Staff at government scientific agency will likely be seconded to help administer funds, documents show

The CSIRO was not aware a $443.8 m grant would be offered to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and staff at the agency are likely to be seconded to the charity to help administer the funds, according to documents tabled in the Senate.

The documents, tabled on Monday, show the agency “didn’t have visibility” before the government announced the grant on 29 April, with correspondence from senior staff noting the prime minister’s office appeared to be involved.

In an email on the morning of 30 April, the day after the grant announcement, CSIRO’s chief operating officer, Hazel Bennett, says: “we didn’t have visibility … seems to have involved the PM’s office … funding went to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation … team will make calls this morning to see what else they can find.”

In an email on 4 May, Christian Roth, CSIRO’s Great Barrier Reef coordinator, wrote his “take on this is one of excitement” and the grant was a “circuit breaker” that could explore “new ways of doing things”.

“By doing what it has done, the govt has ramped up funding, has provided longer term planning certainty, decoupled the funding from Govt. Intervention making is [sic] more palatable to philanthropic or corporate co-investment, and contributed to de-politicising the GBR funding environment,” he wrote.

Frydenberg insists due diligence conducted before controversial reef grant Read more

Later that day, the possibility of a secondment for Roth to the foundation is discussed with Theresa Fyffe, the foundation’s executive director for projects and partnerships.

On May 22, Andreas Schiller, CSIRO’s science and deputy director of oceans and atmosphere, wrote in an email “there will be (most likely) a CSIRO staff member seconded part-time to assist GBRF in administering the funds, define the R&D plan etc …”.

Agency emails also note that the funding announcement effectively meant that CSIRO and the Australian Institute for Marine Science would not be leading the reef restoration and adaptation program (RRAP), for which $100m from the grant was set aside.

In an email on 8 May, CSIRO’s Peter Mayfield wrote that AIMS had “concerns that the funding agreement won’t be tight enough to ensure that GBRF continue to use RRAP work to instruct how the $100m is spent.”

“From all sides, no one has any indications that the RRAP won’t be used appropriately so it’s mainly managing risk and paranoia for now,” he wrote.

On Monday, the government was forced to repeatedly defend the process by which it awarded the $444m grant.

'Due diligence' on $444m Great Barrier Reef grant was for separate project Read more

Under pressure from Labor in the House of Representatives, the environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, proffered a timeline of his decision-making. It came after Frydenberg said on Sunday extensive due diligence had been done ahead of awarding the controversial grant, and the managing director of the foundation, Anna Marsden, said on Monday she was unaware of that due diligence process and no one from the government had contacted her. The government had claimed that officials from the Department of Environment had contacted the foundation in March as part of the due diligence project, but the foundation said on Monday that that was for an entirely different project.

At one point Frydenberg stumbled over his words in question time, suggesting the government had “solicited” the foundation’s interest in the grant – quickly correcting the misspeaking to “elicited”.

The shadow environment minister, Tony Burke, asked whether any due diligence could have been carried out “on a foundation [the government] did not even contact”.

At a later point Burke asked Frydenberg “to table the Google search that constituted due diligence he was just referring to”.

Separate to the inquisition in parliament, the secretary of the environment department is seeking to expedite a probe by the Australian National Audit Office into the awarding of the grant.