Morrison government's health funding program 'unethical'

Another week, another devastating revelation about the Australian public service.

This week’s bad news comes courtesy of the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO), which has examined how the community health and hospitals program (CHHP), a $2 billion Morrison government health program, was administered.

Spoiler alert: it’s bad! The ANAO says the program “was ineffective and fell short of ethical requirements”. It describes a completely flawed administrative process: $2 billion was spent, much of it in breach of Commonwealth grants guidelines; many grants went to dubious recipients for doubtful outcomes; some spending may even have been unlawful.

Scott Morrison announced the fund in late 2018, and at the time it appeared to be a fairly boring policy, funding uncontroversial activities such as cancer treatment, drug and alcohol programs, and public and preventive health.

To say the audit is scathing is an understatement. The Health Department appears to have crashed through all the usual policy safeguards. Like the Human Services Department before it, Health appears to have known that what it was doing was possibly unlawful, but did it anyway. The audit states: “Health did not develop grant opportunity guidelines for seven of 108 CHHP grants, and in at least three instances this represented a deliberate decision by senior management to not comply with finance law.”

The grant agreements were often questionable — some were drawn up so quickly that they lacked basic details. One assessment about the suitability of a grant to the controversial Esther Foundation, featured information pulled from a media profile of the organisation.

The audit found that the Australian government solicitor told Health that “making the grant would likely be without lawful authority”. Health signed the contract anyway.

The overriding imperative appears to have been to shovel the money out the door, so that Morrison could hold a media appearance. The Esther Foundation collapsed into voluntary administration in 2022, amid allegations of abuse at its residential facilities.

Not all of this was public servants’ fault. In many cases, Morrison and then-health minister Greg Hunt announced funding decisions before the bureaucrats had drafted guidelines. As Hunt and Morrison travelled around Australia announcing CHHP funding, hard-pressed Health Department officers were reduced to scouring media releases in the hope of catching up with the news. As the audit notes drily: “Health decided to begin drafting national partnership agreements on the basis of public announcements.”

These latest revelations from the ANAO are dismaying, even for close watchers of the federal public service. We’re not talking commuter car parks here, after all. These were precious health dollars, some of the most sensitive parts of any government budget.

And yet, confronted by the tempest of Morrison’s election campaign, senior Health officials appear to have folded with barely a whimper. You couldn’t even say that Morrison pressured public servants to approve inappropriate grants: he simply announced them, and bureaucrats scrambled to do the paperwork.

Journalists and commentators like to use political jargon like “pork-barrelling” for this sort of thing, but what the audit reveals is something more serious. A funding program — in public health, no less — has been used for political considerations.

The yardstick for devising and implementing a community health policy should be exactly that: the health of the community. Voters expect that scarce health dollars will be spent wisely and adequately monitored and administered. None of that happened. Leaving aside the impure motives, the administration of this program was also clearly disastrous.

Some crucial early decisions loom for national anti-corruption (NACC) commissioner Paul Brereton, who will soon be confronted with an Australian public service with multiple scandals and deep cultural decay. Brereton may receive recommendations to investigate senior APS officers as a result of the robodebt royal commission. He may also end up receiving referrals over this scandal in health.

The NACC’s definition of corrupt conduct is broad and wide-ranging. For instance, its website says corrupt conduct includes the abuse of their position.

A public official abuses their office if they:

Engage in improper acts or omissions in their official capacity;
Know that those acts or omissions are improper;
Intend to gain a benefit for themselves or another person, or cause a detriment to another person.

If we examine the actions of officials in Services Australia in the implementation of the robodebt scheme, and perhaps now in this latest scandal in health, it appears public officials knew, or should have known, that the policies were improper, even unlawful. They went ahead anyway under pressure from their political masters.

Establishing the evidentiary bar for abuse of office will not be easy. But if the NACC is to do its job, there are some dark days ahead for the Australian public service.