The whole show is a shambles and it all starts with Palaszczuk
What Peter Coaldrake found in Queensland amounts to a failure of leadership on every level. In her haste to adopt his report, does the Premier really understand what she has signed up to?
Annastacia Palaszczuk asked for “fresh eyes” on her troubled, third-term government in Queensland and that’s exactly what she got with this week’s scathing review of culture and accountability by public administration expert Peter Coaldrake.
Channelling the language of Fitzgerald-era corruption busting, she vowed within hours of receiving the 131-page report to implement its findings “lock, stock and barrel”. Her opposite number, Liberal National Party leader David Crisafulli, speedily followed suit.
Yet in their haste, does either side really understand what they have signed up to? Because in his measured way, Coaldrake has delivered a sharp-edged blueprint for reform every bit as sweeping as the Fitzgerald change agenda a generation ago and with ramifications at the national level to boot when the new Albanese government is moving to shake up the Australian public service.
You don’t have to read far to get the sense of where the former Queensland University of Technology boss sees where the problems lay in the state government. “This review aspires to influence a cultural shift which encourages openness from the top,” he writes early on, a theme he goes on to develop in a number of contexts.
Still, the top can have only one name: Palaszczuk.
Given the circumstances, she probably had no choice but to embrace the 14 recommendations Coaldrake put forward, despite the sizeable practical hurdles in implementing them. The whole show is a shambles and, like the professor infers but stops short of saying outright in the report, responsibility rests squarely with the 52-year-old Premier. She sets the tone in cabinet, caucus and for the 242,000-strong public service. The failings Coaldrake identified amount to a failure of leadership on every level, beginning and ending with her.
Much of what has hit the media over the past six, disastrous months for Palaszczuk has been borne out: Labor-aligned lobbyists running her 2020 re-election campaign from the “tower of power” at No. 1 William St, then cheerfully picking up where they had left off to broker multimillion-dollar commercial deals with the state; experienced and supposedly independent public servants being stood over by callow ministerial advisers; the alleged bullying of senior officers including integrity commissioner Nikola Stepanov who finished up this week without a successor in place; right to information releases suppressed for political purposes, the officers concerned berated for having the temerity to follow due process; cowed bureaucrats working to the rule that the “price for frank and fearless advice can be too high, sometimes devastatingly so, and the rewards too low,” to quote Coaldrake.
All at a time when Palaszczuk’s once-vaunted political touch seems to have left her. As we covered in these pages a fortnight ago, there is trouble in the Labor ranks, with MPs complaining about her indiscipline and the dubious optics of her constant presence in the social pages on the arm of surgeon boyfriend Reza Adib at one glittering soiree after another.
Her performance this week would have done little to assuage the anxiety that she has “checked out” in the words of a senior ALP figure who suspects her heart is no longer in the demanding job. Having been away in Bundaberg on Tuesday for the release of Coaldrake’s report and at the dentist on Wednesday – “The Tooth Hurts”, The Courier-Mail quipped in a page one put-down of her “truth-ache” – she finally faced the media on Thursday to respond to the devastating findings.
What did we learn? Well, that Palaszczuk professes to believe that the review is a good thing, the “health check” every government needs from time to time. “It’s a great refresh,” she told the sceptical press pack. As for the buck stopping with her, the abusive and possibly illegal conduct related by Coaldrake was something “we all need to take responsibility” for.
It wouldn’t do to go after the miscreants, she insisted, when there was a recommendation on the table that all concerned – public servants, their departmental leaders, ministerial staff and ministers – undergo training on how to behave in the workplace. “If people do not know what they can and can’t do, it is a bit hard to criticise them,” Palaszczuk said. Suffice to say, it wasn’t her finest hour.
Coaldrake, for his part, makes the reasonable point that the failings he uncovered are by no means confined to Queensland and the report should be read in conjunction with a relatively recent review of the Australian public service conducted for the federal government by former Telstra CEO, David Thodey.
This was commissioned by Malcolm Turnbull as PM, but effectively binned by the time Thodey reported to Scott Morrison in 2019. Two things have since changed: Labor under Anthony Albanese is committed to reforming the public service and in Finance Minister Katy Gallagher, who has portfolio responsibility for the program, there’s a custodian with the clout to drive it.
Second, Albanese’s ranking bureaucrat, freshly-minted Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Glyn Davis, another ex-university vice-chancellor, also sat on the APS review panel alongside Thodey.
Davis commands a reputation as a hard-driving change agent, dating back to his days in Queensland in the 1990s when he worked with Coaldrake on the Public Sector Management Commission, which in the wake of Tony Fitzgerald’s corruption inquiry took the axe to the ossified public service a new broom Labor government under Wayne Goss had inherited. The late Goss is one of Palaszczuk’s political heroes.
Back then, Coaldrake was a fiery academic who had penned an influential book, Working the System, detailing how Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Nationals gerrymandered and rorted their way to power in their own right. Labor had spent 32 years in the wilderness by the time Fitzgerald brought down the whole rotten edifice. Here’s what Coaldrake wrote about Joh’s public service in 1989: “Practices have developed within the Queensland public service which reward personal loyalty, punish perceived disloyalty, instil an atmosphere of fear, and generally help to weaken the career structure of the public service.”
The juxtaposition fully 32 years on is acute. Labor has been in power at the state level for all but five of them. Yet Coaldrake could have cut and pasted that passage into his review of culture and accountability under Palaszczuk, and it wouldn’t have looked out of place.
“I promise I didn’t plagiarise myself,” he tells Inquirer, chuckling. “But the point to be made, of course, is that there is a context of a long-term government where there has been significant evidence over a long period of time of a breakdown. It’s an occupational hazard of longevity in office.”
Sensibly,he won’t be drawn on comparing the broad continuum of Labor in power in Queensland between Goss (1989-96), Peter Beattie (1998-2007), his immediate successor Anna Bligh (defeated in 2012 by Campbell Newman for the LNP) and Palaszczuk post-2015 to the run of Country and National Party-led governments under “honest” Frank Nicklin, Bjelke-Petersen, Mike Ahern and Russell Cooper.
The “catharsis” of Fitzgerald fundamentally changed the political landscape, Coaldrake says.
But there are general points to be made which are applicable also to Labor in Victoria – another generational enterprise under Dan Andrews, gunning for a third term in November – and perhaps less emphatically for the Coalition at the federal level post-war.
Every government needs its “north star”, Coaldrake argues. That can take the form of strong leadership or policy ambition. “The north star means people know what the government stands for,” he says, emphasising this is a blanket comment, not a shot at Palaszczuk or anyone else.
On the appalling behaviour he identified through 327 submissions to the review and nearly 100 meetings with public servants, department chiefs and ministers, Coaldrake says: “I think it occurs in every government to a greater or lesser degree. That’s why government from the top needs to send signals … that that sort of behaviour is not welcomed, is not accepted. It goes to the issue of tone.”
Was he surprised that Palaszczuk accepted in toto his recommendations so quickly?
At 5.27pm on Tuesday, 90 minutes after the report was released, she issued a statement welcoming it and reserving her response. Within 40 minutes, a follow-up from the Premier hit reporters’ inboxes: she would implement all of them, no further questions asked.
While Palaszczuk made much of her decision to axe the 30-year rule on cabinet confidentiality and release documents relating to any given decision within 30 business days – a New Zealand initiative adopted by Coaldrake to “let the sunshine in” – the real meat is in his proposals for a central “clearing house” for both internal and external complaints on integrity issues and to appoint departmental directors-general, the cream of the public service, on five-year fixed terms.
The Crime and Corruption Commission is known to have deep reservations about the clearing house concept, but that’s nothing compared to the implications of the D-G regimen now accepted by both sides of politics in Queensland, thanks to Crisafulli echoing Palaszczuk’s full-throated commitment to “lock, stock and barrel” implementation.
It means a cynical government on the way out could plant landmines by reappointing key public service leaders such as the premier’s right hand, the director-general of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, for the full first term of the incoming outfit.
Crisafulli might ask himself would he really be willing to take on Palaszczuk’s D-G Rachel Hunter for the long haul, an established Labor favourite? Or would he take the political honeymoon-ending heat of paying a seven-figure settlement to send her on her way, potentially with other unwanted mandarins?
Thodey came down in favour of putting more structure around the hiring and firing of federal department secretaries, but accepted the final say should remain with the prime minister.
It will be fascinating to see where Albanese, informed by Glyn Davis and Katy Gallagher, lands on this loaded question.
Coaldrake says he understands the risk that the new system will be cynically worked, in that not-so grand Queensland tradition, but it is time to stop the merry go-round of “ritual beheadings” of public service leaders at every change of government.
“I do want to talk about this a bit,” he explains. “If every government didn’t come in and purge the public service leadership in the first 90 days, which is basically what happens, just think about the opportunity.
“This might be a bit dewy-eyed, but I would urge restraint on the part of all incoming governments … about indulging in the accustomed beheading of public sector heads which, I think over time, underestimates their capacity to operate professionally.”
Coaldrake makes a convincing case. Palaszczuk was right to engage him and heed his counsel.
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