Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

I don't have those details immediately to hand, as I'm sure would not be a surprise to Senator Gallagher. I'm happy to take those details on notice so far as we can extract that information. As Senator Gallagher well knows, the direct administration of funds occurs across a range of portfolios. The Department of Finance operates the Commonwealth grant guidelines and has a role in relation to the approval of those grant guidelines, which are then administered across the relevant portfolio departments by different ministers, providing support for a range of different services right around the country.

One particular example that comes to mind is that Commonwealth grants have been used as vehicles during COVID-19 to provide additional support to early childhood education and care services. Indeed, they've also been used as a vehicle by Senator Colbeck in this chamber to help provide additional targeted support to aged-care facilities around Australia. So the grant guidelines are used for a range of different functions and purposes in terms of supporting the delivery of Commonwealth assistance. Yes, they often support—and I suspect this will be where Senator Gallagher goes—a range of different local or community related projects, and those projects are done in accordance with those grant guidelines too. But the types of discretion that are provided, the types of non-competitive processes that exist in place, are often there to enable swift response by ministers in circumstances such as those that I outlined before: supporting direct targeted assistance to sectors that need it most at different junctures such as those in aged care or early childhood during the COVID-19 pandemic.