The regional development minister, Catherine King, has confirmed discretionary grants awarded by the Morrison government are on the chopping block in the October budget as Labor attempts to prune spending it characterises as “rorts and waste”.
In an interview with Guardian Australia’s politics podcast, King said she will not be cancelling contracts. But she confirmed uncontracted funding has faced heavy pre-budget scrutiny “so we can close the community development grants program in particular, and sort of move on and try to make sure that we’ve got some better processes going forward”.
