Serious questions to answer over trust funding

The Government has some explaining to do about the process for funding a trust that had a National MP as its Chair, says Labour’s Environment spokesperson Grant Robertson.

“The MacKenzie Futures Trust, chaired at the time by National's Waitaki MP Jacqui Dean,  had its application for funding turned down by an independent body and had to have ‘special favours’ called in to get payments made,” Grant Robertson said.

The Trust has been funded a total of around $180,000 to run a process to agree on water allocation issues in the MacKenzie Basin.  The money was directly funded from the Ministry for the Environment, even though the Trust was turned down for funding in the Ministry's open tender Community Environment Fund.

"This process raises serious questions.  A pet project of the then Minister Nick Smith has been included in the baseline funding of the Ministry, with large parts of the money going to consultants. How did that happen? What process did it go through to get funding?

"Papers released under the Official Information Act show that Ministry for the Environment staff spent hundreds of hours trying to sort out the funding for the group, including ‘a special favour request’ to the Ministry of Economic Development to ensure they had the legal status to receive the money.

"Jacqui Dean was the Chair of the Trust.  She sent many e-mails and made phone calls to officials on behalf of the Trust. This represents a blurring of the role of an MP, and will have put officials in a compromising position,” Grant Robertson said.

"The independent assessors on the Ministry's Community Environment Fund unanimously turned down the project, yet the Ministry provided more funding to the Trust.  Why did this happen?

"I am supporter of collaborative processes for dealing with issues such as water allocation.  But the process around this initiative appears deeply flawed. This project was highly political.  For goodness sake, the trust was launched at a conference for the Blue Greens, the National Party's environmental wing.

"It is clear from the papers that officials were concerned about the funding and the amount of time spent on the project.

“The Government must clarify how the Trust came to be funded. At the moment the public are being left with the all too familiar stench of National Party cronyism," Grant Robertson said.