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

Allan Fels was tight-lipped on whether he had lobbied the government for money. Picture: Supplied

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