The chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation, John Schubert, has told a Senate inquiry he did not know the government was going to offer a $444m grant when he agreed to meet with the then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and his environment and energy minister, Josh Frydenberg.
In the hearing on Tuesday, Schubert said the prime minister’s office called with an invitation two days before the 9 April meeting but gave no information on what was to be discussed.
He said Turnbull and Frydenberg and a staff member from each of their offices were in attendance at the Sydney meeting but no officials from the Department of Environment and Energy were present.
“Did the prime minister take control and tell you why you were there?” the inquiry’s chair, Senator Peter Whish-Wilson, asked.
“Yes, fortunately, because I didn’t know,” Schubert said. “I obviously don’t remember the exact words, so I won’t try to repeat in exact words but he laid out the proposal that a reef trust partnership be formed quite early in his discussion of it to me, his description of it to me.”
Schubert said while he was surprised by the offer “my overwhelming initial reaction was this fabulous news for the GBR, this is what is needed”.
He said a funding amount of $443.3m was outlined “fairly early on” in the discussion as well as a plan for that to be broken down into items such as $100m for science projects and about $200m for water quality.
But Schubert said he was given no sense of who had the original idea to award the record grant to the not for profit foundation.
“No, I didn’t get a feel for where it started,” he said.
The inquiry has been examining the awarding of the controversial grant to a private foundation, but key questions, including where the original proposal came from, remain unanswered.
Schubert told senators on Tuesday he had considered during the meeting whether the small foundation had the capacity to take on such a large amount of funding.
“That was the second thing that went through my mind when this was mentioned.
“And I very quickly came to the conclusion that although this was really significant growth, no question, that with the connections we have, with the quality of our board, with all the organisations that we’re associated with, that we could actually do this.”
