Digging dirt and straight talking

Grant Hehir is proving to be a huge pain in the arse for the Morrison government as he looks deeper into Canberra’s gaping money pit.

Last week, Auditor-General Grant Hehir wrote to Josh Frydenberg, alerting him to payments made to the two top offic­ials at the Australian Securities & Investments Commission. Picture Gary Ramage

Grant Hehir is proving to be a huge pain in the arse for the Morrison government and some of its key officials as he looks deeper into Canberra’s gaping money pit.

That’s the Auditor-General for Australia’s job description: a dentist doing root canal therapy on agency accounts, a coroner examining­ death by policy misadventure, a habitual teller of bad news without any sugar-coating.

Amid the clamour of pandemic, elections and a federal spending footprint of $670bn, Hehir is shining a light into places usually out of view, with revel­ations tumbling out about poor governance, from sports grants to land deals and executive perks.

In theory, Hehir is untouchable, an independent officer midway through a 10-year term, answering only to parliament, with vast powers of discovery. He is a master of detail and strategy, who avoids a high profile, or ­almost any public attention.

But his elbows-out crusade to stop the rorts and improve public sector performance has put noses out of place and he is in a fight for funds to do his job properly. The Coalition’s spending splurge this year is equivalent to 35 per cent of gross domestic product.

Leading the Australian Nat­ional Audit Office, Hehir must be fearless and above reproach. According­ to those who have worked with him in Melbourne, Sydney, and Canberra, where he started as a Treasury trainee in 1982, he’s direct and driven.

“Hehir had no time for rent seekers who see public money as a trough to get their snouts into,” says Victorian Opposition Leader Michael O’Brien, who was the state’s treasurer when Hehir was secretary of the Department of Treasury and Fin­ance.

“He’s very canny. He understands the politics of government well and also how people try to exploit the system.’’

Stephen Horne, a former assistant­ auditor-general in NSW, says: “Grant has great skills in ­cutting through the verbiage to get to his underlying point quickly. He’s an intellectual, sharp-minded and a deep thinker, and he leaves no loose ends.’’

While the ANAO audits public accounts, it also does performance reviews, the place where taxpayers get value in spades. Insiders say Hehir has improved the way reports are presented; language is clear, often bracingly so.

In January, on the $100m Community Sport Infrastructure Grant Program, the ANAO said funding “was not informed by an appropriate assessment process and sound advice”, with a funding bias to Coalition marginal seats.

At Senate estimates hearings last week, Hehir said the common­wealth “may have been defrauded” in the Leppington Triangle deal, after it paid $30m for land later valued at $3m; in a report­ last month, the ANAO had put the blowtorch to the Infrastructure Department for falling short of “ethical standards” and referred the matter to Australian Federal Police.

Last week, Hehir wrote to Josh Frydenberg, alerting him to payments made to the two top offic­ials at the Australian Securities & Investments Commission, one relating to tax advice, the other to housing costs. ASIC chairman James Shipton stood aside pending an investigation, while his deputy Daniel Crennan resigned.

As one senior polit­ician says, “oppositions love ­aud­itors-­general”. But the wheel turns, and scrutiny falls on them. “The problem with auditors is that they’re like the coroner, turning up after a death. They can tell you what went wrong but they don’t tell you how to avoid mistakes in the first place,” the MP says.

Hehir is a formidable official who knows where the bodies are buried, and how the policy pieces fit together, says another who worked with him in Victoria, where he also ran the Department of Education for three years. “He made sure bullshit proposals did not get up.”

Early in his career, Hehir worked for Labor in Canberra. First, as an adviser to Stewart West, a Hawke government cabin­et minister, and then as chief of staff to Rosemary Follett, first chief minister of the ACT.

In Victoria, he earned the ­respect of governments on both sides of politics. It was a case of “poacher turned gamekeeper”, says a Liberal source, when he left to become NSW Auditor-Gen­eral in 2013, after ­running Treas­ury for more than seven years.

Tony Abbott appointed Hehir to his current role in June 2015. In a blistering review six months later, Hehir found the then prime minister­ had rushed to personally approve $3bn for Melbourne’s East-West Link despite “clear advice­” from officials that the project hadn’t been properly ­assessed and wasn’t ready.

It meant half the funds were loaded into the 2013-14 budget, which could be pinned on Labor. Daniel Andrews scrapped the road project when he won office in 2014, with Hehir’s subsequent audit recommending then treasurer Scott Morrison try to recoup­ the lost federal $1.5bn.

Recently, Hehir wrote to the Prime Minister asking that his funding be put on a more “sustainable basis”. The ANAO has had its budget cut by 18 per cent in real terms since the Coalition came to power in 2013. Its target was 48 audits last financial year but it was only able to deliver 42.

“Without supplementary appropriations, the number of performance audits tabled … will continue to reduce­,” Hehir wrote.

Mathias Cormann, who stepped down as finance minister on Friday, told Senate estimates an efficiency drive across the public­ sector was the culprit, not payback for adverse findings.

Cormann said ANAO funding was under review; the latest budget did not cut funds per se over the forward estimates. Still, the squeeze has been on for years.

“This is part of the Morrison government’s strategy to reduce oversight,” says crossbench sen­ator Rex Patrick.

“Hehir plays it very straight. He is the exemplar of fearless and frank advice, with complete ­concentration on the facts.”