Yesterday the new Finance Minister, Senator Katy Gallagher, was quoted in The Guardian as saying:

We want to make sure that you don’t have $400 million buried somewhere without any business cases or any criteria around that money being spent just to be doled out during the course of an electoral term, that is not appropriate and we won’t be doing that.

If they’re wondering where they might find a few hundred million in the budget, I can certainly point them in the right direction!

Senator Gallagher together with the new Treasurer, Jim Chalmers, are looking for budget improvements to deal with Australia’s record deficit inherited from the Morrison government.  They hope that some of those improvements will come from “starting to unwind a decade of rorts and waste and mismanagement in the budget.”

While I can’t help Senator Gallagher with the full $400 million, the $178.6 million of Federal money allocated to Emu Swamp Dam might provide some savings for the bottom line.

From initial responses to POW!’s various freedom of information requests following the March budget announcement, it seems like Granite Belt Water may not have been required to update its business case, or show a positive cost benefit ratio, prior to being allocated additional taxpayer funds.  If this is the case, then Commonwealth financial accountability rules may not have been followed. 

We’re still waiting on the full documents from the FOI requests, and will update you all once we have those documents.  However you’d have to think that Emu Swamp Dam was a likely candidate for review by the new Federal government, given Senator Gallagher’s comment that:

On my early briefings I’d say there weren’t too many fiscal rules in place in the final terms of this Government. So we do see large pockets of money being allocated places without a lot of detail and that’s certainly an area of significant interest for us.