Federal Labor cancels Turnbull's Australian Rain Corporation rain-making funding ...

Excerpt from the Courier Mail:

Hasty grant leaves cloud over Turnbull

1 March 2008

In a speech at Melbourne's Monash University on Thursday night, shadow treasurer Malcolm Turnbull was in full flight.

Ministers in the Rudd Government, he said, claimed that the previous Howard administration had spent too much "and yet, when they are asked to nominate examples of extravagance, they can only point to a handful of regional grants".

Well, not quite, Malcolm.

They also point to a grant made by Turnbull himself as environment minister at the start of last year's election campaign.

A $10 million hand-out for a trial of what Turnbull described as a new "rainfall enhancement technology" is being cancelled. Climate Change and Water Minister Penny Wong has sent out letters breaking the bad news to the interested parties. However, it appears that not much more than half of the $10 million will be saved.

From a briefing note prepared for Wong by her department -- a copy of which I have obtained -- $2.97 million has already been paid to the Australian Rain Corporation, the company that owns the technology, known as ATLANT.

The document says it is highly unlikely any of this money can be recovered, and there is a risk that ARC will seek further costs. It also concedes there will be costs in terminating a funding agreement with the University of Queensland, which was to help in the trial and evaluate results.

So, even though it is being canned, taxpayers are something like $5 million out of pocket.

The ARC was established (with a Swiss partner) by Sydney multi-millionaire Matt Handbury -- a friend of Turnbull and the nephew of Rupert Murdoch, the chairman and chief executive of News Corporation (publisher of The Courier-Mail).

The most embarrassing aspect of the leaked document, as far as Turnbull is concerned, is that it reveals he approved a grant five times bigger than his departmental experts recommended.

A highly sceptical National Water Commission recommended a grant of only $2 million "for a technology validation test of the ionisation technology by a credible scientific organisation". No field trials should be financed by the government, the commission said, until and unless the science behind the ATLANT technology was shown to be sound.

Turnbull ignored that advice and decided $10 million should be provided so a field trial could be conducted near Bundaberg at the same time as an independent scientific validation of the process was carried out by the CSIRO's Division of Atmospheric Physics. The field trial was costed at $9.6 million, with taxpayers providing $7.5 million of that. (The CSIRO and the University of Queensland were to get $1.25 million each.)

The grant attracted controversy from the start, for a number of reasons. One was that Handbury donated money to Turnbull's campaign in his Sydney seat of Wentworth, via an entity called the Wentworth Forum. Another was the timing. The grant was announced when the campaign for the November 24 election was in full swing.

The departmental briefing paper provides new information about this. It reveals that Turnbull wrote to the prime minister John Howard, requesting the $10 million on October 15 -- the day after the election was called. Howard wrote back approving it the same day.

Clearly the reason for the rush was that the "caretaker" period -- during which no new government decisions can be taken -- was to begin with the dissolution of Parliament on October 17.

Further, contracts for the field trial were signed just 12 days before the election, even though it was pretty obvious by then the Howard government was facing defeat.

Another reason for controversy was that there were strong doubts all along about the science behind the ionisation "rain enhancement" technique, which is based on mainly untried Russian technology.

The departmental briefing given to Wong plays up those doubts.

The University of Queensland had helped in a privately funded trial in southeast Queensland in May and June last year. At Turnbull's request, the National Water Commission assessed the technology and arranged an independent technical review of that trial.

The briefing paper says: "The independent review concluded that: 'There is not convincing evidence that the ATLANT technology operates as believed by its proponents'."

So what does Turnbull say about all this?

He dismisses the issue of campaign donations out of hand, repeating his explanation of four months ago that he was unaware at the time of the decision that Handbury had contributed to the Wentworth Forum.

Turnbull's explanation for the timing is that, if he had not approved the grant when he did, it would have been too late for the field trial to go ahead during summer and a year would have been lost. The election was not a consideration, he claims.

Which leaves the scientific doubts and the question of the size of the grant. Turnbull says his dilemma was that he had conflicting advice.

Turnbull says he opted for a compromise: More than the National Water Commission wanted but much cheaper than the trial a University of Queensland advisory group had suggested.

"I came to the view that we really needed to see if it worked," he said.

"Remember, there were severe drought conditions at the time. We need to be open to new technologies and prepared to give them a go."

See - Labor cancels Turnbull's Australian Rain Corporation funding.