Coaldrake right man to end Queensland’s conspiracy of silence

Peter Coaldrake will take a critical look at the Queensland government’s culture and accountability

Peter Coaldrake knows a thing or two about working the system in Queensland. Fired up by the abuses of power he discerned under former premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen as an emerging academic, he wrote the book on it.

The parallels with the Sunshine State today are inescapable.

We’re not talking about brown paper bags full of cash being pocketed by corrupt cops or politicians.

The question Coaldrake, appointed by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk to lead a probe into government accountability and culture, needs to confront is whether the rot that set in on Joh’s watch has taken root again, only in another guise.

Namely, that of a co-opted public service leadership brought to heel to serve the political in­terests of government and the ­influence on decision-making exercised by Labor-linked lobbyists so fresh out of 1 William St they still have the run of the building.

The Nationals-led government that came crashing down in 1989 under the weight of the Fitzgerald inquiry’s revelations and its own hubris was in power in Queensland for 32 years.

As Coaldrake wrote at the time in Working the System – a juicy 188-page read – the politicisation of the bureaucracy, police and ­judiciary allowed the executive to become a law unto itself.

Gerrymandered voting helped prop up the iniquitous edifice through an ineffectual one-­chamber parliament.

It just so happens that Labor under Wayne Goss, Peter Beattie, Anna Bligh and now Palaszczuk has been in power for all but five of the past 32 years in Queensland.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has appointed Peter Coaldrake to investigate government culture and accountability. Picture: John Gass

Two important accountability agencies, the Crime and Corruption Commission and the Office of the Integrity Commissioner, are front and centre of the probity scandal that has engulfed the ­Palaszczuk government.

The Premier well and truly owns the problem: the administration she heads is not just the creation of her seven years in ­office.

Some of her public service chiefs – Rachel Hunter, director-general of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, for one – have worked for two or even three state Labor governments.

If there are cultural concerns in the bureaucracy, Coaldrake might start there.

Like Tony Fitzgerald, 80, who came out of retirement to co-chair the inquiry into the CCC Palaszczuk called last month, he would know where the bodies are buried.

Before he became a long-serving vice-chancellor of Queensland University of Technology and a mover and shaker in higher education nationally, Coaldrake, 70, was chair of the Public Sector Management Commission that restructured the public service for Goss, making enduring changes to how it operated.

More recently, he ran the ruler over the functions of the Integrity Commissioner in a report delivered to Palaszczuk in 2015.

While his inquiry into culture and accountability in the public sector is proposed as a desktop review of limited scope, Palaszczuk has left it open for him to take ­submissions from public servants and officials.

Coaldrake should immediately ask outgoing Integrity Commissioner Nikola Stepanov to detail why she believed her work to regulate lobbyists was so compromised by internal obstruction that she was left no option but to quit.

The confluence of events that this week led this Hunter to admonish Public Service Commissioner Rob Setter for rejecting Stepanov’s request for his department to audit staff contacts with lobbyists is curious, to say the least.

While he’s at it, Coaldrake might also dust off a copy of Working the System, specifically the chapter entitled, Institutional ‘Dry Rot’.

A younger, more fiery Coaldrake was scathing of collusion between Joh-era bureaucrats and their political masters to rort parliamentary travel voucher entitlements, writing: “In effect, there has been a conspiracy of silence among some senior public servants and ministers in the face of any outside investigations of these practices.”