‘Tickle from the top’: The curious timing of $20m boost to Allan Fels’ Haven Foundation

Alan Fels was tight-lipped on whether he had lobbied the government for money.

Gladys Berejiklian famously resigned from her role as NSW premier (and simultaneously lost that absurd designation as the woman who saved Australia) after fast-tracking a $5.5m grant to a gun club in the regional electorate of Wagga Wagga.

We all know the story. Berejiklian didn’t disclose her relationship with the sitting MP, Daryl Maguire, during the funding deliberations and that omission of detail – along with her obstinance over the necessity of revealing it in the first place – eventually led to a corruption finding being tacked to her ­record.

So why do we bring this up now?

Daryl Maguire and Gladys Berejiklian.

Because earlier this week we shed light on an unrelated funding decision – hardly identical but genuinely peculiar – actioned by the NSW Labor government last year.

Weeks out from the March election, Labor announced a commitment of $20m to an outfit called the Haven Foundation, whose directors include Professor Allan Fels and his daughter Teresa. It’s a not-for-profit subsidiary of another Fels-chaired body known as Mind Australia, whose mission is to assist people with mental health concerns.

One month prior to that funding announcement, then-opposition leader Chris Minns held a press conference revealing that Fels would become central to relieving cost-of-living pressure across the state, announcing that the former competition tsar would review the entire road toll network if Labor won office, which it ended up doing by a convincing margin.

Alongside Dr David Cousins, Fels collected a $1m salary for a review that lasted more than 12 months and wound up handing over recommendations that blew up in the face of Minns and his Roads Minister, John Graham.

Among them were proposals for two-way tolling of the Harbour Bridge, which Minns campaigned against in opposition, and a bizarre assumption that the M5 cashback scheme, a signature election promise, would be scrapped. Minns broke a land-speed record upon the release of that recommendation to get himself in front of a camera and immediately rule out any fiddling with the rebate. Fels, meanwhile, has gone on to allege that additional parts of his review have been suppressed.

But back to when relations between them were still swell …

Four weeks after Fels was tapped for the role, Labor quietly approached the Parliamentary Budget Office with a $20m costing proposal for the Haven Foundation. The NSW government has denied that Fels made his participation in the tolling review contingent on the funding for Haven being made available, but, you know, the timing of the two announcements can hardly be ignored.

Even now, as the government prepares to finally reveal some developments with the project (or so we hear), there’s much grumbling internally over the selection process that was applied. For a start, there’s Haven’s links to Fels and whether or not his suction with the Premier pushed the proposal to the top of the pile, or whether Haven even submitted a proposal at all. What need, after all, when you’ve got the Premier’s ear?

More important is whether Fels lobbied for the money himself. This should have been a very simple question to answer yet the NSW government wouldn’t provide a response. Instead it emailed a lengthy and defensive explanation for the $20m spend on Haven, telling us that its success in Victoria made an ample case for a trial of its services in NSW.

Fels, weirdly, was also silent on whether he had lobbied the government for the money, which is strange given his renown for championing accountability across the corporate and public sector. Not to mention his ongoing role as a director of the Centre for Public Integrity. So did he, or didn’t he?

The Haven Foundation may be worthy of every cent it receives. But there’s a very strict and transparent process for how public funds are apportioned in NSW, as Gladys found out. Minns would be wise to avoid any suggestion this was a product of a “tickle from the top”. YB

Snow business

As households struggle to pay surging power bills, at least someone is profiting from the pain. In this case it’s Jim Chalmers, who banked $236m in dividend cheques from Snowy Hydro last year.

Remember that, while the government company’s flagship hydro-power assets supply electricity into the grid, the vast majority of Snowy’s revenue comes from its retail business, which sells power to 1.4 million household and business customers.

Selling power to the grid delivered $998m in revenue to Snowy last financial year, according to its annual accounts, delivered to parliament this week. But its three retail businesses – Red Energy, Lumo Energy and Snowy Energy – collectively booked revenue of almost three times that figure.

Snowy Hydro CEO Dennis Barnes.

And, while wholesale energy revenue dipped 20 per cent, households and businesses paid Snowy 21 per cent more than the previous year – $2.97bn.

Why is that? Well, another 125,000 customers signed up to Snowy’s retail offerings, a bump of about 10 per cent. But the rest came from rising prices.

“All customers experienced higher retail prices as the effects of the energy crisis in winter 2022, which provided a headwind to financial performance in 2023, flowed through into retailers’ wholesale electricity costs and prices,” Snowy said.

Wisely, Snowy doesn’t break out the profits from its retail and wholesale businesses in its accounts. But the company booked underlying earnings (before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) of close to $900m, almost double the previous year, and a net profit of $418.5m.

Hence Chalmers’ bumper dividend cheques, which boosted Treasury’s coffers to the tune of $236.2m. That’s up from $84.3m the year before.

Welcome, we’re sure, but not quite enough to cover $277m in new Snowy shares bought by taxpayers to help cover the costs of Snowy’s botched 2.0 expansion work – with another $2.6bn to come over the next two years.

Snowy’s C-Suite also did well, with chief executive Dennis Barnes taking home a pay packet worth $2.3m, including a $503,000 cash bonus. After a rejig of the way Snowy calculates its pay scales – boosting take-home pay but reducing potential bonuses – Snowy retail business boss Iain Graham got a 25 per cent boost for the year, to $1.7m. NE

Lessons for life

Start your kid investing in shares when they’re young enough, as they say, and you’ll set a good habit that will last a lifetime.

And never a more heartwarming example than at Thursday’s JB Hi-Fi AGM in Melbourne, which one proud shareholder let his primary-age son wag school to attend, explaining to chairman Stephen Goddard in question time that he’d brought the kid along as part of his stockmarket education and in order to – his words, not ours – show his child what a great company looks like.

Maybe some kids prefer to idolise rock stars or footballers, but not on Thursday – father and son closed out the meeting by posing for snaps with Goddard and CEO Terry Smart. Here’s hoping that someone thought to slip the kid a gift voucher on the way out. NE