Shayne Neumann (Blair, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tonight I want to draw the attention of the chamber to the issue of the Abbott government's Indigenous Advancement Strategy. This is a debacle and disaster of a policy. It is shambolic, dysfunctional and chaotic, and I have written to the Auditor-General asking him to undertake an audit in relation to this particular program. It has proved to be a disaster for many people. There needs to be a proper investigation of the application and assessment process for all grants awarded under this program, as we are talking about $4.9 billion dollars of taxpayers' funding. I am asking the Auditor-General to look at the mandatory incorporation requirement—which is applicable only to Indigenous organisations—and issues of transparency and accountability.

Upon the election of the Abbott government, they brought 150 individual programs from eight government departments into five program streams, and then they forced 1,440 organisations then funded by the Commonwealth government to compete in an open grant round. A press release issued by the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, Senator Nigel Scullion, on 9 September 2015 advertised the available amount as $4.9 billion, when in fact it was only $2.3 billion. Because they had botched the program so much, they had to provide transitional funding of $300 million to continue with the program.

There was a myriad of problems with the application process and the assessment process, and the resulting funding announcements have been well documented. That is why Labor co-sponsored a reference to the Senate Finance and Public Administration References Committee inquiry into the Commonwealth Indigenous Advancement Strategy tendering process. Indeed, nearly every submission to that inquiry excoriates and condemns the Abbott government in relation to this process. It was confusing, inaccessible and it prevented many organisations from completing the applications—as evidenced by the high rate of noncompliance. There were 2,472 applications received in relation to the round of funding; it was a competitive tender round. Of these, 1,233 were deemed non-compliant by the department, and there was a massive oversubscription, resulting in applications totalling $14 billion, leading to costly delays. During this time some organisations were forced to close their offices and lost valuable staff, while others faced the prospect of the closure of their services altogether.

When the government announced the funding in March, they announced the 964 successful organisations that got funding, and in fact the whole process was so bad that they had to announce another $140 million in relation to it in May. The government has produced no specific criteria against which the application was made for the gap-fill process, and nor has it been able to adequately explain how applicants were identified for assessment during the gap-fill process. In fact, it cannot even produce a spreadsheet to outline who got the money, for what duration and for what purpose. Indeed, many organisations had not even signed their funding agreements just weeks before the new financial year. As at 30 June 2015, there were 10 organisations that have declined funding offers under the IAS. So transparent and accountable was the process that it took an article in The Australian newspaper and then a follow-up one over the weekend for the government to release figures! And even then—by its own admission—the data was incorrect. In fact, the spokesperson for the senator, the Minister for Indigenous Affairs, was reported in The Australian newspaper on 8 September as saying that, in an apparent bureaucratic mistake, the records in fact of the department included:

… all grants contracted in previous financial years (2013-14 and 2014-15), including grants that do not use IAS funds, including grants through the Aboriginal Benefits Account.

And the website made no mention of the inclusion of the non-IAS funding, and no mention had previously been made in correspondence with the senator's office or with representatives for the department.

It is a complete shemozzle. I have serious concerns for the level of ministerial discretion. We have lost 119 staff from the Indigenous affairs group within the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet and, as I say, Indigenous organisations applying for grants of more than half a million dollars per year were mandatorily stripped of their choice to incorporate with the national regulator, ASIC, alongside non-Indigenous organisations, and they had to incur greater costs and greater extensive regulatory powers under the Office of the Registrar of Indigenous Corporations. I ask the Auditor-General to do the right thing and investigate the whole process. (Time expired)