Peter Dutton has denounced the inquiry into Scott Morrison’s secret ministries as a “witch-hunt” as fresh concerns were raised about the former prime minister’s power to allocate grants when he held extra portfolios.
Dutton made the comments on 2GB Radio, ahead of the expected release of details as soon as Friday about the inquiry into the “implications” of Morrison’s hidden ministries.
After a search of program guidelines, Guardian Australia can reveal Morrison had the power to give grants through the home affairs department’s $187m safer communities program.
Several rounds of the program occurred after Morrison’s secret appointment to administer the department on 6 May 2021, qualifying him as one of the ministers able to make grants.
On Tuesday, the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, released advice from the solicitor general finding Morrison’s appointments were legal but “fundamentally undermined” responsible government.
On Thursday, Dutton said the issue had “clearly now turned political” as he separately labeled the Albanese government’s royal commission into the robodebt debacle a witch-hunt.
“We’ve said we’d support a process to ensure it can’t happen again, we didn’t agree with the decision that Scott had made,” he told 2GB Radio.
“The question now is how you make sure it doesn’t happen again, which is a pretty simple process in terms of requiring prime ministers to declare the acting arrangements and that would resolve the matter.”
Dutton said Albanese clearly saw “political advantage” in an inquiry targeted at Morrison, citing the fact the actions of Labor premiers in the pandemic would not be in its terms of reference.
“It’s morphing into a witch-hunt rather than pointing out a problem that needed to be solved.”
Albanese has said the inquiry would consider “who knew what and when in [Morrison’s] office and the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet” and the “legal implications behind decisions that were made”.
The secret ministries have sparked renewed scrutiny of Morrison’s centralisation of power, including the fact as prime minister he was personally the decision maker for modern manufacturing initiative grants in the industry portfolio, which Labor complained about in July 2021.
Unlike that program, the safer communities guidelines appear to have unintentionally given Morrison the power to make grants.
In May and June 2021, the sixth round of safer communities grants for “early intervention” and infrastructure specified that grants could be made by “a minister or assistant minister in the … home affairs portfolio”.
Guardian Australia is not suggesting Morrison used the power to make any grant decisions.
A further $50m was tipped into the program in the 2022 budget, with fresh guidelines issued in March 2022 specifying that only the assistant minister for customs, community safety and multicultural affairs could make grants.
That followed a scathing auditor general’s report in February 2022 which found the program funded 10 projects that had been deemed “unsuitable” by the department after the project applicants were visited in person by Peter Dutton’s assistant minister, Jason Wood.
The Australian National Audit Office complained that “over time the guidelines have become less clear on which minister would be making the grant funding decisions” and that in the third and fourth round “the minister identified in the guidelines as the decision-maker did not make the decisions”.
It appears that the broader grant guidelines were intended to allow either the home affairs minister or the assistant minister to make grants, but inadvertently authorised Morrison after his May 2021 appointment, before the assistant minister was finally nominated as responsible.
The Greens justice spokesperson, David Shoebridge, said some rounds of the safer communities program “almost certainly created a breach of the mandatory commonwealth grant guidelines that require all grants to clearly identify decision-makers and their roles”.
“This is the problem with sneaky and secretive government, it starts trapping people and organisations in all sorts of messes,” he said.
“It goes without saying that when the decision-maker is ‘a minister’ and one of those ministers isn’t known to the public, the parliament or the department that the guidelines requiring transparency have been breached.”
After gaining five secret ministries throughout 2020 and 2021, Morrison has said he only once exercised his powers, to block the Pep-11 offshore gas development.
Morrison responded to the solicitor general’s advice by saying he “did not fulfil the function of an acting or co-minister” in any of the five portfolios, and was merely appointed to administer the departments.
Morrison again defended the arrangements as a “necessary” safeguard in “extraordinary circumstances” which were done with the “best of intentions”.
The home affairs secretary, Michael Pezzullo, was reportedly unaware that Morrison had been appointed to administer his department.
Guardian Australia contacted Morrison and the department for comment.
