Labor has asked the auditor general to investigate Peter Dutton’s awarding of community safety grants, after revelations the minister asked his department to fast-track a proposal weeks after an industry body made a political donation.
The opposition’s home affairs spokesperson, Kristina Keneally, said on Thursday that the awarding of the grant “looks on the face of it worse than the sports rorts scandal that saw the resignation of then minister Bridget McKenzie” a year ago.
While Dutton had strenuously denied any wrongdoing, Keneally said she had written to the Australian National Audit Office to ask it to consider examining Dutton’s handling of the safer communities fund.
The ANAO is the same independent body that issued a scathing report on how sports grants were skewed towards marginal seats, ultimately triggering McKenzie’s resignation. McKenzie resigned because she had failed to declare a conflict of interest by not disclosing that she was a member of a gun club that received funding in the program.
Keneally also questioned whether Dutton may have breached ministerial standards, which require ministers to “observe relevant standards of procedural fairness” and to “ensure that official decisions made by them as ministers are unaffected by bias or irrelevant consideration, such as consideration of private advantage or disadvantage”.
Keneally stopped short of calling for Dutton’s resignation when she addressed reporters at Parliament House on Thursday, nor did she make any accusations of illegal conduct.
But Keneally said that if McKenzie had been forced to resign over an undisclosed conflict of interest, “surely Peter Dutton would have to go if it is the case that he took a donation, didn’t disclose it and turned around and gave a completely discretionary grant to the same organisation”.
Keneally said the government had serious questions to answer, including whether Dutton disclosed a conflict of interest when making the grant decision and whether Scott Morrison knew about it.
Her comments follow revelations on ABC’s 7.30 program that after Dutton’s intervention the National Retail Association (NRA) received a one-off $880,000 grant to assist retailers respond to armed offender incidents.
Dutton has denied that he was influenced by the NRA’s $1,500 donation to the Liberal National party of Queensland at the “Support for Peter Dutton dinner at [the] Norman hotel” on 21 November 2018. The head of the retailers association, Dominique Lamb, denied discussing the grant with Dutton at the event.
On 28 September 2018 Dutton told his department he wished to consider an NRA proposal “which seeks to leverage Australia’s retail network to assist authorities in maximising public safety, particularly through the protection of public places”.
The donation was declared in the NRA’s financial disclosures, as well as a second $5,000 donation to the LNP to support Dutton made in the 2018-19 financial year.
Documents obtained under freedom of information show that on 29 November 2018 Dutton’s office “requested that the proposal from the National Retailers Association be considered sooner”.
On 6 December 2018 Dutton instructed his department to ask the finance department to cost a proposal from the NRA.
On 14 March 2019 Dutton agreed to give the NRA $800,000 (excluding GST) for a two-year grant to develop educational material to assist retailers in deterring, detecting, delaying and responding to a terrorist attack in a crowded place.
The Department of Home Affairs briefing to Dutton said the industry department’s business grant hub had assessed the application as having “satisfactory scores against each of the three merit criteria”.
It recommended that the funding be approved, noting the proposal “represents value for money and a proper use of commonwealth resources”.
Lamb told ABC’s 7.30 the NRA had gone “through a significant tender process” to win the grant for the Protecting Crowded Places program, which helped it train a total of more than 48,000 retail workers, responding to a “need of our membership”.
In a written statement, Dutton said “the baseless suggestion that I have or would be influenced by a lawful donation to the LNP is false and highly defamatory”.
“The suggestion that the government has done anything other than support projects worthy of support is nonsense.”
