A friend on the board

Liberal donor personally recommended Tony Abbott's daughter for scholarship | World | The Guardian

It's not exactly a good look, is it?   A private  college which has been around for 25 years and has given out 2 "Chairman scholarships" in that time, and one of them happens to be for the daughter of a supported political friend who looks to be on track to become Prime Minister.

I wonder who the first recipient was?  And was there any other applicant other than Miss/Ms F Abbott in the year she applied?   The absence of answers to these questions give rise to suspicion that the Chairman scholarship applications might be made after personal invitation, and to very few people.  (Perhaps one?)   If this suspicion is wrong - why won't the Institute simply disclose how many applicants were competing for the scholarship that year?   A simple number would breach no confidentiality, surely.

And the reason why this is indeed a matter of public interest is really set out in the very last paragraph of the Fairfax report:

In the federal budget, the government announced that from 2016 it
would for the first time extend direct government funding to private
colleges.

The changes, which also extend support for TAFEs, and diploma
and associate degree courses, will cost $820 million over three years.
They follow a recommendation from a review of university funding by
David Kemp, who was education minister in the Howard government, and Dr
Kemp’s former advisor Andrew Norton.

If the delivery of a $3000 bottle of wine to a new Premier is a matter which should have been disclosed on a public register, then a direct $60,000 benefit received by a major politician's daughter should also have been disclosed unless it was clearly made on a competitive basis from a reasonable field of applicants (including some without obvious political connections.) 

Update:   I was most amused while watching The Drum last night to hear the media editor for The Australian ask whether The Guardian had been sitting on this outrageously unfair story for some time.   "Why would that matter?"  she was asked.  "It would tell us a lot about their agenda" she said.

Yes - a person who works at The Oz complaining about another paper having "an agenda"!   Hilarious.

Update 2:   Curious that Andrew Bolt has not had a post about this, despite his knowing that close Catallaxy buddy Sinclair Davidson (wrongly) thinks it's a case of "Lefties going after Lib family members", which would normally be right up Andrew's alley.   In fact, Catallaxy readers have lost interest in the thread already too.  How convenient.

Andrew Bolt does not like being in open disagreement with anything at Catallaxy.   He also will never call them out for offensive and highly sexist language in it's threads, even though he has now quoted directly a thread comment.

He's a massive hypocrite.

Update 3:  see new post above.