Ministers and Senators Behaving Badly Series 4

If you can't convince them, then confuse them …
“In my travels I’m yet to have someone ask me what the accounting
treatment is behind the money that’s in their account,” Colvin said. “They’re
interested that the money has been given to them.”
There’s also a separate $4 billion emergency response fund legislated in
October 2019, an endowment intended to pay out up to $150 million a
year for emergency response and recovery and $50 million for mitigation.
Marc Ablong, the home affairs department’s deputy secretary of national
resilience, told Senate estimates that none of the $4 billion has been spent.
Ablong said “there may be” Australians still living in caravans after the
summer bushfires – it isn’t in his knowledge – but the legislation states the
department can’t release emergency response fund money while other
sources of funding are available.
Recycling fund
In May 2019, the Coalition promised a $100 million Australian recycling
investment fund to provide concessional loans of $10 million to large-scale
recycling projects.
The chief executive of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, Ian
Learmonth, told Senate estimates that no recycling projects had been
approved for loans despite “a very active pipeline of transactions and some
active negotiations with proponents”.
Covid-19 economic response
The Covid-19 response didn’t get off to as slow a start as the bushfire
response, but it has still produced programs that critics claim doesn’t do
what they say on the box.
There was a $1 billion “relief and recovery” fund for the hardest hit
industries including aviation, agriculture, fisheries, tourism and the arts.
Spending in the tourism sector was limited to transport links such as
airlines and airports, and major attractions such as supporting zoo animals.
Margy Osmond, the chief executive of the Tourism and Transport Forum,
told the Covid-19 committee in August there was “considerable concern”
tourism operators missed out and it is an “ongoing bone of contention that
it was not spent extensively in the industry”.