Editor’s view: Bailey review ignores Coaldrake Review

Has anyone in government actually bothered to read the Coaldrake Review? Judging by the review into Mark Bailey and his office over the removal of a $2.4bn train cost blowout from a media release, then perhaps not, writes the editor.

Mark Bailey answers questions during a Transport and Resources Committee Estimates Hearing at Parliament House earlier this month. Picture: Dan Peled / NCA NewsWire

The central warning issued in last year’s landmark Coaldrake Review of culture and accountability in the state’s public sector was that “public service officials can feel pressured ... by ministerial staff ... to moderate advice ... to fit with a perceived ministerial preference, which may or may not be real”.

That is, there exists in the state’s public service an unwritten but very real rule that what you think the minister’s office wants, you do.

It is, then, concerning to learn that the review commissioned this month by the director-general of the Premier’s department into the recent cover-up of a $2.4bn cost blowout by Transport Minister Mark Bailey was directed not to find if Mr Bailey and his office had acted appropriately in hiding the real cost from taxpayers, but solely to seek a legal opinion as to whether an emailed request – that nobody is now denying was made – from a staffer in the minister’s office to the department could be judged to be a “direction” or an “attempt to direct”.

That legal opinion, from the respected Mr John McKenna KC, concluded that the email would not be considered, legally, a “direction to the recipient – in the sense of a command, requirement, order or instruction” as it was instead more a message that conveyed “a request or suggestion for consideration”.

That is a legally sound opinion, no doubt. But the political point here is different – a fact that would be clear to anybody who read the Coaldrake Review (and we are starting to think nobody in this government actually bothered to).

Professor Peter Coaldrake warns that ANY suggestion from the minister’s office can be considered by the public servants as a direction.

And you do not have to read far into his report to find the evidence.

“There is a view,” Prof Coaldrake warns on page nine – to which he deliberately adds the dramatic emphasis “repeatedly confirmed” – “that public service advice is too often shaped to suit what are assumed to be the preconceptions of the people (in ministerial offices) receiving it; that the price of frank and fearless advice can be too high, sometimes devastatingly so – and the rewards too low”.

He goes on: “All this encourages a reluctance to depart from what is perceived to be the ‘official line’. The examples given are not isolated, nor are they confined to singular pockets of government.”

Yep, Prof Coaldrake is saying what every one of the state’s hard-working public servants knows all too well: what the minister’s office wants, the minister’s office gets.

But Prof Coaldrake is fair to a fault, and so even goes out of his way to point out that this is not a cultural challenge that has emerged since the Palaszczuk government took power. To the contrary, he says this problem in the way the elected officeholders – and their staff – interact with their meant-to-be independent departmental staff has been raised repeatedly by other public sector reviews both here and interstate. Prof Coaldrake: “But that does not lessen their relevance here and now, nor for the future.”

Indeed. And yet here we are, a full year later, and the state’s highest-ranking public servant appears to believe the biggest issue in this sorry episode of taxpayers being misled is whether the Code of Conduct for Ministerial Staff was breached.

We trust that Mr John McKenna KC’s opinion is sound.

We know Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk’s judgment is not – at least when it comes to this trouble-prone minister she keeps shielding.