Opinion: Transparent government still a pipe dream in Queensland

WITH all the secrecy surrounding its various inquiries and reports, anyone would think the Queensland Government had something to hide, writes Mike O’Connor.

IT IS SAID that when in government, you never hold an inquiry or commission a report unless you know what it’s going to find.

Ongoing revelations at the banking royal commission would appear to confirm the political wisdom of this and explain the Federal Government’s reticence to call it.

In this vein, one could be forgiven for presuming that when the State Government commissioned a report on whether the ballooning size of the state public service was delivering Queenslanders value for their money, it expected the answer to be a resounding “Yes!”

KPMG duly carried out this investigation, pocketing a handy $165,000 plus GST, and handed its findings over to the Premier.

Rather than a broadside of press releases extolling the wondrous advances that had been made by the Government in delivering public service to the electorate, there has been an eerie silence. The report was handed down more than 10 months ago and since then, nary a squeak.

A Freedom of Information request was turned down by the Department of Premier and Cabinet. It was claimed the contents could not be disclosed to the taxpayers who paid for it because it was “created for the purposes of being submitted to cabinet”. This is a standard government blocking tactic used when it wants to hide something.

Where is the report? Who has read it? Has it been placed in that great big cupboard in the Premier’s Department labelled Too Hard?

Perhaps it’s sitting alongside the report into rape and underage sex in two north Queensland Aboriginal communities given to the Government by retired Supreme Court judge Stanley Jones more than a year ago.

Then there was the 2016-17 Queensland Family and Child Commission annual report which was handed to the Government on October 31 last year.

It gathered dust in the Too Hard cupboard until the Commonwealth Games were in full swing, when it was quietly released to the public in the fervent hope that its contents would go unnoticed amid the sporting clamour.

The reason for this attempted subterfuge became obvious when it was revealed in the report that four of the five Queensland children who died from fatal assaults over those 12 months were known to government authorities.

This was a shocking indictment of the system, but rather than own up to it and ignite debate on how best to improve it, the Government tried to bury it.

Open and transparent government is something which is promised at election time.

Once the poll is declared, then the Government’s energies are consumed by the construction of a wall behind which to hide its deliberations.

The aim, at all costs, is to prevent voters from seeing how it operates, employing armies of people to stage-manage sanitised grabs for the six o’clock “news”.

So what of the KPMG report? Since the Government was elected, it has hired 20,000 extra public servants. What are they all doing? Voting Labor, and paying fees to trade unions after being leant upon ever so gently to do so, perhaps.

Why the secrecy? Anyone would think they had something to hide.

Email Mike O’Connor