Labor has called for a $444m government grant to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation to be returned.

It comes after the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, defended the decision to award the money to the small private foundation and said it had been subject to “a very thorough process”.

“Malcolm Turnbull doesn’t seem to understand that the more he explains this the worse it looks,” Labor’s environment spokesman, Tony Burke, said on Tuesday.

“There’s only one way out of this mess and that’s for the money to be returned to the taxpayer and managed with probity.”



It was revealed last week the foundation first heard it would receive a budget allocation in a private meeting between Turnbull, the environment and energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, and the foundation’s chair, John Schubert.



“Responsibility for this cash splash lies squarely with the prime minister and it has been a careless use of taxpayer’s money,” Burke said. “There are massive holes in the contract and secrecy provisions that are in perpetuity. We will never know how some of it is spent.

“It is a grossly irresponsible way to treat our most precious and fragile environmental asset.”

The opposition has launched a public petition calling for the government to secure the return of the grant.

In an interview on the ABC’s 7.30 program on Monday, Turnbull said the grant involved “a very thorough process, a whole cabinet process leading up to the budget”.

He said the grant was not offered before it had been considered by cabinet and cabinet’s expenditure review committee.

“No it all went through beforehand, we had a whole ERC process,” he said.

Asked by host Leigh Sales why it had been offered without a competitive tender process, he said the foundation was an “outstanding” organisation and they “were clearly the best team to do it”.

“What the Labor party is doing now is they are embarrassed that they did not put serious funding into the reef,” he said.