Scott Morrison secretly swore himself in as treasurer in order to get power over foreign investment proposals, new documents have revealed.
A trove of emails and other papers released by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under a freedom of information law reveals a senior bureaucrat told a select group of colleagues in April 2021 “the Treasury swearing relates to FIRB”. (FIRB is short for the Foreign Investment Review Board, a non-statutory body that advises the treasurer on foreign investments.)
The news that the former prime minister had the board in mind when he became co-treasurer with Josh Frydenberg raises more questions about the secret ministries affair, which has already caused Morrison’s censure by his colleagues in Parliament.
In his speech explaining his actions last month, Morrison said nothing about foreign investment, referring instead to the extraordinary challenges posed by the coronavirus pandemic.
“The decision to take on authority to administer the departments of Treasury and home affairs in 2021 as a dormant redundancy for decisions that were not subject to cabinet oversight was to be able to take swift action, if necessary, in the national interest at a time when Australians’ interests were under constant threat,” Morrison said.
So did the FIRB have anything to do with the pandemic?
Well in March 2020, as the coronavirus started spreading in Australia, the board told foreign investors they would need approval for any proposed investments, regardless of the value. The threshold for screening was reduced to $0, the board said in an update at the time.
It said: “Australia is being fundamentally disrupted by the coronavirus, including potentially threatening economic security and the viability of critical sectors. Businesses are increasingly under pressure. There will likely be a rise in debt restructuring transactions for Australian businesses, along with opportunities to invest in distressed assets.
“Without these changes, it is possible many normally viable Australian businesses would be sold to foreign interests without any government oversight, presenting risks to the national interest.”
But in the board’s annual report covering the 2020-21 financial year, acting chair Cheryl Edwardes said legislative reform that took effect on New Year’s Day 2021 “signalled the transition out of the zero dollar threshold”.
So it’s still unclear why Morrison would have needed special pandemic powers over the FIRB starting in April 2021.
The new documents also revealed the reason Morrison sought to administer the home affairs portfolio. “The home affairs swearing relates to decisions on citizenship loss,” the same April 2021 email mentioned earlier said.
It contains no more clues as to why that issue was urgent at that particular time.
However, it’s worth noting that in July 2021, the minister who publicly held the home affairs portfolio, Karen Andrews, made a decision under her powers as minister to strip a dual Turkish-Australian citizen of his Australian citizenship.
About a year later, in June 2022, the High Court invalidated the power of the home affairs minister to strip Australians of citizenship under the particular section of the law used by Andrews.
The Parliamentary Library wrote in an explainer earlier this year: “This decision will have significant implications for the government’s ability to revoke the citizenship of dual nationals who are alleged to have engaged in terrorism-related conduct but have not actually been convicted of an offence.”
It isn’t clear if Morrison’s move to secretly swear himself into the home affairs portfolio had anything to do with this matter. But then again, so much is still unclear about the whole affair.
