Lobbyists habit is hard to break

Peter Coaldrake’s review of culture and accountability in the Queensland public sector was clear. It called for the explicit prohibition of lobbyists “dual hatting” as political campaigners. Yet two days after Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk committed to implementing the report “lock, stock and barrel” she was finding the habit hard to break. For now she will continue doing business with the two Labor-aligned lobbyists who ran her successful 2020 re-election campaign, former ALP state secretaries Cameron Milner and Evan Moorhead. Cabinet would consider on Monday whether the pair would be ­allowed to continue to lobby her government this term. She believed Professor Coaldrake’s recommendation was for a “prospective” government.

As Professor Coaldrake tells Inquirer on Saturday, the breakdown in public sector culture tends to be “an occupational hazard” of governments’ longevity in office. For that reason his report is relevant not only to Queensland but also to other states. Professor Coaldrake’s review, he said, “aspires to influence a cultural shift which encourages openness from the top”.

On that score, the entrenched state of secrecy that is Daniel Andrews’ Victoria comes to mind. In a landmark Freedom of Information victory for The Australian, Victorian Information Commissioner Sven Bluemmel recently ordered that documents related to secret Covid-19 surveys of Victorians conducted by Mr Andrews’ $2m political strategist, QDOS Research, for the Department of Premier and Cabinet be made public. But in an abrogation of the principles of transparency and accountability, the government committed even more public money on an appeal to the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal to overturn the ruling.

There is much in Professor Coaldrake’s report that would improve governance in all states and the commonwealth. In Queensland, he says, government departments should account “more robustly” for engaging consultants and contractors, with regular monitoring by a beefed-up auditor-general’s office. That makes sense. Ideal systems of governance tend to be elusive, however. And the review’s proposals that the heads of government departments and agencies be appointed on fixed five-year terms, unaligned to the four-year electoral cycle, would carry potential risks. The most senior career public servants occupy powerful positions. It is in the public interest that they provide independent, frank advice to governments irrespective of politics. But they should not be more powerful than elected governments. Under a system in which elected leaders could not hold senior officials to account or in extreme cases terminate their contracts until the five-year period is up, the balance could tip too far in favour of officialdom. Striking a workable balance is essential.