.