The latest royal commission is about one thing only

LOOKING past stakeholder and political interests used to be the job of government departments. So why is Scott Morrison calling for a costly inquiry into aged care, asks Shaun Carney.

NOW that the federal government has established a second royal commission that it previously insisted was unnecessary, you have to start to wonder why we need the existing machinery of government.

All the departments with their thousands of public servants toiling away administering and proposing policies, the regulatory bodies armed with their legislated powers, the ministers with their advisers, the backbenchers who are there to represent the millions of constituents — what are they for?

Perhaps the government is starting up a new model of government-by-royal-commission: just appoint a team of investigators and lawyers headed by a former judge and let them go out into the community to find out what’s wrong and then come back with ideas about how to fix it.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison seemed to be heading that way when he explained why he’d chosen to set up the inquiry into aged care. “A royal commission will actually look at the actual facts, not at the agendas of advocates, not at the agendas of media, not at the agenda of politicians,” he said. “A royal commission will be focused 100 per cent on the needs of residential aged care residents.”

Actually, that whole looking past the agendas of stakeholders — including, by his telling, politicians such as himself — and focusing on the facts thing used to be what governments were supposed to do.

Perhaps not so much anymore. It’s certainly not the way the government has rolled of late.

Problems in aged care have been evident for the past 10 years or so, and now Prime Minister Scott Morrison is hoping to turn it around. (Pic: AAP/Mick Tsikas)

Problems in aged care have been evident to anyone who’s had contact with the sector any time in the past 10 years or so. They’ve been highlighted regularly in the media and in a series of reports. Despite that, aged care minister Ken Wyatt, until the weekend, had been insisting there was no need for a royal commission.

When you get obsessed with crusading against red tape, sometimes for its own sake, as the government has, and leave it up to individuals and businesses to self-regulate, things can wind up in a bad place.

The mania for “light touch” regulation in the past two decades has lulled far too many ministers and prime ministers into a false sense of security and encouraged policy laziness. The Prime Minister has been guilty of that.

A few weeks after the 2016 election, he was thoroughly contemptuous of the idea of a royal commission into the financial sector, describing it as “nothing but a populist whinge from Bill Shorten”. He questioned what there would be to look into and said it would undermine confidence in the banking and finance industries, which was “a fire you don’t want to start.”

Simply put, he just didn’t want to know. The wrong person — Shorten — was proposing the idea, so inevitably it was unworthy.

It was only sustained political pressure from Morrison’s Labor opponents, the media and several of his backbench colleagues threatening to cross the floor that forced the government to first crack down in a few areas and then eventually convene the Hayne royal commission late last year. What’s emerged from that royal commission has been scandalous.

Last week, Morrison half-admitted his error: “The problem I didn’t see and I should have seen, the problem that also needed to be addressed was the hurt people were feeling as a result of the banking and financial sector. I regret not having done that earlier for that reason. I regret we didn’t do it earlier,” he told Parliament.

Beyond anything else, the newly announced royal commission is about the Liberal Party retaining votes from older Australians. (Pic: Kym Smith)

The ordinary Australians who were ripped off and done over because he and Malcolm Turnbull didn’t call the royal commission earlier probably have much stronger feelings than that. It’s fair enough for the government to be unhappy now and to ask what the regulators tasked with keeping the financial sector honest were doing. They are reasonable questions and those bodies must be held to account. But ultimately the responsibility lies with the government — it oversees those bodies.

Our big banks are among the very few Australian businesses that operate on a global scale and the financial sector is one of the most vital parts of our economy. It’s too important to leave untended. Just sitting still for as long as possible and then toughening up a few laws to give the appearance of activity was not the way to keep it healthy or on the straight and narrow.

We’ve reached a strange moment when it’s standard practice for a government to let problems pile up so much in two ministerial portfolio areas that only royal commissions can sort them out. You could call it category failure.

At some level, the Prime Minister already knows this is not how politics or government is supposed to work. He said as much when he chaired his first cabinet meeting and handed out lapel pins featuring the Australian flag to his ministers. He said he wore his pin because “it reminds me every single day whose side I’m on. I’m on the side of the Australian people, that’s what I’m saying to myself, that’s who I think about first.”

All very admirable but it looks like the lapel pin has let him down a few times. Either that or this latest royal commission is really about bad polling numbers among a core group of Liberal supporters — older Australians for whom aged care is a part of everyday life — and a pre-election environment that threatens to spiral beyond his control.

Shaun Carney is a Herald Sun columnist.