Despite producing one of the most significant and reforming budgets of recent decades, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet is busy trying to extricate himself from the scandal of former NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro’s appointment to a $500,000 trade commissioner job in New York.
The job itself is a waste of money. There is no evidence that state trade commissioners — or for that matter national trade commissioners — deliver any value for money. Governments appear reluctant to test the benefits of the position against the costs not merely of paying commissioners but supporting them and maintaining an office.
But Barilaro and then premier Gladys Berejiklian announced a doubling of trade commissioner positions, including the New York one, in late 2019 as part of a “global NSW” strategy — although good luck finding an actual strategy document anywhere. There appears to have been no cost-benefit analysis done of whether the 10 extra trade commissioner positions would deliver any value to taxpayers.
Other appointees to the trade commissioner roles are no mugs — they include two former big four consultants with long in-country experience in their respective appointments, a 20-year Macquarie Bank Japan veteran for the North Asia post and a long-serving Business Australia CEO to Europe. The appointee to the China position, announced at the same time as Barilaro’s appointment, is the former CEO of the Australia China Business Council.
And then there’s Barilaro himself, whose trade and US experience consists of running a timber doors business in Queanbeyan.
No wonder the stench is overpowering a government that faces an election against a reinvigorated, and wholly cynical, Labor opposition next March.
Perrottet has thrown the bureaucrat responsible for the appointment under the bus, in effect blaming the secretary of the Department of Enterprise Investment and Trade, Amy Brown. Until his departure from politics, Barilaro held that portfolio, along with regional development, so he used to be Brown’s boss.
There’s no doubt we’ve — at long last — entered a period of intolerance of traditional forms of political opportunism. Pork-barrelling is increasingly seen as a form of corruption. Jobs for the boys and girls now seems to be next on the list of traditional behaviours that are annoying voters — and as Nick Greiner discovered three decades ago, it comes with some risk when following a sudden departure from politics. Already comparisons with the Metherell affair are being invoked.
Greiner’s was an excellent government undone in 1991 by political stupidity, a cynical Labor opposition (Bob Carr invented the idea of a state GST and campaigned against that) and issues like inadequate disaster response and toll roads. The resonances 30 years later are powerful, even if Perrottet leads a much older government that will be seeking 16 years in power next year: this has been a quality, reforming government prone to spectacular misjudgments and blamed for poor disaster response and remorseless growth in tolls, facing a Labor Party already labelling stamp duty reform as the Liberals’ “forever tax”.
The Barilaro scandal is a classic case of the kind of misstep that cuts straight through to voters uninterested in big-picture government, historic changes in the economic empowerment of women or complex tax reforms. Unless Barilaro bails out of the appointment, he’ll seriously damage Perrottet’s chances next March.
This is easily the most blatant stinking example of snouts-in-the-trough looting of tax-payer dollars since… umm… the last one. Isn’t it wonderful that governments, that insist they can never afford decent pay for care workers and the like, can always find oodles of cash to pay colossal salaries to their very privileged mates?
Barilaro helping himself to a big slice of the pie is really a smaller issue than the creation of such a ridiculous set of pointless sinecures anyway, no matter who gets picked. Barilaro merely helps to bring it into focus as he is so obviously just a blood-sucker.
If this is seen after the next NSW election as the issue that crushed the Perrottet government and sent it to oblivion, it would be nice to think it would result in all Australian governments being generally less willing to indulge themsleves and their mates with such largesse. Barilaro would finally have contributed something to Australia, no matter how unintentionally.
Well said, Rat
And not just any pie…it’s a “Big Apple” pie!
Jobs for the girls/boys and the pigs.
The stupidity of this appointment is epic and baffling. Was no-one in the NSW government taking any notice the extraordinary outcome the May federal election? How could they not fail to see that the success of the independents (and not just the Teals) was fundamentally based on the electorate fed up with all forms of corruption and lying? Appointing Pork Baralaro on the same day as announcing what appears to be an innovative reform budget beggars belief.
So Keane can’t refer to the Andrews government without noting how corrupt they supposedly are, but faced with direct evidence of corruption at the highest level in the NSW government they get dubbed ‘a quality, reforming government’
He’s still pining for the fjords of Goldstandard Gladys.
While ever there’s been the perpetually pervasive (if waxing and waning but persistent and perceptible) suggestion of “Fish?” wafting from various fissures in the NSW state Coalition government, he’s been touting them, over other states, playing favourites, for years.
Taking a stance up-wind perhaps, from that carried corruption?
But turn his baleful eye to Mexico way and watch the fire & brimstone!
A “quality, reforming government” : as long as one ignores it’s ongoing record of being prone to spectacular misjudgments, it’s poor record for disaster responses and remorseless growth in tolls? … Otherwise?
Bit like Sir Humphrey Appleby (was it?) – “Hospitals would run so much more efficiently without patients!”?
…. Then of course there was it’s trail of pork-barreling and other dodgy deals.
“… Help yourself to another icare?”
… Where’s that Darling cotton-pickin’ Kevin Humphries these daze?
Yep let’s not forget that four billion dollar loss icare had under Dom’s watch.
Also the extra multi millions he threw in at the behest of our Gladys for Daryl from Wagga Wagga.
And apparently airlines would, without passengers!
Keane is a quality reforming journalist who is never ever prone to spectacular errors of judgment.
Crikey’s very own Leigh Sales.
It’s difficult to decide whom should be most offended.
Oh stop it! Everybody has the occasional blind spot, or an affection too close to their heart to examine. Bernard works very hard and produces many excellent articles. If there are some subjects where dearly held convictions slightly edge out mundane evidentiary considerations, yelling at him about it won’t do any good.
Oh Bernard, you still look through rose-coloured glasses as you carefully dismiss the ineptitude of the NSW Liberal party, I’m sorry to say.
You so often refer to Matt Kean as a bit of a legend in his previous role of Environment minister and his current role of (troublemaker) Treasurer … without referencing the disastrous ongoing results of his (lack of decent) policies which are destroying critical habitat for wildlife in NSW, along with stupendously stupid ideas like pressing ahead with raising the wall of Warragamba Dam, with no real environmental assessments of what will happen to Indigenous sacred sites nor endangered species.
Yesterday, Guardian Australia reported on monstrous cracks in sandstone dated millions of years old in the Blue Mountains…caused by approved Mining in the area.
That’s a few, small, issues I have with the NSW government …and that’s without the problems that have occurred for at least ten years with NSW hospitals and “ramping of ambulances” (NOT, a recent occurrence just because of the Pandemic as most of the media report/assume) ….AND, the anti-democratic laws brought in for environmental activists….AND, AND, AND,AND….So Bernard please spare me/us the constant pain of reading about how great they AREN’T (NSW Libs).
I enjoy reading most of what you write but not your personal/professional views on a lousy, in my opinion, mostly corrupt, in my opinion, State government.
100% agree, BK, and 100% hope your prediction in the final par comes to pass.