LNP blocks longer term for CCC boss as Labor ends cash-for-access events

Opposition LNP members of a powerful Queensland parliamentary committee have stymied a Palaszczuk government effort to install the new anti-corruption agency boss for a longer term, as Labor scraps its business cash-for-access program.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has also reiterated her intention to lead the party to the 2024 election, after some media reports suggesting otherwise, and offered a belated apology to public servants who may have faced the bullying outlined in a damning report into government culture.

Acting Crime and Corruption Commission chair Bruce Barbour has now been formally handed the role for a three-year term amid a period of significant disruption for the watchdog. Credit: Dallas Kilponen

Fronting a press conference on Thursday for the first time since Professor Peter Coaldrake’s report was published two days earlier, Palaszczuk had said she was “not troubled” by it and stopped short of issuing an apology.

On Friday, Palaszczuk made an apology to any public servant who has been bullied, and said she “probably wasn’t as clear yesterday as I should have been”.

“The report is serious; of course we take it seriously,” she said.

After suggestions by assistant minister and Maryborough MP Bruce Saunders that he would like to see the names of some of the people who made submissions, whom he suspected may have been “anti-Labor”, Palaszczuk also reiterated such details would remain confidential.

LNP Opposition Leader David Crisafulli said Saunders’ comments were intimidating and his junior minister role was untenable.

“The Premier’s response today, ‘Bruce is Bruce’, shows her inability to grasp the magnitude of the cultural problems she has overseen for the past seven years,” he said.

Deliberations between Labor and the LNP-led, but government-controlled, parliamentary crime and corruption committee also spilled over on Friday, after the reluctant appointment of acting Crime and Corruption Commission chair Bruce Barbour to the role for a three-year term.

The Palaszczuk government and its committee majority had sought to install Barbour for five years, after he took the temporary reins in January when predecessor Alan MacSporran quit and publicly cited a breakdown in his relationship with the oversight committee.

Speaking alongside Palaszczuk, Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman said the government had put forward Barbour’s name for the longer term, but had pushback from LNP members on the committee, who would agree only to a three-year term. Any appointment must be bipartisan.

“Maybe they think that they can appoint their own chair if they win the next election – which shows me they don’t want independence in this role at all,” Fentiman said.

In a letter to Fentiman, committee chair Jon Krause said LNP members believed the potential for a “period of significant transition” at the CCC, in the wake of a formal inquiry by Tony Fitzgerald and its looming report, meant a three-year term would better allow a review of any such changes.

A recent but yet-to-be legislated recommendation to move to a single non-renewable term of no more than seven years for the CCC chair position, rather than the two five-year terms now possible, was another reason.

Another key accountability role facing overhaul, the position of Integrity Commissioner, is still yet to be formally filled as Nikola Stepanov wraps up her final week.

Cairns-based barrister Mark Glen, who has acted in the role on at least three occasions — most recently in 2021 — will do so again until the formal recruitment process is finalised.

Palaszczuk also used the start date of new political donation caps, legislated alongside campaign and electoral financing reforms in 2020, to announce that her ministers would cease rubbing shoulders at controversial Labor business fundraising events.

“This will mean the end of the annual State Conference ‘business observers’ and all other events associated with the [Queensland Business Partnership Network],” she said, calling on the LNP to end its own program. Comment has been sought from the party.

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