Has the honourable Mr Wilkie benefited from illegal allocation?

Graphic: the new Moonah Arts Centre

Extract from yesterday's High Court submissions: Note that the Moonah Arts Centre is in Mr Wilkie's heartland, and the allocation appears to have been during his period as elected representative. Did he seek the allocation then, but now decries the proposed ABS allocation? What was the urgency and necessitous circumstances at Moonah?

Then, if your Honours look at some of the examples, if you go to page 8, for example, there was a use of the advance in connection with what appears to have been an advertising campaign to inform the Australian public of payments, tax cuts and entitlements. There are, on page 10, references to funding in respect of the Australian Ballet for $2 million; the Moonah Arts Centre for $4 million. There is not a lot of detail provided. On page 11 you see the use of the advance in respect of the Wellesley Park upgrade for $1.2 million; the Centre for Rowing Excellence in New Town Bay for $2.5 million; Greater Western Sydney AFL Multicultural Centre for $2 million.

None of those examples comes near to the natural disaster sort of example as the kind of thing necessary to create an urgent need for expenditure. While accepting your Honours do not have a great deal of information about any of those processes, the proposition that the expenditure must be so urgent that it is not possible to come back to Parliament to get a specific Act is difficult to reconcile with the way that the power is actually used because it is very hard to see how expenditure on an arts centre, a rowing centre or a multicultural centre could ever be so urgent that it was not possible to come back to Parliament to obtain an appropriation in relation to that amount of money. Your Honours will see similar examples in the other reports; I do not need to go to them.

GAGELER J: Mr Solicitor, do these reports have a statutory basis?

MR DONAGHUE: I do not believe that they do, your Honour. I might check that, but I think that they are a product of Parliament having - at the time that it discontinued its past practice of going back and appropriating all of the money that had been previously advanced – this is back in the 50s – it was recognised that that did not make sense because the money had already been appropriated in the original Act, in the schedule, and appropriating it again was pointless.

But that had been the mechanism by which Parliament looked at what had been done with the advance. So when that was discontinued the Senate Committee said, “What should happen instead is you should give us a detailed report on the way you have used it every year”. I think that that remains the foundation.

GORDON J: Just so I am clear, under the earlier Appropriation Act you took us to, it was a provision within the statute that there will be particulars provided to Parliament because if you looked at the advance it said particulars of which are to be submitted to the Parliament.

MR DONAGHUE: It would after wise be, indeed. So that was the early practice. I was going to take your Honours through some of them and I decided that - - -

GORDON J: No, that was the original practice and then it changed.