The Future Fund spent $20,000 to send the CEO’s then-executive assistant on a scoping trip to assess hotels in the US and negotiate hotel rates, Senate estimates has been told.
It comes as the government is also under fire for charging taxpayers nearly $100,000 to send the communications minister, Anika Wells, her staff member and a department official to the US during the United Nations General Assembly.
The chief executive of the Future Fund, Raphael Arndt, confirmed the trip to Senate estimates on Monday night, one of two overseas trips his EA was sent on, and revealed he had separately dined at Disney’s exclusive Disney Club 33, to learn about the entertainment giant’s “cultural induction” for its teams.
Membership to Disney’s Club 33 is by invitation only and reportedly costs tens of thousands of dollars.
The ACT senator David Pocock questioned why the hotel negotiations could not have been done over the phone, asking “was there a report done from that? Or what, was she checking the firmness of beds?”
Arndt said the rates negotiation had led to annual savings of $30,000. The scoping trip included the former EA (who was not named) and a second person, who both flew business class.
“The view was one, we wanted to make sure we had the appropriate setup for hotels, including whether they were in safe places within cities,” Arndt said.
“And secondly, that the relationship with the hotel managers would help with the negotiation of rates, and that’s what transpired … my understanding is we’ve realised more savings than that as a result of that project.”
The Future Fund was set up in 2006 and oversees a portfolio of $261bn.
Arndt said the trip occurred after the Covid pandemic, leading Pocock to again question why the negotiation could not have taken place over Zoom.
“If you ask the average punter out there whether the Future Fund needed to send someone … to go and check out some hotels, they’d probably say yeah, nah,” Pocock said
On a separate trip, Arndt dined at Disney’s Club 33, which he said was to study Disney and the Disney University’s “cultural inductions”, while the Future Fund establishes an academy to teach “culture”.
The Fund’s 2025-26 corporate plan states that the academy will help “supercharge our culture”, and “develop great leaders”.
“One of the peer groups that we identified in the study was Disney and the Disney University,” Arndt said.
“They do cultural induction for their teams in a way that seems quite effective. And so we organised for some meetings with a person who was involved in that activity, and had a tour of the facility, which included lunch at the location that you are referring to.”
On Wednesday, the government faced questions on the bill to taxpayers to send Wells, her deputy chief of staff and a department official to the US in September. Wells had originally been expected to fly with Anthony Albanese earlier in the week, but delayed her travel to deal with the triple zero outages.
Taxpayers were charged $95,000 for the three flights. Wells and her staffer also claimed US$2,985 each in accommodation while the departmental official claimed US$5,970 for accommodation. All three claimed US$1,348 each in ground transport.
The communications department also paid US$45,744 ($70,000) to host an event titled “Protecting children in the digital age” at the UN General Assembly, in the delegates’ dining room. Wells also held meetings with senior executives at Meta, Microsoft and Amazon, and attended several events and panels.
Wells defended the spending at the National Press Club on Wednesday, and said the trip was “incredibly important”.
“The reason you know all those things is we’re transparent about them, we’ll disclose them and we’ll continue to disclose them … That event fuelled a global momentum in this space.”
The shadow special minister for state, James McGrath, said the cost was “disappointing”.
“When Australians are facing a cost of living crisis, they don’t want to find out that federal Labor ministers are spending $35,000 travelling to and from New York, and that’s just the minister’s airfares.”
