Grants program funnelled money into Coalition seats at election time: audit

A $184 million program aimed at improving community safety funnelled money into marginal and Coalition-held seats at the last two elections with an auditor-general report finding records were not properly kept in more than half of the grant decisions.

In a review of the Safer Communities Fund, now overseen by the Department of Home Affairs, the auditor found all but one of the projects approved for Labor at the 2016 election went to marginal electorates. Almost half of the money set aside for Coalition-held seats went to safe Coalition electorates.

Then Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton campaigns in the 2019 electionCredit: Attila Csaszar

Three years later, in the run-up to the 2019 election, money went to Coalition seats at a rate that “represented a higher proportion of approved applications (in both numerical and dollar terms) than they represented as a proportion of the application population”.

The federal government’s handling of discretionary grants has come under fire after a string of critical independent reports. The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age revealed in December that over a three-year period, Coalition-held seats received $1.9 billion in grants compared to Labor electorates which received $530 million.

The auditor-general’s review of the Safer Communities Fund followed complaints from Labor that then-Home Affairs minister Peter Dutton handpicked 53 projects to share in $8.5 million for security cameras and safety lighting ahead of the last federal election, only five of which were in safe Labor seats.

The auditor found that the first Safer Communities Fund round of projects was established to “fund identified election commitment” projects in the 2016 election, which was narrowly won by Malcolm Turnbull.

Projects located solely in Coalition-held seats accounted for 59 per cent of all projects. Of that, 48 per cent went to safe seats, 36 per cent to fairly safe seats and 16 per cent to marginal electorates.

Labor-held seats accounted for 27 per cent of funded projects.

“In all but one instance, the location was in a marginal electorate, involving 99 per cent of the funding awarded to projects located in an ALP held electorate,” the auditor-general found.

Some projects were across multiple electorates.

There was generally “no trend evident” in terms of projects flowing to seats held by particular parties across the entire Safer Communities Fund – except in the case of the 2016 round and the third round of projects that were announced during the 2019 election.

The report found the round three projects were “located solely in a Coalition-held marginal electorate and, to a lesser extent, Coalition-held fairly safe electorates [and] represented a higher proportion of approved applications (in both numerical and dollar terms) than they represented as a proportion of the application population”.

“The funding awarded to projects located in safe electorates and fairly safe electorates held by the ALP was lower in comparison to the proportion of the application population they represented.”

The audit also found decisions on awarding grants weren’t appropriately informed by departmental briefings and that for the majority of cases, the basis of ministerial briefings wasn’t clearly recorded.

This includes cases when ministers only approved part of the funding asked for. Documents previously released under freedom of information laws have shown Mr Dutton diverted money away from recommended projects to other hand-picked applicants, largely in Coalition seats.

“It was not recorded how decisions were taken about which applications would receive partial rather than full funding, and how the amount of partial funding was derived,” the audit report said.

The audit also found that as the program went on, it became unclear which minister was responsible for decisions and, in two rounds, the minister who actually made the decision was not the one named in the guidelines.

The program was initially set up to boost the efforts of local councils and community groups to combat crime and anti-social behaviour.

However, the audit found 84 per cent of its funds have been given to religious groups, overwhelmingly Jewish or Christian. It notes this represents the groups who submitted the most applications, saying Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and Sikh groups made relatively few applications for money.

There were 16 cultural groups that applied for funding but had never been successful: Filipino, Iraqi, Italian, Russian, Assyrian, Chinese, Congolese, Fujian, Indian, Iranian, Korean, Kurdish, Malaysian, Persian, Polish, Ukrainian.

The Auditor-General recommended the department make sure in future that everyone in the target audience for grant opportunities are aware funding is available so there are no actual or perceived barriers to entry.

It also said Home Affairs needs to give better briefings to ministers with more information about the merits of each application.

The department agreed to all the recommendations.