The controversial Great Barrier Reef Foundation hasn’t exactly lived up to the big promises made when the Turnbull government handed it nearly half-a-billion dollars.
Born dodgy, continue dodgy: that’s the story of the Great Barrier Reef Foundation’s staggering $440 million handout from Josh Frydenberg in 2018, when the Turnbull government had some extra cash and decided it was a good idea to give it to a little-known body linked to business luminaries, including then-Business Council chair Grant King.
Now the auditor-general has looked at how the foundation has spent taxpayers’ money, and in particular whether it fulfilled its promise that it would magically leverage taxpayer funding into $300-400 millions of additional private sector funding.
The results, nearly halfway through the life of the funding project, make for grim reading. And they should also serve as a corrective to anyone who insists that the private sector automatically does things better than the government.
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