The climate sceptic thinktank the Institute of Public Affairs was mooted as a co-host of an Australian visit by Donald Trump’s beleaguered Environment Protection Agency head, Scott Pruitt, which may have included discussion with local officials on whether environmental deals should be changed or cancelled.

Emails released to the US environment group the Sierra Club under freedom of information laws show that Matthew Freedman, a Washington consultant who describes himself as “a close personal friend” of the Australian environment minister, Josh Frydenberg, played a central role in organising Pruitt’s proposed August trip before it was cancelled when Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas gulf coast.

In the US, the emails are of interest as evidence that Pruitt relied on business figures and lobbyists to plan and justify his overseas travel. They were first published by the New York Times.

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From an Australian perspective, they give insight into Pruitt’s proposed agenda and schedule. They discuss focusing on promoting “innovation deregulation”, federal-state relations and how to counter potential disagreements with Australian officials about climate change. The EPA administrator rejects mainstream climate science and worked closely with fossil fuel companies to reduce environmental regulation when he was Oklahoma’s attorney general.

Freedman suggested that Pruitt meet several members of the Australian government including the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull (listed as “Malcomb”), the foreign minister, Julie Bishop, the trade minister, Steve Ciobo, and the then resources minister, Matt Canavan, along with Frydenberg.



He said an initial step should be to get a better sense of any US-Australian environmental agreements and whether they should be “changed or updated or cancelled and replaced with others”. There is nothing in the emails to indicate that Australian officials agreed with this agenda.

The documents include an email from the executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs, John Roskam, in which he proposes a two-hour roundtable for Pruitt with IPA-affiliated researchers who disagree with the scientific consensus on climate change. They included a James Cook University geophysicist, Prof Peter Ridd and the IPA senior fellow Jennifer Marohasy, who has accused the Bureau of Meteorology of corrupting the temperature record and whom Roskam described as “Australia’s authority on temperature and climate variability”.

“All of these people are excellent and I know Scott and his team would learn a great deal from a discussion with them,” he wrote to Freedman.

Roskam also recommended Pruitt meet Maurice Newman, a former chair of Tony Abbott’s business advisory council who has described global warming as “a delusion”, the former Productivity Commission head Gary Banks and the economist Henry Ergas.

The IPA head wrote that he had spoken to the then Minerals Council chief, Brendan Pearson, who was “working with the [US] embassy” on the trip. Pearson resigned from the council late last year after its biggest member, BHP, objected to the lobby group’s advocacy for new coal plants under his leadership.

In emails to Pruitt’s staff, Freedman described the IPA as a “very strong group for the administrator” and a potential co-host of the trip. He said Pruitt’s office had agreed invitations should be sought from the Turnbull government, the business lobby group the American Australian Council (of which Freedman is the treasurer) and Australian non-government organisations, including the IPA.

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The consultant said discussions with the government would inevitably turn to matters on which the Trump administration differed from Australia, giving the example of climate change. He said it was important to be able to say “we agree to disagree” on it. He recommended before the meetings that Pruitt get a briefing on the destruction of coral reefs by the Chinese to have as “a good talking point” when protection of the Great Barrier Reef came up in discussions with Australian officials.

Freedman recommended that Pruitt meet the Victorian Labor government so that he could say he had met “both sides”. He said visiting the state also made sense because it was “open for business” and doing creative things that could lead to US tech companies setting up headquarters there.

He said he would take advice from Frydenberg’s office on meeting the federal opposition. He had been in direct contact with the minister and had had conversations with his office and the embassy.

A spokesman for Frydenberg said the minister had invited Pruitt to Australia when they met in the US last year.

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“The administrator expressed an interest and was keen to learn more about Australia’s cooperative federalism and ‘one-stop-shop’ environmental approvals process,” he said in an emailed response. “Given Mr Pruitt cancelled his trip to Australia, no meetings reached final confirmation.”

The spokesman said Frydenberg and Freedman knew each other through the Australian-American Leadership Dialogue.

Roskam said Freedman, the US embassy in Canberra and the US consulate in Melbourne had approached the IPA about Pruitt’s potential visit. He said the organisation had welcomed the chance to “work closely with the world’s leading advocate for cutting environmental red tape”.

The emails released to the Sierra Club include tourist and dinner recommendationssuch as a trip to Uluru and breakfast at the Boathouse restaurant in Sydney, which Freedman said was owned by the former trade minister Andrew Robb, whom the ex-lobbyist described as “a good friend”.

Pruitt faces 11 federal investigations in the US, including into his spending on travel and his business relationships with lobbyists. Freedman worked on national security-related issues for Trump’s transition team but was removed after using a personal email address to conduct government business.

