This article is more than 6 months old

This article is more than 6 months old

Former Indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion approved more than $560m worth of funding in his last few weeks in the role, leading up to the election in 2019.

A Senate committee has heard Scullion also gave almost $4m to 12 projects that his department, the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) did not recommend be funded.

A number of the $560m in grants were “minister-initiated”, the committee has been told.

Of the $1.279bn in the Indigenous affairs budget for this financial year, $567m was handed out by Scullion in the six weeks from 1 March to 11 April.

Of the total Indigenous budget of $1.27bn, 90% had been committed by January 1 this year, NIAAA told the committee.

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Scullion also declined to support 28 projects that the NIAAA recommended should be funded, including the now defunct National Congress of Australia’s first peoples, several school nutrition programs for Indigenous children in remote communities, and cadetships in the NSW Legal Aid Commission named for the late Indigenous Judge, Bob Bellear.

One of the grants Scullion did approve had not been applied for through formal channels. The $500,000 grant to the Alice Springs based Red Tails AFL club to help young Indigenous men in the region was developed by NIAAA because the minister told them “it was who he wanted to support”.

Other grants handed out in that six-week period included $15.8m to Wesfarmers for an “employment parity initiative”, almost $17m to the Cape York Institute for five youth programs, and $10m to the Brisbane Broncos for a girls’ academy and a mentoring programs.

NIAAA secretary Ray Griggs said he could not say exactly how many grants were applications by agencies, and how many were approaches by the minister but “I suspect it is an admixture”.

The NIAAA later released details of the 12 programs Scullion funded agianst advice.

Scullion maintained control over the entire budget, but NIAAA had delegation to approve grants of less than $5,000 for Naidoc activities, Griggs said.

“We were not involved in the process in the minister’s office,” he said and, under questioning by Labor senator Tim Ayres, could not say whether the minister engaged with the prime minister’s office in making the funding decisions.

Only seven funding decisions, worth about $32.2m, have been made by the current minister Ken Wyatt, and they have all accorded with the advice he has received from NIAAA, Griggs said.

“I am just stunned that someone in the authority of a ministerial position can have no accountability with the way he spent Indigenous funds,” Labor senator Malarndirri McCarthy said after the hearing. “I’m just appalled.

“And obviously we will have a deeper look at the details of that spending, but you have a department for a reason and he was a one-man show. He made all the decisions, by the looks of it.”