Opinion: Jobs for the boys and girls continues under LNP
The LNP promised a fresh approach to transparency and accountability. What we’ve had so far is just more of the same, writes Paul Williams. VOTE IN OUR POLL
What’s invisible, smells bad and, in politics, can make you very unpopular?
No, not that. It’s secrecy – the nasty habit pollies have of hiding embarrassing details despite taxpayers’ right to know. Most governments fall into it but no voter likes it.
It was secrecy – and accusations of a diminishing integrity generally – that first damaged the once-unassailable Palaszczuk Labor government in 2022. Labor was accused of interfering in the work of independent officers, such as the Integrity Commissioner, and of allowing ministerial minders to bulldoze public servants.
Palaszczuk called inquiries (with Peter Coaldrake’s the centrepiece) but the damage was already done. Where, in February, a YouGov poll pegged Labor’s primary support at 39 per cent, by June Labor had collapsed to 34, and lost its after-preference vote lead for the first time in ages.
During last October’s state election campaign, the Liberal National Party promised a fresh start. It was a pledge that saw the LNP win office with a seven-point swing. But with this month’s Resolve opinion poll revealing an 11-point collapse in the LNP’s vote since January (now on 34 per cent to Labor’s 32), it’s very likely Queenslanders don’t see a fresh start but simply a repeat of the secrecy and shenanigans of previous state governments.
In December, for example, the new government gagged debate on abortion in the Parliament. So much for free speech. In January, it was reported just four LNP cabinet documents had been uploaded to the web – as demanded by the Coaldrake review – and none of those was terribly important.
Later, a briefing document driving the LNP’s suspension of the Best Practice Industry Conditions policy – the so-called CFMEU tax – appears to have been heavily redacted, leaving just two lines for public consumption from a 44-page document.
In April, a potentially more perilous development occurred when the LNP appointed State Development, Infrastructure and Planning director-general John Sosso to the Electoral Redistribution Committee – the body charged with redrawing, with delicate balance, the state’s electoral boundaries that can make or break any government.
No one is challenging Mr Sosso’s long experience or ability to do the job. After all, he’s worked under both Labor and the LNP. But electoral integrity is arguably the most critical dynamic in any democracy, and voters must have total confidence in the redistribution process. In short, given his current proximity to the LNP, Mr Sosso is not the most appropriate appointment – a point anti-corruption commissioner Tony Fitzgerald also made.
Voters would also question why, since the last election, so many figures with LNP connections have been given plum public sector jobs. Former LNP deputy premier Jeff Seeney, for example, was appointed to the CS Energy board, while former member for Ryan Julian Simmonds became head of Economic Development Queensland.
Then there’s former LNP Mines minister Andrew Cripps, who was appointed Queensland’s recovery co-ordinator, and former member for Burleigh Michael Hart being sought out to chair the Work Health and Safety Board. It appears a whole swag of appointments to the TAFE Queensland board also have LNP links.
Again, no one suggests these people are not up to their jobs, but were they vetted against other candidates in an open, competitive process?
Years ago I called Labor out for giving jobs to Labor boys and girls. Today I do the same to the LNP. I, like most Queenslanders, am also frustrated by both parties’ habit of dropping controversial news late on Friday afternoons or on public holidays to avoid media scrutiny. It simply must stop.
Perhaps more bizarrely, Health Minister Tim Nicholls banned Opposition health spokesman Mark Bailey from visiting hospitals. Really? Why? And around the same time, Energy Minister David Janetzki – during a speech to the Queensland Energy Club – failed to reveal an explosion at Callide power station that, if he didn’t know about, certainly should have.
But a real stickler for many will be reports that David Crisafulli – the cleanskin premier and the face of the fresh approach – has ordered every public service department to send every journalist’s request for information to his office. It makes sense in terms of strategic communication – governments like to control information – but it really is a bad public relations look.
And, finally, there are reports the LNP has spent $650,000 in taxpayers’ money to commission opinion polling – the very practice the LNP criticised Annastacia Palaszczuk for.
If the LNP wants to be more than a one-term wonder, it had best reinvent the fresh approach it promised just 10 months ago. Secrecy stinks, but so does losing an election.
Paul Williams is an associate professor at Griffith University
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Originally published as Opinion: Jobs for the boys and girls continues under LNP
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