Charles Wooley: Warns Tasmania’s new Premier Peter Gutwein to get good advice

When gathering advisers our columnist urges new Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein to cast far and wide for some creative and unencumbered freethinkers

The greatest requiem ever written for a fallen leader was expressed by Shakespeare in the words he gave to Mark Antony on the death of Julius Caesar.

“Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears,

I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.

The evil that men do lives after them;

The good is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with Caesar.”

That might be said of almost every political leader. None are wholly good nor wholly bad but with their passing it is too often the good they failed to do that defines their legacy.

This week Tasmania’s new Premier recognised the shortcomings of the old, in health and housing and climate change, with a three-word catch cry. “We must do more,” Peter Gutwein declared.

If he makes that call the guiding principle of his premiership then some good might indeed live on after him.

New Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein alongside Tasmanian Governor Kate Warner as he is sworn in at Government House this week. Picture: ZAK SIMMONDS

Our Government must do more. No one would disagree. But how can the new bloke do more with the same old team? There are about 40 ministries to be filled and only 13 government members in the Lower House and even that depends on which way the wind blows. Some responsibilities have been flicked upstairs to liberals in the Legislative Council but still many ministers are struggling under the weight of far too many portfolios.

Take Elise Archer for instance; Attorney-General, Minister for Justice and for Corrections. That should be enough, but somehow she also makes time for Building and Constructions. And then for a bit of light relief she is also the Minister for the Arts. (The Art of juggling.)

If she ever has time for day out and wants to kick up her heels and wear a fancy hat, Elise is also Minister for Racing. (Minister for racing from one department to the next.)

Until this week’s reshuffle where some portfolios changed but not the workload.

No one likes politicians so it is hard to argue there should be more of them. But there should be. Our parliament is ten bums on seats short of what it was before 1998 when the major parties stupidly reduced the Lower House by ten. It was done to keep out the Greens but the Laborials actually shot themselves in the foot and now you would be hard pressed to form a half-decent scratch team from both sides of parliament and certainly not without including the Green’s Cassy O’Connor who is probably the smartest person in the chamber.

She must be so lonely.

Across the portfolios the workload is ridiculous with thin talent spread even more thinly. Decisions can actually be made by unelected public servants and advisers with the so-called minister a rubber-stamp who only wears responsibility when things inevitably go wrong.

Our egregious health system is a portfolio carried like an albatross around the hapless neck of the last pollie out of the room. The incumbent is doomed to failure and it blights their future career, as we have seen.

All of which is why no one wants the job and why we are left with the longest hospital queues in the nation and the worst outcomes in all categories.

If I were health minister and you got crook and needed an op, I would honestly advise you to fly to Melbourne. That way your chances of survival would be greatly increased and if anything went wrong, I would be able to shift the blame to the Victorian government.

Admittedly, outsourcing our sick might not be a complete panacea but as the man said, “We must do better.” Another way to improve government underperformance in so many areas must be to think creatively and outside of the Salamanca square. As a rule the Tasmanian parliament is not crowded with clever people and when there is one, generally they don’t succeed because they are totally alone.

Way back, there was an annoyingly clever bloke called Neil Batt, who led the Labor opposition in the mid-1980s. He was so smart nobody liked him, not even his own party, but he was certainly an outside-the-square thinker. Interviewing him once about Tasmania’s chronic high unemployment he told me, “Unemployment. I could fix that tomorrow.”

“But Mr Batt, how would you do that,” young Wooley asked.

“Simple,” he replied. “I would give every out of work Tasmanian $200 and a one-way ticket to the mainland.”

Oddly, he was never elected premier. Probably just ahead of his time.

I suspect Will Hodgman chucked it in because it all got too depressing and there were too many duds in his team who kept letting him down so badly. You know who they are, I’ve made enough enemies already this week.

I reckon his wife Nicky saw it was all getting too much and going nowhere and she called, “Time”.

It was the right decision from a woman who has more brains than the collective Liberal cabinet. Actually, that is far too faint praise for Nicky who deserves much more. But the point is, in this week of supposed dramatic change, in reality nothing has changed. It’s still the same old team minus Will.

So, for her own peace of mind Mrs Gutwein should move early to encourage her husband to gather about him smarter people. One way would be to cast far and wide (the further and wider the better) for some bright advisers. Not the usual party hacks and indifferent public servants but some creative and unencumbered freethinkers, preferably not from here.

I doubt Neil Batt would come back from Melbourne and I am too much of a local.

Besides I am flat-out busy right now down Dodge City way studying the tide. Like political leadership I am finding it is monotonously regular. It comes in for a while and then it goes out.

On that subject Shakespeare has some advice for Peter Gutwein.

“There is a tide in the affairs of men,

Which taken at the flood leads on

to fortune.

Omitted, all the voyage of their lives is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a sea are we now afloat.”