Sorry state of Palaszczuk’s Queensland Labor rule exposed

This is the week the fragile shell of Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Labor government in Queensland cracked, exposing its innermost workings.

This is the week the fragile shell of Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Labor government in Queensland cracked, exposing its innermost workings.

No natural disaster caused the rupture; no sleight of hand by the parliamentary opposition was ­involved. Palaszczuk’s mess is ­entirely of her own making, ­created over the seven years she has wielded power in the state.

Now, at last, it is all out in the open. And what an unedifying spectacle it is.

The strands that came together might seem unrelated but are in fact deeply entwined, threaded through the decision-making hubs of Queensland Parliament House atop George Street to the courts precinct, past the teeming new casino site and Brisbane’s gleaming CBD towers.

They can be grouped into three categories, all of them on widescreen display this week: the long, troublesome shadow of Palaszczuk’s one-time 2IC and Left-faction leader Jackie Trad; the influence trade union bosses exert over a government they regard as beholden to them; and the compounding element of the ­Premier’s hands-off approach to her job, allowing what’s loosely called “integrity” issues to fester into a full-blown crisis of accountability.

First to Trad, who lost her seat of South Brisbane at the 2020 state election that delivered Labor a third consecutive term. After facing investigations by the state’s Crime and Corruption Commission into an investment property purchase and her intervention in the appointment of a state school principal, she had quit the ministry and as deputy premier before voters lowered the boom.

If Palaszczuk thought she was shot of the scandal-prone Trad, she was sorely mistaken. Acting on an opposition referral, the CCC had continued to probe Trad’s role in another public-sector appointment, that of undertreasurer Frankie Carroll in 2019 to head the department she oversaw as ­treasurer.

Yet out of public view, citizen Trad had taken legal action against the anti-corruption ­agency. The nature and effect of the litigation is still not known ­because the Supreme Court proceedings to date have been covered by gag orders imposed by the presiding judge.

Former deputy premier Jackie Trad. Picture: Getty Images

The Liberal ­National Party alleges Trad’s ­intent was to “suppress” the CCC’s findings – believed to have gone well beyond her own conduct after the investigation was widened to other senior appointments reaching back to the early days of the government in 2015.

When opposition front­bencher and former attorney-general Jarrod Bleijie raised the issue in state parliament on February 22 a farcical standoff ensued: the government could not possibly comment because that would be contempt of court, parliament was told.

Trad’s lawyer, Andrew McGinness, warned media outlets, including The Weekend Australian, that reporting of Bleijie’s privileged comments to parliament would contravene a ­Supreme Court non-publication order, even though they had been recorded in Hansard.

At no point was the order produced. When this newspaper ­attempted to confirm its existence with the Supreme Court’s media representative and, separately, the court registry, we were told no ­information was available: the case file had been sealed by order of the judge. This was the only ­restriction we could turn up.

Our attempts to establish with Palaszczuk’s office if taxpayers were footing Trad’s legal bill hit another brick wall. On Wednesday, manager of opposition business in the House, Tim Nicholls, asked Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman whether she had indemnified Trad for her “private action in the Supreme Court to hide a secret CCC report”.

In response, Fentiman fumed that first Bleijie and now Nicholls were being disrespectful of court processes.

“We will respect the court, we will respect the court’s orders and we will respect the separation of powers,” she said.

On Friday, Palaszczuk finally admitted the government was picking up the tab under legal indemnity provisions for ministers of state. Trad’s departure from parliament was irrelevant because the case related to “actions ­performed” in her capacity as a minister, the Premier said.

She could not say how much taxpayers were on the hook for: “Those costs aren’t worked out until the end of the case.”

Trad said in a statement she had felt “compelled” to take legal action. “I deeply respect the process of the Supreme Court and will not be prejudicing the deliberations of the matter by making comments regarding my application before it has been heard and decided on in full by the court,” she said.

Friday also happened to be the last day at work for chief justice Catherine Holmes, who is retiring after seven years in the role. She became engaged in the Trad saga on Wednesday after The Australian’s Queensland bureau chief, Michael McKenna, wrote to her about a “troubling issue that has arisen in Queensland parliament concerning transparency of the courts and the interaction of the executive – past and present – with the administration of justice in this state”.

Chief justice Catherine Holmes became engaged in the Tran saga. Picture: Richard Walker

A driver of the reporting on Palaszczuk’s integrity woes, McKenna asked Holmes to clear up the confusion over the non-publication order and whether it prevented media from covering references in parliament to Trad’s legal action against the CCC, clearly a matter of public interest.

Holmes, through her chambers, responded in an email at 4.55pm on Thursday advising that Supreme Court judge Martin Burns had that day lifted the order of May 24, 2021, prohibiting the identification of Trad and restricting access to the court file to the parties to the case.

An accompanying statement said: “The order previously made in this proceeding has now been varied so that its terms and the name of the applicant can be disclosed. That is because information in relation to the existence of the proceedings and the identity of the applicant have already been disseminated by someone unknown, ending in reference to both in parliament. Consequently, the maintaining of the order in its existing form has been rendered futile.”

However, an affidavit by McGinness as well as court submissions relating to the 2021 non-publication order and subsequent ­orders remained sealed, Holmes’ spokesman said.

The conduct of the case, effectively in camera, has caused disquiet in political and legal circles. As Bleijie pointed out to parliament last month: “I have had it put to me by a number of sources that this investigation has, in fact, been completed by the Crime and Corruption Commission and is ready for tabling in parliament.

“The only thing stopping the CCC report being tabled in parliament is Jackie Trad. Jackie Trad is so determined to hide the report from the public eye that she has applied to the Supreme Court of Queensland to have the report suppressed from being made ­public.

That court action follows ­another Labor mate, disgraced former public trustee Peter Carne, applying to the Supreme Court to have the Crime and Corruption Commission report into his conduct … suppressed. He lost that court action and has filed an ­appeal to the Court of Appeal. There is nothing on the court register so far that relates to Jackie Trad’s application. Why is that?”

For Palaszczuk, it represents an unwanted reminder of what Trad represented when she was at her side – the embodiment of the dysfunction that lies at the heart of her increasingly shopworn government. The history is worth ­recounting.

Labor’s wipe-out at the 2012 state election – where it was reduced to a rump of seven MPs in a then 89-seat parliament – not only brought the LNP to office under Campbell Newman, but marked a changing of the guard inside the Queensland ALP where right wing factions had mostly been ­ascendant.

When the tide unexpectedly turned again in 2015, Palaszczuk, a member of the AWU-Right, confronted a caucus and cabinet dominated by an ­expanded and empowered Left. The faction also controlled the key party councils.

Trad used the numbers ruthlessly even if it meant defying the Premier, as she did to throw up ­obstacles to the development of the Adani coalmine in central-west Queensland.

Adani Australia's workers accommodation camp in 2021. Jackie Tran defied the Premier by throwing up obstacles to the development.

Palaszczuk stayed above the fray for eminently practical reasons: to take on her headstrong deputy would have risked blowing up the government. For all her fierce ability, Trad’s defeat in 2020 was a relief to many of her parliamentary colleagues.

Palaszczuk’s light-touch ­approach was on show after the embers of another accountability bonfire reignited, with outgoing Integrity Commissioner Nikola Stepanov telling a parliamentary committee she had been called a “bitch on a witch hunt” by Public Service Commission CEO Rob Setter, her senior in the pecking order. Setter denied this.

Palaszczuk’s response on Monday? They should “sit in a room” and sort out their differences ­because she had better thing things to do.

Columnist Madonna King, who chaired a 2018 taskforce on bullying at the Premier’s behest, was flabbergasted.

“This is a leader who claims credit for lifting the representation of women in parliament and cabinet,” she wrote for the InQueensland website.

“This is a leader who claims credit for improving dismal ­female representation on boards. This is a leader who has vowed to stamp out bullying, wherever it occurs, and to use every law ­possible to ­reduce the scourge of domestic ­violence.

“And then she tells a woman, who accuses one of her most senior bureaucrats of calling her a ‘bitch’, to go back to work. Ask anyone working in the field of domestic violence today and they will shake their heads in disbelief. They’ll call it dismissive and inappropriate and a whole lot more. Arrogant. Cruel. Defying logic.”

Then there was the late Peter Simpson, ex-boss of the Electrical Trades Union in Queensland, a force in the industrial left. He gave the lie to claims that factionally aligned ministers owed nothing to their union backers.

Former state archivist Mike Summerell

On Wednesday, a long-withheld 2017 report for the CCC by former state archivist Mike Summerell on the so-called Mangocube email saga embroiling then energy minister Mark Bailey was tabled by the parliamentary crime and corruption committee in response to the ongoing integrity concerns.

Like Stepanov, Summerell professes to have quit over alleged political interference, claiming he had been stopped from doing his job to spare the government’s blushes. In the case of Mangocube, a private email account used by Bailey to conduct ministerial business which he deleted when McKenna exposed the security risk in The Australian, Summerell told the CCC the minister’s ­actions were likely to have resulted in multiple breaches of the Public Records Act. Bailey, now Minister for Transport and Main Roads, survived because he was able to reactivate the Yahoo ­account and recover the emails, including a choice selection from Simpson that have now been put in the public domain.

Take this one, sent at 6.03pm on June 30, 2015. “Comrade,” the email to Bailey begins, “I’ve spent the past 5 months or so talking up this government and our star ­recruit, you, telling all and sundry that asked how you were going as our new Minister, that all was ­tickety-boo.

“My pride, given the amount of effort and strings I had to pull to get you there have all kept me in defence mode, well not tonight!”

In another exchange, the ETU man – who died in 2020 – instructed Bailey how to vote on proposed changes to the WorkCover compensation scheme. “You’re apparently getting three options to vote upon ­tomorrow for the WorkCover changes,” Simpson emailed on June 21, 2015. “A being a full return to pre Bleijie ‘reforms’ including retrospectivity … A is the only one acceptable … An important one mate, we obviously hope you go for A.”

Bailey replied: “Will give you a call in the morning, comrade.”