Labor will raise the Prime Minister’s involvement in the pre-election grants when Parliament resumes on Tuesday.

“On 26 March 2019 the Prime Minister’s Office had advised the minister’s office that it was expected that the minister would write to the prime minister to seek ‘authority’ on the approved projects and inform him of the ‘roll out plan’,” Mr Hehir told MPs.
Senator McKenzie quit over the affair after it was revealed the taxpayer-funded grants had been awarded using a colour-coded spreadsheet. The final list of approved recipients was changed after Mr Morrison called the election, when the public service had entered the pre-election caretaker period.
Mr Morrison has told Parliament he was “not the decision maker in relation to the program”.
“As I’ve said on numerous occasions, the ministerial authority for these decisions was the Minister for Sport,” he told the House of Representatives in February.
Asked on Monday if he had misled Parliament, Mr Morrison said: “No.”
Challenged over his answer during a press conference on bushfire spending, the Prime Minister cut off a reporter from the Guardian Australia.
“I’ve answered your question,” he said. “I said no.”
Labor will seek to revive the controversy this week as the committee’s scrutiny continues. The rorts have already led to Senator McKenzie’s removal from the frontbench and helped spark Barnaby Joyce’s failed challenge against Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack’s leadership of the junior Coalition partner.
Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese accused the government of neglecting policy in favour of “pork barrelling on an industrial scale”.