David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

This has come on in rather a hurry. I know Senator Tyrrell may wish to come down and speak to it. If she does, it's important she be given the opportunity to come down and speak to it.

I rise to associate the Greens with the disallowance motion put on by Senator Tyrrell to disallow the Financial Framework (Supplementary Powers) Amendment (Prime Minister and Cabinet's Portfolio Measures No. 2) Regulations 2022. It has a very innocuous, almost deliberately Orwellian title. It's the regulation under which there's a sweetheart deal to deliver millions of dollars to the pet charity of the Governor-General that was cooked up between the former Prime Minister and the Governor-General over a series of fireside chats. The Labor government have said they're going to pull the funding. That's good. We support the decision. In fact, we celebrate the decision. We were pushing for the pulling of the funding.

If this is a project that has merit, then it should go through the usual procedures to have it assessed as a meritorious project and go through the usual transparency procedures for a grant. But, as the statement that came with the financial framework regulations made clear, this was a grant that managed to avoid all the usual scrutiny processes. It wasn't put up on the website. There was no competitive tendering. It was $18 million of public money being handed over to a charity which was being lobbied for by the Governor-General behind closed doors.

It was good to see the new government say they're not going to proceed with the funding. We support them saying they're not going to proceed with the funding. Indeed, it's something the Greens and my office had been calling for, for some considerable time. The Senate will recall that, on behalf of the Greens, I put forward a similar disallowance motion to that that's been put forward here by Senator Tyrrell. We agreed, for the tidiness of the Senate, to withdraw our motion and associate ourselves with Senator Tyrrell's motion, which has now come on.

We say to the Labor government: the decision has been made to pull the funding—tick. Let's now scrub the offensive regs from the statute books—the regs that allowed for the delivery of this big chunk of public money without any scrutiny, without even being put on the website let alone allowing competitive tendering. If this leadership charity—I suppose it's called a charity—or this leadership proposal has merit, go through the usual process. Have competitive tendering. Have a proper public assessment of it. If it stacks up and it's better to spend $18 million here than $18 million on other critical projects—and I can think of about 500 that I'd put before spending money on this particular project—then by all means fund it.

In the meantime, this motion is doing the people of Australia a great service. It's scrubbing off some unnecessary laws. We make a lot of laws, and we could just scrub off this one, which is not only unnecessary but, if it's allowed to remain on the statute books, would still allow the government to reverse its decision and put the funding through without any kind of scrutiny or that necessary daylight that all grants should go through. For those reasons, we associate ourselves with the motion, commend Senator Tyrrell for bringing it to the Senate and look forward to the government supporting it.