If politicians in Canberra and all the states and territories haven’t been paying close attention to the saga of the John Barilaro appointment in NSW, they should be.
The scandal is death-by-a-thousand-cuts stuff, with new information emerging every day. The evidence of senior bureaucrat Amy Brown yesterday to a Legislative Council inquiry was particularly damaging to NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet, who’d claimed both that no suitable candidate had been identified for the job — Brown says in fact she congratulated successful candidate Jenny West, who had “exceeded expectations”, before Barilaro’s office got her to rescind the offer of the New York posting — and that there was no ministerial involvement in the decision.
All coverage of the state government’s budget has been blown away. No one’s talking about the massive investment in childcare or healthcare or the long-term transition to universal pre-kinder. It’s all jobs for mates.
It demonstrates two things: the public tolerance of jobs for mates is now at an all-time low, and any process of appointment of a mate to a public sector job, when exposed to the cold light of day, will look shonky at best — or much worse.
Much of this is the legacy of the Coalition government, the most corrupt in Australian federal history, and its unabashed eagerness to appoint mates to any position it could find — most egregiously the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT), which is now wholly discredited by a long list of appointments of Coalition mates, starting back under George Brandis in the Abbott years.
Scott Morrison in particular took the standard but widely tolerated examples of political misconduct of the last three decades — pork-barrelling, jobs for mates, political lying, politicisation of the public service, opposing scrutiny — and turned them into central elements of his entire political strategy, dialling all of them up to 11, until integrity and his own reputation for lying became central issues of the 2022 election.
Morrison has made all of this deeply unacceptable. Every other government is now on notice.
Labor in Canberra has no option but to abolish the AAT. It cannot be regarded credibly ever again unless, somehow, it is purged of every Coalition appointee, which can’t happen under existing legislation. The whole tribunal has to be abolished and a new one established in its place, with qualified appointees — not partisan hacks, failed MPs and Liberal and National mates.
But the AAT is just the symptom of a bigger problem: the discretionary role that government ministers have in relation to appointments.
It’s the same problem as pork-barrelling and ministerial discretion in relation to grants. Governments — most especially the Berejiklian-Barilaro government and the Morrison government — proved that politicians can no longer be trusted to exercise their discretion over grant allocation in the public interest. Instead, they exercise it in their partisan interests. Ditto with appointments to public bodies.
For those hoping Labor in Canberra will take a more public interest-focused approach to public appointments, their optimism may prove justified (the Rudd government, driven by John Faulkner, actually walked the walk on integrity). But that won’t change a broken system.
The Centre for Public Integrity today called for a proper Public Appointments Framework, that would lock politicians out of public appointments. The framework would:
- strengthen the current Commonwealth Merit and Transparency Policy to require clear criteria and minimum eligibility thresholds, public advertising of vacancies, independent selection panels and a requirement that appointments only be made on the basis of panel recommendations;
- require that the policy be legislated and widened to all public appointments;
- ensure the whole thing be monitored by a joint cross-party parliamentary committee;
- make sure that departmental secretaries are much more difficult to sack, and only on legislated grounds, and;
- recommend that the AAT be abolished and replaced.
Removing the role of politicians from appointments and giving the job to independent panels would go a long way to addressing not merely the symptoms of the problem, but the problem itself.
Now is the time to move for the federal government — and any other government paying attention.
Yes, all things I’ve been saying for years. Scrapping and replacing the AAT is absolutely necessary, and must be only a first step to cleaning up this atrocious mess. There should also be a very determined inquiry into what was going on during recent governments, which is presumably a job for the long-promised federal integrity commission.
But… “politicians can no longer be trusted to exercise their discretion…”
No longer!? When could they ever? If ministers could be trusted to use their judgement wisely in the national interest at all times there would be no useful role for oversight and no need for a parliament to hold them to account. What a lot of fuss and bother scrapping parliament would save, freeing up ministers to get on with the business of government without any hindrance. No. Parliament was created centuries ago because ministers cannot be trusted. It is a fundamental error for parliament to ever grant ministers any more discretionary authority than is absolutely necessary.
This Barilaro rort will ensure many will not vote LNP in March. A total corrupt set-up. He should be immediately banned from taking up this job. And Is it even a necessary job? Don’t we have the Feds for these trade functions?
Even after he’s gone, the stench lingers on.
… like a fart in an elevator….
Porker Barilaro and Porker Joyce and the VENAL CORRUPT Nats. Why did the NSW Libs owe the dummy spit Koala Barilaro and his developer mates on the North Coast any favours after he threatened to walk out on Gladys.
Good point. The job has nothing to do with the proper functions of the NSW Government. Unfortunately, other state governments are up to the same tricks with delusions of grandeur about their role in macroeconomic and industry policy. The Barilaro rort and a new federal government provides an opportunity to clean up the mess (racket) of overseas representation by state governments once and for all.
Great idea. Close all state trade offices. The LNPee seems to think it is a place for unqualified mates.
“Is it even a necessary job?”
It’s the most obvious sinecure I’ve seen in a long time. Little more than a long luxury travel holiday, all at public expense with no discernible or measurable public benefit. Barilaro thinks this job was made for him, and that seems to be the truth, since he dreamt it up. But let’s not be too hard on him, he was only building on the great example set by various predescessors, too numerous to list, who also went out of politics to highly paid postings in very nice places with no questions asked about their suitability, experience or relevant qualifications. Standing on the shoulders of giants, and so on.
Smells every bit of “entitlement rort” – dreamed up, set up and announced by Barilaro (with Shredderjiklian’s help) for when he got “out of politics”, to live high on the hog on the tax-payer teat in NY.
Yes, it must be very galling for a career diplomat in line for a plum posting to be trumped by a ‘retired’ politician such as Amanda Vanstone or Alexander Downer. Anyone who knows Vanstone would know that her diplomacy extended only to knowing which bottle to open when the sun reached the yardarm, and Downer’s mannerisms make my skin creep from a thousand miles! If Abbott’s and ScuMo’s policies didn’t make us enough of an international pariah, our ‘chosen’ representatives would surely finish the job!
Vanstone issued a visa to a Mafiosi after he made a donation to the Liberral party. Less than a year later he was in gaol.
Don’t forget the perennial free loader Joe Hockey, failed Treasurer and free loader.
Another Coalition loss precipitated by a “retail” Nationals leader?
Good to see recognition/acknowledgement of John Faulkner. He deserves more of it. It’s a shame he didn’t get more opportunity to advance integrity measures & that he was thwarted on some his electoral donations & other reforms by Steve Fielding.
Let us not forget that John Barilaro was the deputy premier who threatened to move the Nationals to the cross-bench while still keeping their ministerial titles, salaries and entitlements. The fact that he thought such a thing would even be possible demonstrates his unfitness for any public office. And the profound issue of principle that Barilaro was trying to hold his own government to ransom over? The right of land developers to bulldoze koala habitats.
No government that has to rely on a coalition with the Nats to stay in office will ever pass probity tests. The Nats are just Rorters Incorporated.
One other question: where was Trade Minister Ayres in all of this? It would be good to learn more about his role…
Google him! Very interesting as to how he has not been referred to NSW ICAC is beyond the pale!