IT’S a fact that almost 70 per cent of lotto winners end up flat broke within a few years. They don’t know how to spend all that money, lack perspective, and spend irresponsibly.
This piece was originally published on The Courier-Mail.
It makes you wonder what the Government was thinking when it decided to ignore the expertise of organisations such as CSIRO, James Cook University, and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, and create a brand new lotto winner with their now infamous $444 million gift to the Great Barrier Reef Foundation.
“It’s like we’ve just won lotto,” the tiny charity’s chief executive Anna Marsden said in May.
But let’s hope not too much like that. What is this windfall supposed to do to save the Reef? There is surprisingly little detail. More surprising still, the foundation had not applied for the grant, there had been no call for tenders – in fact they did not know they were being considered at all.
In fact, most of the process funnelling half a billion dollars into the foundation – whose board is made of alumni or staff of organisations such as Exxon, Shell, and BHP – seems to be confusing even those who made this blunder.
When pressed on the matter, Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg has taken to either dodging questions as he did with 4BC presenter Ben Fordham, or making statements that have been flatly contradicted, as was the case with his claims of “extensive due diligence” which the foundation’s boss was blissfully unaware of.
She told the ABC she wasn’t aware the diligence process was under way and that nobody else in the foundation was contacted.
Meanwhile, the Great Barrier Reef bleaches and dies while nothing is done to address the root cause of the issue – climate change.
This half a billion dollars won’t do anything about that, despite the foundation acknowledging climate change is the biggest threat to the Reef. The 90-page agreement between them and the Government doesn’t mention those words once.
Lotto winners certainly have a habit of going broke in just a few years. But the real bankruptcy comes from this Government which has so little regard for the environment and the Great Barrier Reef that it would waste half a billion dollars like this – and so little respect for the public that it thinks it can get away with it.