Senator FAULKNER (3:05 PM) —I move:

That the Senate take note of answers given by the Minister for Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (Senator Alston), to questions without notice asked by Senator Faulkner today, relating to the distribution of funds for the Federation Cultural and Heritage Projects program.

We have the situation now where, in question time in the Senate today, Senator Alston was unable to respond on behalf of the government to a report that appeared in the Weekend Australian . That report cited a highly placed government source who indicated that the 16 Federation Fund projects that did not reach the government's own minimum 15-point score were weak, that the ministers knew they were weak and that their selection as projects was electorally motivated.

Senator Alston could not respond on that issue. He could not tell us how many of the 16 projects that he and Senator Hill pulled out of their bottom drawer scored as low as eight points out of 24 in the departmental assessment. Even though they were rushed through and approved for announcement in the last election campaign a year ago, he could not tell us why it was necessary for that quick assessment process and those public announcements when work has not yet commenced on the projects themselves. Of course, he could not tell us whether the Tasmanian School of Fine Furniture project in Launceston met the minimum funding criteria of $500,000 or whether that was another one of the projects that he and Senator Hill pulled out of the bottom drawer.

That is the problem we have here. We have a massive cover-up from Senator Alston and Senator Hill and their departments on this issue. We have been able to extract information that there were 16 projects that did not meet the department's minimum 15-point threshold, but the ministers will not identify them. They will not tell us the cost of the projects. They will not tell us how many of these projects were recommended by the National Council for the Centenary of Federation. They cover up the identities of these 16 projects, they use every trick in the book, they run thick black texta lines over their statements of reasons and they defy the Auditor-General's guidelines.

Eventually we will get to the bottom of this. Eventually we will extract the identity of these 16 projects. We will find out which ones they were. When we know the identity of all of the 16 projects that these ministers found in a bottom drawer, we are going to run the ruler over them. We are going to find where they are, we are going to look at their electoral significance, we are going to look at when those particular projects were announced and we are going to compare them with the other 70 approved choices that were ignored by the ministers. We are also going to look at the nine projects ranked very high—between 19 and 24 points on the criteria points list—but which went unfunded. We are going to run a ruler over them as well. We are really going to try to make sure that these ministers are held accountable. They have used every dirty trick in the book to try to cover this matter up. They have run on this, but they cannot hide.

These ministers have been caught red-handed funding projects in marginal electorates with millions of dollars of taxpayers' money and on the eve of an election campaign. These projects were announced during an election campaign for party political purposes. I can assure the Senate that, if that is the case, and if that case is proven, we will be demanding the resignation of the responsible ministers. We will get to the bottom of this, we will keep asking the embarrassing questions and we will keep this government and these ministers accountable on these issues. We will continue to scrutinise this massive Federation Fund fiddle. (Time expired)