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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: [email protected]

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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: [email protected]

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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: [email protected]

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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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]

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: [email protected]