Scott Morrison defends taxpayer-funded private jet for Mathias Cormann’s OECD bid

Mr Morrison said on Wednesday using commercial flights for Mr Cormann’s travels would have placed him at risk of contracting coronavirus.

“There really wasn’t the practical option to use commercial flights in the time we had available, because of COVID,” he told radio station 2GB. “If Mathias was flying around on commercial planes he would have got COVID, the risk of that was extremely high.”

He said Australia taking Mr Cormann’s bid for the job at the global economic body seriously, which the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade also providing eight staff to the bid, with one official travelling with him.

“Australia has never secured such a position before, and now we are in the race for it, it would be very important,” Mr Morrison said. “Mathias would be an outstanding secretary-general of the OECD, standing up for those liberal democratic market-based values which the OECD represents.”

The Greens are opposing Mr Cormann’s tilt at the top job, with the party’s leader, Adam Bandt, writing to the ambassador of every nation that has a vote in the nomination process this week, to warn that appointing him as secretary general would be “a blow to tackling climate change”.

While Labor supports Mr Cormann’s bid, foreign affairs spokeswoman Penny Wong said she was confused by Mr Morrison’s justification for approving the use of a RAAF jet.

“There’s 36,000 Australians currently stranded as a result of border closures. They don’t get this sort of treatment, having a RAAF jet,” Senator Wong told ABC on Wednesday evening. “They are required to fly commercial, so I thought that double standard would be pretty hard to hear for some of those families whose relatives are in difficult circumstances, stuck outside Australia.”

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Senator Wong said the opposition had taken a “mature view” that there was a national interest in having Australians in international institutions which was different to the “pettiness” when the Coalition scuppered Kevin Rudd’s candidacy for the United Nations secretary-general.