Report ‘lets the sunshine in’ – lock, stock and barrel

If Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is able to honour her pledge to accept the recommendations of the Coaldrake report “lock, stock and barrel’’, the state’s public administration will improve markedly. The last premier who made such a promise after the delivery of a highly critical report was former National Party premier Mike Ahern in 1989, who had the unenviable task of implementing the Fitzgerald report, which detailed decades of systematic police and political corruption. The problems dealt with by Peter Coaldrake, former vice-chancellor of the Queensland University of Technology, while serious, are on a smaller scale, but they need attention, and he did not mince words. As the review says, Queensland’s integrity issues are shared by governments across the country.

Professor Coaldrake’s 131-page review, aptly titled Let the Sunshine In, makes 14 recommendations. One of the most important is prohibiting lobbyists from “dual hatting’’ as political campaigners. The review was established after investigations by The Australian into the growing power of lobbyists in Queensland. In April, we revealed three Labor-linked firms secured 70 per cent of all meetings granted to lobbyists by the Palaszczuk government, exposing favoured access for those who helped on election campaigns. “Most people would be incredulous at the proposition that a lobbyist working with a political leader in one capacity cannot later exercise special influence,” Professor Coaldrake wrote. “A sound approach would be for political parties and the lobbying firms themselves to recognise the damage to confidence in the system that arises from a willingness to create such conflicts.’’ But the recognition of community concern has been slow and “can only be dealt with by regulation which prohibits professional lobbyists who work on a party political campaign from lobbying for a period before and after an election”.

Under Professor Coaldrake’s blueprint, lobbyists who go from involvement in an election campaign into business will be barred from dealing with the government for four years. Former ALP state secretaries Cameron Milner and Evan Moorhead headed Labor’s election strategy as they continued to lobby the government on behalf of corporate clients, some of which were the subject of announcements by Ms Palaszczuk and her ministers before and during the campaign. The independence of the position of auditor-general should be strengthened, the review states.

Ms Palaszczuk and Opposition Leader David Crisafulli have both accepted the recommendation that CEOs of government agencies, including directors-general, be appointed on fixed-term, five-year contracts, unaligned to the electoral cycle.

As Griffith University professor of public policy and law AJ Brown said, the message was that governments should be prepared to work with agency heads who have worked under previous governments and agency heads should be professional enough to serve any government.

Professor Coaldrake, who overhauled the Queensland public service for former Labor premier Wayne Goss, described its current culture as “too tolerant of bullying, unwilling to give life to unfashionable points of view, and dominated by the occupational hazard of all governments – short-term political thinking’’. The review envisages a cultural shift “which encourages openness from the top, starting with cabinet processes and a resulting shared focus on identifying and dealing with the challenges Queensland faces’’. On Tuesday, when the findings were released, Ms Palaszczuk described them as bold, comprehensive, visionary and “exactly what I want”. On Wednesday, a dental appointment prevented her from discussing the review at a press conference, unfortunately. She will do so on Thursday.