With Australia a banana republic in which self-interest, non-accountability and corruption — in soft or hard forms — pervades business and politics, we have only a limited number of institutions that we can trust to protect the public interest from politicians and the vested interests that control them.
But many of them are under attack from the politicians that they threaten.
With the Australian public service, and even its famed central agencies, now hopelessly politicised, sources of independent, high-quality policy advice are becoming rare.
The Productivity Commission (PC) remains independent and willing to criticise government economic policies — particularly its failure to pursue a carbon price, its facile obsession with managed trade deals, and its steady re-embrace of protectionism.
But there are concerns about the PC. In 2019, Scott Morrison appointed longtime Liberal Party staffer Michael Brennan to replace outgoing chair Peter Harris, who was often outspoken in his analyses, and a vocal critic of the government’s secrecy around the failed Trans Pacific Partnership trade deal.
Brennan has reasserted Liberal Party orthodoxy in the role, insisting the recession is a supply-side problem, not one of demand, and the economy needed deregulation and a reduction in industrial relations protections.
Early this year, Brennan’s predecessor Harris mocked what he called “[trotting] out that old whipping dog, red tape” for “another beating”.
And while the Reserve Bank long ago took Treasury’s mantle as the country’s most credible economic policy institution and remains independent, don’t forget Tony Abbott considered a plan to bring the bank more under his control by appointing an external conservative figure to replace Glenn Stevens.
The Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) under auditor-general Grant Hehir has expanded its role as a thorn in the side of the public service, repeatedly exposing bungling and rorting by bureaucrats and ministers, most spectacularly with its exposure of systematic rorting of the sports infrastructure grants program by Bridget McKenzie and Scott Morrison’s office.
In recent years the government has slowly chipped away at the ANAO’s budget. In the last Labor budget, the ANAO received around $72 million, with its budget forecast to rise to $76 million by 2016. The Abbott government cut that back, keeping the ANAO to around $72 million in ensuing years, until in 2017 the Turnbull government sliced $2 million a year from its budget.
In each successive budget since then, including the recent one, the ANAO has had $1 million sliced off its budget, so it will now only receive $68.6 million this year. In that time, it has gone around 350 staff to 320.
The government has been more successful at nobbling Australia’s most trusted media outlet, the ABC, with budget cuts and a persistent campaign of intimidation and harassment that has cowed the ABC’s news division into compliance and responsiveness to Coalition criticism.
The Coalition has also been a persistent critic of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption, and even engaged Margaret Cuneen, a high-profile critic of ICAC, to help design the risible federal integrity body that has fallen into a hole since it was proposed more than two years ago.
Many of the design features of the Morrison “integrity” model reflect the constant attacks by News Corporation on ICAC, which were renewed today despite the clear public interest in the revelation of close links between the premier and a corrupt MP.
The Coalition’s preferred model for independent regulators is weak and underfunded: it gutted the corporate regulator ASIC when it was elected, slashing tens of millions in funding. Its aged care regulator is hands-off and reluctant to intervene in the deeply rotten private aged care sector. And it has systematically stacked the Administrative Appeals Tribunal — the front line for litigation against government decisions — with Coalition appointees.
The lessons from the multiple scandals unfolding now is that genuinely independent, well-resourced and properly empowered regulators, run by non-partisan figures, are crucial to exposing and deterring corruption and misconduct by politicians and business people.
That seems to be the last thing the Morrison government wants.
Bernard, you’ve pretty well nailed it. And right wing governments here, in the UK and the US have established a pattern of behaviour – a clear intent to wind back funding for and otherwise diminish long-established bodies tasked with accountability using a range of tactics including relentlessly undermining rhetoric and/or flippant talk about the need to cut “unnecessary red tape”. Hence the reduction of funding, eg, for the ANAO and ASIC, and the stacking, also eg, of the AAT.
At the risk of being a bit of a cracked record about the MSM’s role in all this (notably the Murdoch press), if the fourth estate was doing its job properly, holding those in power (not so much those in opposition) to account, then the Coalition (any government) would not be able to get away with activities aimed at relentlessly reducing the accountability and regulatory measures that are crucial to the health of democracy and which feed more just and fairer outcomes for the betterment of society.
The brazen and rampant right wing partisanship of the MSM (Murdoch press and broadcaster, Nine papers and TV and Stokes’ Seven) here as their billionaire owners and major shareholders pursue their own political and commercial interest which they see best served by the right wing still in the thrall of neoliberalism with an alluring tint of even more extreme libertarian tendencies, is a betrayal of and an abandonment of the fourth estate, and the voting public along with it.
The Murdoch press particularly appears stuffed to the gunnels daily with attacks on Labor governments and leaders and their policies. The persistent undermining of crucial public health measures and messaging by Labor state governments in these pandemic times, is a case in point. At the same time it runs dead or soft on appalling transgressions and policy failures by the federal Coalition government and Liberal leaders, preferring instead to smear and shoot the individual or institutional messengers who don’t toe the right wing line and/or with whom it disagrees.
Lest I be accused of pushing a blindly partisan position, let me make it clear that if it was a non-right wing government behaving in this way and the MSM was an MIA apologist for it, I would be saying the same thing.
If I was still working for the MSM I wouldn’t sleep at night. In fact, I couldn’t so I left. But no wonder more than a quarter of a million people (actually it’s just now nearly 275,000) have signed Rudd’s petition. I take this as a sign there is a good, solid bunch of us who can see exactly what this government and their MSM cheer squad is doing and not doing and what that means for our body politic, democracy and society, and we’re worried, bloody sick about it. I know I am.
Very well said, and I could not agree more. I find it chilling and terrifying that too many Australians just don’t appear to understand how completely and thoroughly they’re being done over by Morrison & his appalling right-wing government, and the monstrous Murdoch so they’re sleep walking into an authoritarian state. If and when they wake up it will all be far too late.
The petition has the endorsement of 1% of the Australian population.
Now, wottabout the rest?
Yep, M – cutting red tape is code for reversing regulatory laws designed to protect citizens from predatory/illegal behaviour and corrupt practices.
Totally agree Meg.
For future reference, it’s gunwales, pronounced gunnels!
Sorry, pedant alert.
It is great to read another comment aimed squarely at the corrupting power of the murdoch media formula, it has of course been adopted by other mainstream media because it is so effective.
Nothing can shift back to something with a more balanced, less corrupting driver until our media, the public’s information model, has been cleaned up.
A federal ICAC is possible only when the message of its importance and value can reach the general population.
Seems to me you have pretty much covered it Bernard as to why electorate cannot trust Government. Specifically Federal, and by no means exclusion of a number of State Governments. But the Feds carry the banner? Front bench Ministers are a disgrace and clearly revel in their exercise of power, disdain for accountability, transparency. No question mark . . . just a statement of fact.
Thank you for that article, Bernard. I watch in dismay as one-by-one they trash the institutions and checks and balances of our parliamentary democracy and rule of law.
Morrison’s modus operandi seems to be the one he used and for which he got sacked at the NZ and Australian tourism commissions but no one seems to be stopping him this time. No shouting and constant headlines about corruption and undermining of due process in the msm.
And Alan Tudge (one of the offenders against the rule of law) has the gall to put the rule of law and parliamentary democracy in the proposed Australian Values test that prospective citizens must pass.
Yes JMNO, the very same Tudge about whom Justice Flick in the Federal Court said, as reported by GA: “The minister has acted unlawfully. His actions have unlawfully deprived a person of his liberty. His conduct exposes him to both civil and potentially criminal sanctions, not limited to a proceeding for contempt. In the absence of explanation, the minister has engaged in conduct which can only be described as criminal.”
“Alan Tudge… has the gall to put the rule of law and parliamentary democracy in the proposed Australian Values test that prospective citizens must pass.”
Perhaps passing the test will require a sufficient display of hostility to such un-Australian concepts?
It’s interesting that the so-called conservatives are set to destroy the venerable institutions that help uphold a Westminster democracy.
These people are not conservatives, they are radical extremists, but like the boiled frog not noticing the temperature rising we have largely been inured to how radical they are, following 30 years of Murdoch demagoguery and heavily slanted media.
And the frog suspects nothing. Just us Cassandras out here. Worst period of government in my lifetime.
Somehow BK forgot to mention ANAOs pointing out that they paid $30M for a $3M block of land at Badgerys that just happened to be owned by an LNP supporter. At any other time in our history this would have been front page news for a month and Ministers heads would have rolled. Awful.
Agree. And think of the constant, screaming outraged headlines during Gillard’s time even from supposedly unbiased journalists like Michele Grattan compared to polite revelations of sports rorts, just about anything done by Christian Porter, nothing about the general abuse of process, corruption, no sustained campaigns for action or change. The Government is defunding the ANAO, politicising other watchdogs like the ACCC, and nary a word from the msm. And then there’s the ABC. . .
Just ask the PM which of the scandals exposed by the state integrity bodies could be exposed by his proposed body.
Morrison fought tooth and nail to stop the banking royal commission. Says everything about his integrity. Time to go Scumo!
Time to go Scumo ?..You wanna’ bet a rising house property or two or three price on that ?
There is no market on whether ‘it’s time’ Rosel; you just can’t get viable odds. But you’re arguing it will happen, which I – and Tori, it seems – very much doubt.
One in ten mortgages in Australia are currently stressed, according to the RBA. When jobkeeper ends – which BTW is being used to subsidize these mortgages – how can house prices continue to rise, given a probable tsunami of foreclosures and resulting debt deflation results?
There’ll be some, apparently, cheap properties in the overcrowded cities when, not if, it finally dawns on people that the past “golden (foil) age” of millions mingling heedlessly is over.
Imagine even half of the current populations of the Great Wens of the coast decamped for the regions.
Imagine if the people of those regions erected quarantine procedures on those intranational refugees.
It is clear that mass shutdown is not only not effective in eradicating something so ubiquitous as C19, it is also not conducive to the old way of life, from the dim distant past of pre 2020.
The future will be intentionally sequestered communities not locked down but locking OUT those not certified infection free or willing to adhere to good hygiene.
Gated communities writ large.