This was the situation before Malcolm Turnbull was politically beheaded by the hard right of the Liberal Party and Scott Morrison installed as the new Australian Prime Minister.....
Lenore Taylor
is Guardian Australia's editor. She has won two Walkley awards and has twice
won the Paul Lyneham award for excellence in press gallery journalism.
She has been
a journalist for over thirty years and covered federal politics for over twenty-two
years.
Despite being invited onto the ABC "Insiders" program as a political journalist and editor, she found that pressure appeared to have been placed on that program to remove its video of her one of comments from its Twitter feed.
The Great Barrier Reef Foundation denies there was any prior due diligence conducted concerning the $487,633,300.00 grant.
Remembering that as federal treasurer Scott Morrison led the charge to savagely cut ABC funding, the question that needs answering now is "Will he continue to bash the ABC by allowing minsters to apply inappropriate pressure on management and staff to alter editorial decisions?"
The real reason Turnbull gave the Great Barrier Reef Foundation
$487.6 million with few strings attached and a short deadline on the spend
The Saturday Paper, 18-24 August 2018:
Picture the scene: three
men in a room, two of them offering the third the deal of a lifetime.
The pair say they will
give the man’s little outfit – which has assets of only about $3 million,
turnover of less than $8 million and just a handful of staff – a
$444 million contract, under terms yet to be negotiated. The offer comes
out of a clear blue sky, totally unsolicited by the lucky recipient. For this
little organisation, it is like winning the lottery, except they didn’t even
buy a ticket.
Such a deal would be
exceptional, even in the corporate world. It would have been exceptional even
if the pair making the offer had been, say, investment bankers, and the third
man the head of a tech start-up.
But they weren’t. Two of
them were the prime minister of Australia and his environment minister, and the
third was the chairman of a charitable organisation called the Great Barrier
Reef Foundation. All three do have backgrounds as bankers, however: Malcolm
Turnbull, Josh Frydenberg and the foundation’s John Schubert worked with
Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank and Commonwealth Bank respectively.
The question is why it
was done this way. Why solicit this little organisation, of which most people
would never have heard, to be the recipient of the biggest such grant ever made
in Australia? Why was the money given without tender and without any prior
grant proposal? Why, instead of providing the money a bit at a time, subject to
satisfactory performance as assessed on an annual or biannual basis, was six
years’ worth of funding provided in one lump on June 28, less than three months
after that first meeting?
Geoff Cousins thinks he
knows the answer.
Cousins is a former
president of the Australian Conservation Foundation. Perhaps more importantly,
he is a corporate boardroom heavyweight. For 10 years, he was an adviser to
John Howard.
“It’s a most cynical
piece of accounting trickery,” he says of the Barrier Reef grant.
“A piece of
chicanery. That’s the only way I can describe it.”
To explain why, he
traces back several years, to the government’s desperate attempts to persuade
UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization,
that it was a good steward of the Great Barrier Reef, and that the reef World
Heritage area should not be declared to be “in danger”.
To that end, the
government had promised, under its Reef 2050 Plan, to invest more than $700
million in measures to protect one of the world’s great natural wonders.
“For the Department of
the Environment and Energy to grant over $440 million to a small charity that
didn’t even prepare an application form or ask for the grant is inconceivable!”
“They made a commitment,
the Australian government, to the World Heritage listing committee, to spend
$716 million on the Barrier Reef, prior to 2020,” Cousins says.
“But they have
spent just a fraction of that, and there is no way that in the remaining 18
months or less that they can reach that target, which raises the potential of
the reef being put on the endangered list.”
In Cousins’s view,
someone must have realised the trouble the government faced in meeting its
spending targets on time. His guess is Frydenberg.
“Even if you started
now, you couldn’t actually spend that money. There’s not a list, not a pipeline
of projects approved and ready to go,” Cousins says.
“So Malcolm, then
putting on … his business head, his accounting head, says ‘Well, all we’ve
really got to do is make sure the money moves from the government’s accounts to
the bank account of some other private or not-for-profit institution, then the
money is spent.’ But the money hasn’t really been spent at all. Even the CEO of
the foundation says it won’t all be spent for six years.”
If you tried that kind
of dodge in the corporate world, Cousins says, “your accounting firm would say
… they would have to qualify your accounts”.
Cousins makes a very
strong circumstantial case. It is true the federal government has grossly
underspent on its UNESCO commitment, and that the money given to the reef
foundation will go much of the way to making good on that funding promise.
It is true also that UNESCO
has become increasingly critical of the government’s performance protecting the
reef. Last year’s meeting of the World Heritage Committee noted in particular
that progress on achieving water-quality targets was too slow to meet the
agreed time frame. As it happens, the largest single item on the reef
foundation’s to-do list is improving water quality, with $201 million
allocated to it.
Read the full aticle here.
