Extract from ABC News
Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton's office fast-tracked a one-off $880,000 grant proposal to a retail association eight days after it made a $1,500 political donation to the Queensland Liberal National Party — at an event Mr Dutton attended — for the purpose of personally supporting him.
Key points:
- The National Retail Association (NRA) made a $1,500 donation to the Queensland LNP, saying it was to support Peter Dutton
- One week later Mr Dutton asked that an application by the NRA for a funding grant "be considered sooner"
- Mr Dutton said any suggestion he would be influenced "by a lawful donation to the LNP" was "false and highly defamatory"
7.30 can reveal that Mr Dutton awarded a one-off "national security and criminal justice" grant to the Queensland-based National Retail Association, which represents employers in the retail and fast food industry.
The revelation is part of a cache of ministerial briefings obtained by 7.30 under freedom of information laws that set out Mr Dutton's awarding of grants from within a multi-million-dollar fund earmarked to support crime prevention efforts.
The grant was not awarded through any open or competitive grant scheme, but was awarded on a one-off basis by Mr Dutton. It appears Mr Dutton has only awarded a handful of one-off grants since he became Home Affairs Minister.
Legal experts have told 7.30 that Mr Dutton's consideration of the grant funding after the association donated to the Queensland LNP may give rise to a perceived conflict of interest, which could be considered a breach of Prime Minister Scott Morrison's ministerial standards.
Those standards require ministers to "observe relevant standards of procedural fairness" and to "ensure that official decisions made by them as ministers are unaffected by bias or irrelevant consideration, such as consideration of private advantage or disadvantage".
"When the minister is exercising discretion to award a very large sum of money to a party, which only one week before had made a donation for his ultimate benefit, really there's obvious room to infer a conflict," Geoffrey Watson SC, a director of the Centre for Public Integrity, told 7.30.
"Without knowing what Mr Dutton was thinking … it just looks on the face of it as though there was a breach of the code.
"But of course, he may have a good explanation for that. He should give it."
Mr Dutton controls the approval of these one-off grants, the amount of funding awarded and any conditions attached to the grants.
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