When the Watergate scandal exploded in the United States in 1972 two questions quickly emerged as being the key to the matter.
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The first was "what did the President know?" The second was "when did he know it?"
The same questions need to be asked about the involvement of senior Coalition politicians, including the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, and possibly the Treasurer, in the sports funding rorts presided over by Bridget McKenzie.
It is now quite apparent this could not be the result of a single, and relatively junior, minister wandering off the reservation in order to score some brownie points with fellow MPs in marginal electorates.
The disclosure of the colour-coded spreadsheets used to allocate the grants in ways that were completely different to what the APS had recommended strongly suggest this was an orchestrated attempt to use public money to influence voter behaviour ahead of the 2019 poll.
This was a deliberately orchestrated attempt to use public money to influence voter behaviour ahead of the 2019 poll.
They are quite clearly "the smoking gun".
More recent questions about the way in which drought grants of up to $1 million were to be allocated just weeks out from the election are additional signs a conspiracy may have been afoot.
It would appear that a desperate government, which most pundits expected to go down on election day, pulled out all the stops in a desperate bid to cling to power.
While rorts and pork barrelling have always been a part of the Australian political landscape the Coalition appears to have taken it to a whole new level in 2018 and 2019.
This would come as no surprise to Canberrans given the ease with which the former Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Agriculture, Barnaby Joyce, was able to rip the APVMA away from the ACT and relocate it to his own electorate a few years ago.
Bridget McKenzie, who is also now under fire over a VIP flight scandal that would do Bronwyn Bishop proud, is the common denominator in both the drought and the sports funding debacles.
It appears that although she was moved from sport to infrastructure, and then to agriculture, the Victorian Senator's real title should have been "special minister for pork barrelling".
While the Opposition has avoided going in as hard as it should have on this issue, at least in part because of its own track record in this area, the language being used by Anthony Albanese is getting stronger.
That said, his call for an independent inquiry, as opposed to the PM&C process initiated by the PM, is akin to Paul Keating's famous comment about "being mauled by a dead sheep" which he borrowed from Britain's Denis Healey.
What we need to see from both sides of the chamber is a commitment to putting processes into place to ensure that public funds cannot be gamed by incumbent governments for their own political advantage ever again.
You don't need an inquiry for that; just a recognition that the Australian people aren't fools, don't like to be treated like fools and will eventually punish politicians who think this level of contempt for proper process is acceptable.
The time is long past for McKenzie, who is rapidly losing the support of her own colleagues in The Nationals, to put this to bed by resigning.
The Prime Minister needs to dismiss her from the Cabinet and then explain to the Australian people the extent of his, and Michael McCormack's, knowledge of, and involvement if any, in this sordid episode.
