Greg Barns opinion: Hard to give a vote of confidence

POLITICS in the modern era is a cynical business. If it comes to a choice between expediency and obfuscation on the one hand and transparency and fairness on the other, the former wins out.

Minister for science and technology Madeleine Ogilvie at Fulcrum Robotics in Huntingfield. Picture: Linda Higginson

POLITICS in the modern era is a cynical business. If it comes to a choice between expediency and obfuscation on the one hand and transparency and fairness on the other, the former wins out.

Just ask Racing Minister Madeleine Ogilvie, Speaker Mark Shelton, and those in the ALP caucus refusing to welcome back an MP in David O’Byrne, who has endured enough shunning by his erstwhile colleagues.

The events of last week tell us this about Tasmanian democracy – it is being eroded by the cancer of opportunism.

Take former Labor MP Ms Ogilvie, now a minister in the Rockliff government.

Labor’s Dean Winter (a man with a field marshal’s baton in his rucksack) has, for some months, relentlessly pursued Ms Ogilvie over her public statements about the demise of the former chief executive of TasRacing Paul Eriksson in July last year. Ms Ogilvie told parliament last week she knew Mr Eriksson had been sacked in early July last year, but last year in a media release and before a parliamentary committee she said he had resigned to spend more time with his family in Sydney and that was the reason for his departure. Her sin is one of omission, but that doesn’t diminish her culpability.

As this newspaper’s David Killick reported on March 1, the long and short if it is that Ms Ogilvie knew Mr Eriksson “had been sacked five days before telling the public he was leaving to spend more time with his family”.

As Mr Winter rightly observed: “There cannot be a more obvious example of a minister misleading the parliament and misleading the public than what this minister has admitted in her answer to parliament.”

Parliament, Premier Jeremy Rockliff. Picture: Chris Kidd

Premier Jeremy Rockliff, who likes to portray himself as man of decency, should have sacked Ms Ogilvie then and there. Misleading by press release is one thing, but misleading a parliamentary committee is another. Why not stand firm on democratic principles and have the community hold you in higher esteem?

But on the same day the Liberal Party MP who is Speaker, Mark Shelton, made his own contribution to the erosion of democracy. Under fire over his lobbying for funds for a community hall at Bracknell, in which he and three members of his family sit on the committee, Mr Shelton had the casting vote on a motion to refer his conduct to a parliamentary committee, and used it to vote down the motion! One would have thought that the Speaker of the Tasmanian parliament would put the importance of the watchdog role of parliament before his and his party’s own interests.

As the Greens Leader Cassy O’Connor puts the case, Mr Shelton, “a member of the hall committee, has a direct private interest in the Bracknell Hall project. Given that interest, he should have avoided any involvement in arranging funding for this project. Instead, Mr Shelton met with the Meander Valley Council’s general manager to discuss state government funding, accepted a funding request from the council, and advocated to then-premier Peter Gutwein for $400,000 funding to be provided.” Surely there should be a parliamentary examination of this set of circumstances.

But Labor’s conduct last week is also deeply troubling in terms of its undermining of values such as fairness and proportionality. The party’s leader Bec White says her team will not allow the immensely talented Mr O’Byrne back into the Labor caucus room from which he was ejected in 2021 after resigning as leader, because of allegations about sexual harassment that were not substantiated by an independent review undertaken by a former Fair Work commissioner. Mr O’Byrne did admit to wrongdoing in the form of kissing and texting in relation to a union employee in 2007.

By any reasonable standard Mr O’Byrne has paid more than a price for these events. If the Labor Party had any commitment to the idea that the punishment must fit the wrongdoing, then it would welcome back its most effective MP. Why is it not doing so? One assumes, yet again, political expediency stands in the way of fairness. Mr O’Byrne’s undoubted skill and talent – just look at his dogged pursuit of the Rockliff government over its inept housing and transport policies – would be threatening to some in the Labor Party room.

The sad feature of these events last week is that it is a case of plus ca change. The premier thinks it is all just “grubby politics”, and Labor Leader Ms White says that she has a happy bunch of campers in her domain, so why let fairness get in the way?

It seems not to occur to them that they are damaging their reputations in the eyes of a weary public, which has become used to one rule for politicians, and other for the rest of us.

Hobart barrister Greg Barns is a human rights lawyer who has advised state and federal Liberal governments.