Labor has made a good start in purging the rancid influence of Barnaby Joyce from the infrastructure portfolio, but there’s a long way to go to detoxify it.
Back in July, Minister for Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government Catherine King appointed long-serving former department secretary Mike Mrdak and NBN director Nicole Lockwood to review Infrastructure Australia (IA), a creation of Anthony Albanese in the Rudd years intended to provide independent advice about funding.
Under the Coalition, IA was routinely ignored, and then demeaned in one of the most egregious examples of board-stacking and jobs for mates in a government renowned for it. Last November, Joyce appointed Colin Murray, a self-described Joyce supporter, to chair it and appointed former LNP vice-president Amanda Cooper, failed LNP candidate Elizabeth Schmidt and former Liberal office holder Vicki Meyer to the board.
All have now left; Murray told a regional newspaper this week that he’d jumped rather than be pushed.
In a statement remarkable even by Joyce’s cretinous standards, he complained this week that Labor had made a “farce” of the independence of IA.
Purging the body of Joyce’s malignant influence is only the start: King has flagged to handpicked journalists an intention to reprofile infrastructure spending to smooth out ups and downs in coming years, partly to reduce pressure on the construction sector, which is experiencing supply-side constraints and labour shortages, and partly to offset serious drop-offs in infrastructure spending.
In recent years the Reserve Bank has called repeatedly for a smoother “pipeline” of major infrastructure spending to reduce economic volatility.
The real problem of IA, however, is that it is only an advisory body, and can be ignored by governments — as the Coalition repeatedly demonstrated over nine long years with billions of dollars spent on rorted programs and National Party pork-barrelling, usually in the infrastructure portfolio, with minimal resistance from bureaucrats.
The logical next step is to give IA direct control of a substantial proportion of the Commonwealth’s infrastructure budget — say $7-$8 billion a year — with the brief to, in coordination with state and local governments, spend it only on projects that maximise return for taxpayers. Such a body, closer to a Reserve Bank of infrastructure, would need a bipartisan board appointments process to prevent future National Party ministers from corrupting it.
King’s purge of the board of IA has so far not been matched by the required purging of the Australian Rail Track Corporation, another victim of National Party soiling.
Former Nationals leader Warren Truss continues to head the board of the ARTC. Joyce quietly appointed Angus Taylor fundraiser Ryan Arrold to the board on March 30 this year, as well as former NSW National minister Katrina Hodgkinson on the same day, and veteran fossil fuel industry lawyer Keira Brennan.
Brennan’s appointment is noteworthy. The $20 billion inland rail project, which is the biggest (and most wrongly accounted-for) item on the ARTC’s books, is primarily intended to be a subsidy for coalminers, meaning Brennan’s skillset and experience in advising coal companies like AngloAmerican, Glencore and QCoal is ideal.
King has only announced a review of inland rail, rather than killing it altogether — or ordering ARTC not to use it to provide a taxpayer-funded subsidy to coalminers who are enjoying massive war profits.
Yes, it’s a start. Let’s hope Labor sees it through.
It’s not just infrastructure either. What is Labor doing about that notorious rest-home for Liberal Party shonks, rejects and failures, the hopelessly compromised Australian Appeals Tribunal?
They cannot be fired without legal cause but the AAT can be abolished in toto.
Do so, salt the earth and build back better.
I expect that, in time, the AAT will be abolished in toto. There are so many fronts requiring action to clean up appalling rorts by, and jobs for incapable mates appointed by, the previous government that the government must hardly know where to start. For starters, everything Joyce touched….
King Midas in reverse.
The LNP Government salted a lot of government entities with their friends and failed candidates. Many of those do not have the qualifications required and/or are incapable of rendering free and fearless independent advice. I think all appointments made in the last 4 years should be declared null and void.
We elect Governments to govern. What then is the purpose of having independent bodies? With the exception of judicial positions I think they all should be brought under direct Government control. That would automatically include IA and the ARTC.
Careful of the ‘radical right libertarian trap’ that uses one factor and demanding reactionary responses e.g. stacking the AAT to then justify shutting down or nobbling further, then cases going to the expensive court system, or not at all?
US writer Thomas Franks wrote about this phenomenon in ‘The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Ruined Government, Enriched Themselves, and Beggared the Nation’ where departments, agencies etc. are compromised by incompetent leadership, personnel and strangling budgets; all for small or no government and less sensible regulation e.g. environmental.
Quote from Amazon:
‘It is no coincidence, Frank argues, that the same politicians who guffaw at the idea of effective government have installed a regime in which incompetence is the rule. Nor will the country easily shake off the consequences of deliberate misgovernment through the usual election remedies. Obsessed with achieving a lasting victory, conservatives have taken pains to enshrine the free market as the permanent creed of state’
I heard that inland rail was just another rort to increase the value of certain tracts of land.
Wasn’t Infrastructure Australia the body that wanted to pay for all the infrastructure around Morrison’s buddy’s gas fracking project in the Northern territory? And wasn’t the NT government on board with that?
All I can say is thank goodness we will have a NACC in the very near future. Someone best dust off their Akubra.