Kristina Keneally (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise today to participate in this take-note debate in response to questions asked by me and Senator Ketter of Senator Birmingham. Well, they say that success has many parents and failure is an orphan. We can't get anyone from the government to admit whose idea it was to give the Great Barrier Reef Foundation $444 million of public money. Minister Frydenberg has been asked. He's been asked in the parliament. He's been asked on ABC Insiders. He's been asked on 2GB radio by Ben Fordham. He refuses to say.

Yesterday, in the House of Representatives, the Prime Minister was asked twice whether it was his idea to give the money to the foundation. He refused to answer on both occasions. You'd think, if this was such a magnificent idea, the person who conceived of it would be shouting it from the rooftops. Instead, we have people scattering away from this ill-conceived and ill-designed proposal, this maladministration of public money. This is a flawed approach, and it is an approach that leads directly to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, to Mr Turnbull.

We only know through the scrutiny applied by the Senate process in estimates and in committee hearings that there was no grant application, that there was no public tender process. We only know through the scrutiny of the Senate that the foundation itself did not ask for this money. They had no conversations with anyone in government prior to 9 April about taking responsibility for nearly half a billion dollars of public money. And why is 9 April important? We now know, due to the Senate scrutiny process, that 9 April is the day the Prime Minister of Australia went into a room with Minister Frydenberg and no public servants and offered the chair of this foundation, Dr John Schubert, $444 million of public money—no due diligence; no grant application process; no contestability; no discussions. We now know, through the Senate process, there were no discussions with the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. We now know, through processes in this Senate, that there were no discussions with the CSIRO. We know that this government seems to have come up with this proposal without talking to anyone whatsoever, and decided that it can gift this private foundation $444 million of public money.

And it is important to note that it's a private foundation, because this is public money. Now we are in the farcical situation of public sector science agencies, like the CSIRO, like the Australian Institute of Marine Science, having to go cap in hand to a private foundation to get access to public money to carry out public science to protect one of our great public assets, the Great Barrier Reef. This is an extraordinary set of circumstances conceived by a bunch of merchant bankers, including the Prime Minister, who think that it's okay to strike up a deal behind closed doors. The carelessness of public money being handed out in this fashion!

Now, the government waltzes around justifying this, a post-hoc justification, and saying that this foundation can raise additional money—that they can leverage $444 million and they can get additional money from corporates. They say on their website they've raised $57 million from corporates and philanthropy. They do not have audited reports on their websites to substantiate that, so maybe they could start by putting those reports up. We know the government hasn't done the due diligence because, again through the Senate process, we have heard from the department that they haven't even looked at the audited reports prior to 2011. So how can the government, as we saw today, stand up and say this foundation is a great fundraising machine when they don't even know if it's true? Not Minister Frydenberg, not Senator Birmingham, not the Prime Minister and not anyone from government can stand here and say how much money this foundation has raised in the past, or tell us how much it is going to raise in the future. They have privatised the Great Barrier Reef.

Question agreed to.