As Considering The The

ANAO Report No.11 2014–15 The Award of Grants under the Clean Technology Program 86 applicants 104 , including by soliciting improved proposals with respect to one or more merit criteria. Such an approach was only adopted at the very end of the program in relation to one particularly significant government policy change. 105

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September 2014, the department advised ANAO that it sees a distinction between the role of the department as a facilitator to program access and IA committees as assessors of merit. Specifically, the department advised ANAO that: A key part of the AusIndustry customer service function is to assist customers to access government programs. This extends to advising customers on what they can do to make it more likely that their application will be considered to be competitive. It is the role of Innovation Australia to consider applications against the merit criteria and make recommendations to the Program Delegate. This process ensures that only the most meritorious applications are recommended for funding. In the event that the Committee considered that the application was not sufficiently meritorious, it would not be recommended for funding. This is the appropriate process for ensuring that the Program outcomes are maximised.

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with this advice, the departmental assessment process 106 focussed on increasing the likelihood that applications would be considered, by the IA committee, to be ‘competitive’ against the merit criterion. However, where an application as originally submitted was identified to have scored sufficiently well 107 that it was expected to be recommended for funding, the department did not examine whether reframing could lead to a more meritorious project being undertaken. 104 As discussed in paragraph 3.10, one of the ways in which the program guidelines demonstrated this was through clear advice to applicants that incomplete applications would not be assessed. 105 On 16 July 2013, the then Government announced that it would bring forward the adoption of an emissions trading scheme, with an expectation that this would reduce the carbon price by 75 per cent. In response to the announcement, on 24 July 2013, the department has advised that it wrote to all applicants with an application that was yet to be considered, and provided them with an opportunity to change their applications in response to the new carbon price. As the then Government went into caretaker mode from 5 August 2013, these changes were only relevant to applications revised in time for the last round of committee meetings held in the final week of July 2013 and in August 2013. 106 The importance of the department’s merit assessment to the committee deliberations and recommendations is highlighted in the advice from an IA committee chair quoted in paragraph 2.48. 107 In general, applications that were assessed to involve a cost per tonne of carbon of less than 80 were considered sufficiently competitive that reframing was not likely to be needed for the applicant to be approved to receive some program funding. ANAO Report No.11 2014–15 The Award of Grants under the Clean Technology Program 87

3.40 In