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Peter Dutton blocked high-priority crime prevention grants for Indigenous communities as Home Affairs Minister in favour of less-worthy projects found to have favoured Coalition seats and which included protecting “expensive bowling greens”.

With many polls showing the Voice referendum on track for defeat, Labor has seized on new documents to attack Dutton for rejecting a grant from one of the remote communities he used as an example of a place the Voice to parliament would not fix local crime.

Peter Dutton was accused by the PM of pushing “conspiracy theories” in the referendum campaign.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

The major parties locked horns over the Voice again in parliament on Monday. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who the opposition labelled “out of his depth” last week, accused Dutton of pushing “conspiracy theories” in the referendum campaign.

New information shows in 2019, the then-home affairs minister bypassed six Indigenous grant applications in the third round of the $184 million Safer Communities Fund when he diverted millions of dollars away from projects ranked high-priority by his department.

The fund, established in 2016 to help community groups prevent crime, has attracted scrutiny from the federal spending watchdog, which found that in the third round of the program, more grants were given to Coalition seats and those that did go to Labor seats received less funding. Labor has axed the grant program.

“Where projects located solely in a Coalition-held marginal electorates and, to a lesser extent, Coalition-held fairly safe electorates, represented a higher proportion of approved applications (in both numerical and dollar terms) than they represented as a proportion of the application population,” an Australian National Audit Office report found.

All 70 top-priority projects were green-lit for the third round at the recommendation of Dutton’s department, including nine Indigenous initiatives. The audit found the grant program delivered more funding for Indigenous organisations than those associated with any other cultural group.

But instead of funding the top 70 fully, Dutton gave lower than the requested levels of funding to create what Labor committee chair Julian Hill has labelled a “slush fund” to cherry-pick from a long list of 211 projects considered lower priorities.

Handwritten notes from Dutton show he rejected departmental advice to create a reserve list of the next 15 meritorious projects, should there be money left to spend after the first 70 were funded. Documents show he instead chose 53 projects from the broader list of 211, only five of which were in safe Labor seats. Of the 53 successful projects, only seven were deemed by officials to be more worthy than the rejected Indigenous community initiatives.

The large East Arnhem Land town of Nhulunbuy – on the Gove peninsular, near the location of the Garma festival – missed out on $300,000 for CCTV and lighting. It was deemed the 26th most worthy project out of 211, based on a departmental merit score.

Two months after the refusal, local ABC reported a booze-fuelled crime spike involving mass street brawls. Further outbreaks in crime were reported throughout 2022 and 2023, and NT police rolled out a CCTV trailer vehicle in the area in December.

Dutton visited the area in February and has referenced East Arnhem Land nearly a dozen times this year including when he revealed the Liberal Party’s formal opposition to the Voice.

“In East Arnhem Land, where I was the other day in Nhulunbuy and Gove … they want their voice to be heard and they want their voice to dictate the local policies,” he said in March.

The federal Labor MP for the NT seat of Lingiari, Marian Scrymgour, said Dutton disregarded local voices who spent scarce resources applying for much-needed support to counter crime.

Lingiari MP Marion Scrymgour in federal parliament.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

“When he was a senior minister and had communities such as Nhulunbuy ranked higher [than other projects], they should have won some of these grants.”

A spokesman for Dutton said the third round of the Safer Communities program gave more money to Indigenous groups than the proportion of applications that came from these organisations.

He savaged Labor’s claims about his decision-making, saying: “This is an absurd and pathetic attack from the Albanese government who desperately want a distraction from their shambles on the Voice.”

“The Labor Party literally cut the Safer Communities programme. Australians expect their government to act to make their communities safer and more secure. This is exactly what Mr Dutton did through the Safer Communities Fund.”

The Yarrabah Aboriginal Shire Council in East Cairns missed out on funding despite being ranked the fifth highest on the list of 211 based on a merit score.

Conditions there have been described in the Cairns Post as “third world”, with children as young as six involved in fights, health workers requiring police escorts, and supermarket staff saying they feared for their lives.

Other Aboriginal community programs rejected in the third round were ranked ninth, 12th 36th and 46th most important.

Successful projects in the third round included a timber post and rail fence “sympathetic in style and design to the 1840s property” in the then-marginal Labor seat of Macquarie (ranked 109), protecting “expensive synthetic bowling greens” in the then-Liberal seat of Tangney (number 76), and $34,000 to help people feel safe shopping at night in the Alchester Shopping Village in the then-Liberal seat of Aston (Number 168).

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.

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