The Indigenous affairs minister, Nigel Scullion, was not told Tony Abbott had been appointed special envoy on Indigenous affairs until after it had been reported in the media.
Scullion told a Senate estimates committee on Friday that he neither asked for nor was consulted about Abbott’s appointment and he had already seen media reports – including that Abbott would not accept the role – before he received a call from the prime minister, Scott Morrison.
“I had a call from the PM, we had a conversation about the role and what will be happening,” he said.
Scullion told Greens senator Rachel Siewert he believed the conversation took place “around the time” that the appointment was formally announced on 26 August.
“I wasn’t aware he was going to be appointed,” he said. “I heard about speculation in the media first but I think it was somewhere over that period of time.”
However, he said he expressed “frustrations” about dealing with school attendance and educational outcomes in Indigenous communities, the area that Abbott was particularly focused on, and was “grateful” for the assistance.
He said he had seen and was not surprised by the negative reaction to Abbott’s appointment in the media, saying “it makes much better reading than people saying nice things apparently”, but had not received that feedback directly from the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people he spoke to.
“People haven’t been ringing me to tell me ‘This is appalling, what are you doing?’”
Scullion said he had heard some positive feedback from First Nations people but could not point to any particular organisation that had made a positive comment about the appointment, beyond one opinion piece in the Australian.
“I don’t think there was any particular kerfuffle in Indigenous Australia about that and, if there was, it certainly didn’t last above a day,” he said.
The response from many Indigenous organisations and the communities Abbott visited in the role has been sceptical.
In response to questions from the Labor senator Jenny McAllister, Scullion said the envoy role was designed to report directly to the prime minister and that neither he nor Abbott could direct each other.
Scullion began the hearing by criticising Labor MPs for not supporting government legislation to reform the community development program (CDP).
The proposed reforms include 6,000 subsidised jobs for CDP participants designed to transition people to full-time work. The $1.3m program was funded out of the Indigenous Advancement Strategy.
Siewert said it was unreasonable to ask the Senate to vote on changes before an evaluation report into the existing CDP program was released. The Senate ordered the report to be tabled last week.
A department spokeswoman, Deborah Lewis, said the report could not be released until it had been checked with the Indigenous communities that participated in the evaluation, and she could not say when that would occur.
Scullion said he commissioned the review of the implementation of the recommendations of the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody, which was released this week, following a conversation with Western Australian senator Pat Dodson because “we both came to the conclusion that none of us were able to say what has been implemented or not”.
The review found only 64% of the 339 recommendations were fully implemented, 27 years on from the royal commission’s final report, including only 55% of those recommendations concerning the use of non-custodial sentencing options.
He said the Northern Territory was close to signing a funding agreement to establish a mandatory 24-hour custody notification service, and the commencement of a scheme in WA was “imminent.”
