Almost weekly, the person behind Anthony Albanese’s Twitter feed puts out a short statement, hanging off a recent event, calling for powerful corruption commission. A Labor Party seriously interested in winning government ought to be doing much more.
About once every week, someone organising Anthony Albanese’s Twitter feed puts out a short statement, hanging off some recent event, saying that Labor favours a powerful corruption commission to bring errant government to account. They are right to do so, but a Labor Party seriously interested in winning government ought to be doing more to ramp up its campaign, and to call out what is going on in modern government in Australia.
This is necessary for two reasons. First, while actual corruption is a serious problem, the more so when the risk of being caught seems to be declining, equally serious is a corrupted idea of public stewardship and good government. With the Coalition insisting that a corruption commission will look only at matters suggesting criminal activity, much corrupted management of public resources may escape scrutiny.
It is apparent that prime ministers and state premiers believe that political pork barrelling is perfectly OK, has long been done on both sides of politics, and is not a breach of public morality. It’s not; it hasn’t, and it is. It ought to be exposed and those who engage in it should be subject to serious penalties. And a political scorching.
Labor is selling itself a myth — that the public (and a partisan media) does not care about blatant abuse of power — and thus that denunciation need only be ritual. That’s much the same as persuading itself that the party has tried firm climate change policies, only to find that the public does not care.
Second, corruption, and corrupted ideas of public stewardship and the public interest are but a subset of a developing crisis in good government and in the proper administration of public resources. We have a crisis of legal and political accountability, of principles of transparency, proper process, and fair and equal treatment of all citizens — of honest and impartial administration in short. It has become worse because legislatures are failing in their duties of scrutinising official action and public expenditure, in part because the current ministerial government is being more secretive and sly about what it is doing.
And many of the old checks and balances are no longer up to the task, whether because they have been starved of resources, are no longer adapted to the times, or because ministers have made it clear they do not care about good administration, as long as they achieve their political objectives. Put bluntly, the Morrison government seems increasingly an ethical vacuum. The want of regard for basic principles of honest administration, as contracts are fixed without tender, as rules are ignored, seems to be infecting parts of the public service as well.
The problem is the greater because of the Budget crisis caused by the pandemic, and the probably reasonable determination of ministers to act swiftly in devising schemes to prop up unemployment, feed liquidity into business and the community and to brake a decelerating economy. Also probably reasonable from the government’s perspective, though more arguable, was the decision to use the private sector, rather than the public sector, as the primary engine room of keeping the economy going and as a dispenser of the liquidity put into the economy.
Such a decision was, of course, ideological, based on suppositions that the private sector is more efficient than the public sector. There was also a fear that a public service put in control of pandemic economic measures would expand unnecessarily, do everything it could to entrench itself, and be difficult to dismantle. By contrast, champions of the government’s approach would say, flexibility was the keyword, and the design meant that a general movement towards a smaller public sector could continue.
The stench of bad government will not go away
That someone else might disagree with the policy or the ideology is not the issue. The government’s broad disposition about such matters is generally well known, and it is, within reason, entitled to decide how its schemes will work.
But no matter how a scheme is organised, and by whomever it is performed, it must still be subject to general principles of honest administration and stewardship of the public interest. It is subject to rules about conflict of interest and natural justice; to rules about transparency and accountability. Morrison cannot remove such requirements by handing over matters to the private sector, nor can he conceal outcomes by pretending he, or his ministers, are no longer responsible for process or outcomes once a transfer has occurred.
We watched Trump destroy institutions and trample on constitutional conventions, relying, in part, on the suspicions of insiders among his followers. We must ask ourselves whether the Morrison smirk and the Coalition complacency has Australia heading in the same direction.
This month’s issue of The Monthly has an important article written by its editor, Nick Feik, about the Morrison government as a government of endless scandal, in which a lack of accountability, from Morrison down, has become endemic. It is one of the best indictments of modern Australian government in recent years.
Its chronicle of scandals, such as the sports rorts affair, open rorting of grant schemes, dubious purchases of water allocations, Home Affairs contracts for asylum seeker security and site services, land purchases at absurd prices relative to valuation, substantial grants without a tender (and, sometimes, apparently without application) to News.com, and arranging lucrative contracts to party donors and cronies are not new. What is compelling is the way the sum of these consequences of political dereliction is shown not to be isolated incidents but as part of a conscious pattern of government. “These aren’t bugs in the system; they are the system”, Feik says.
The fish has rotted from the head. The micro-managing Morrison has a finger in almost every scandal. But most of his Cabinet, and a good many other ministers, have also been implicated in partisan administration, sometimes concealed with an insouciance suggesting that neither they nor the public care. The stench of bad government will not go away merely by creating an integrity commission. It also involves a rearming of traditional watchdogs of poor administration, such as the Ombudsman, FOI, the Financial Management Act, and the Audit Office, and whistle-blower protections as well as an upgrade of parliamentary scrutiny.
But it also involves a revolution in public service leadership. All too many secretaries and officials have become complicit in poor practices, in partisan behaviour, and in appalling outcomes, as with, for example, the illegal and mismanaged Robo-debt scheme.
The criticism of Labor is not that it has stayed silent. It is that they are not making enough noise about it. The protests are all too ritual, able to be dismissed as though it were a game. They, the cross-bench and sections of the media should be treating systemic maladministration as a fundamental breach of the governing compact. They should be shouting it from the rooftops, and mobilising the public indignation that would occur were it doing its job of bringing the government to account.
Labor could even talk of draining the swamp. But they need to talk about it. Non-stop, and with genuine indignation. And Labor needs a spokesman with cred, able to use genuine indignation to effect. The issue cannot be entrusted to someone who spent most of the last Labor administration “wanting to be convinced” there was even a problem.
John Waterford AM, better known as Jack Waterford, is an Australian journalist and commentator.
Comments
15 responses to “The Morrison government: increasingly an ethical vacuum”
Cutting the public service allows the Government to run on corrupt payments instead of taxes.
Thanks Jack, you have identified the problem. Morrison is a conniving gutless bastard, Albanese is just an old fashioned gutless bastard.
In reality the problem is much bigger. Australia lauds physical courage on sporting and battlefields. It is captive to a narrative that applauds compliance. We don’t understand or applaud moral courage. Bean avoided justified criticism of gutless British and Australian commanders and his war time history unfortunately became a bench mark for decent and laudable behavior.
Where do we start Howard had no moral courage, nor Beazley, Rudd lost his over refugees and similarly Gillard. Abbott is a school yard bully, lack of moral courage and political judgement was the cause of Turnbull’s failure and nothing to be said about Morrison.
Lack of moral courage and greed infects business management; also the leadership of churches, the Army and sporting organisations, just look at McGuire. This country is in a bad way unless it can put self and greed to one side and discover moral courage – what is right and wrong. As simple as that.
“This country is in a bad way unless it can put self and greed to one side and discover moral courage – what is right and wrong. As simple as that.”
Sounds like a much needed recipe for the entire world.
Well said !
From what I hear, lots of Federal ALP MPs are trying to bring out these issues, but rarely seem to be publicly supported by the “Leader”. They were a good and strong team in 2019, and did not lose the election so badly that Mr Albanese could call a panic on the whole lot of MPs and of the policies. His recent “small target with cutbacks” is exactly the nature of the Leader. Meantime Morrison is turning Australia into a One Party State.
I’m waiting for someone with a bit of guts to tell Albanese to take a hike and don’t look back, exit stage right and go bush for some time, the less we see of him the better. I’m sure many are familiar with the history of Benedict Arnold https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benedict_Arnold#Plotting_to_change_sides and the remaining crop remind me of a vacuous bleating cavalcade of cicadas, except for a handful, ah that’s 5 out of the lot of them.
Now I’m going to indulge in some fantasy! Imagine a triple ticket of Keating (Wisdom), Rudd (Emissary & Visionary) & Shorten (bastardry)? Explosive, yes, but it would certainly clear the decks and bring some new foundations to what the ALP is supposed to stand for as well as the country.
Hello Jack: Brilliant!! Pete Costello would certainly want a man with your skills in his team. You write an article on the corruption of a third term Coalition government, and get a sixty percent response criticizing Labor and Albanese. You raise issues potentially negative for the Coalition yet structure your article such that, come the two horse election race, Albanese loses and Morrison wins. Genius!
Yes Jack, the fish stinks from the Head down and spreads like a cancer thru the entire body.
Like all remedial actions that could be undertaken, its source needs not only to be removed but eviscerated with no opportunity to undermine any kind of recovery.
That means that the body politic needs to become accountable not only to itself, but to the entire community, and that community needs to work together for the benefit of all, not for some.
Until those that believe that they are accountable are held to account, not just by the ballot, but by common and criminal law, nothing will change, until the corrupt AEC and the donations regime is removed, nothing will change.
Until all Corporations are made to pay tax in the country of origin of earnings, nothing will change, and until the various factions that demand their preferences over the majority nothing will change.
Until denial, shadow politics and narcissism are called out, nothing will change, and everyone will keep treading foetid waters.
What we have is much worse than a crisis of governance, much worse than an ethical vacuum. We have deliberate, endemic corruption in which politics is no more than the pursuit and retention of power.
All regulators are dissuaded from regulating it and all prosecutors are discouraged from prosecuting it. The mechanisms used to repress regulation are the abuse of ministerial power. Nick Feik in The Monthly catalogues only the scandals committed by the Morrison Government, but all governments since Howard have known about Howard’s gift of $12bn of public-owned Greater Sunrise gas to Woodside and pals and none of those governments raised a murmur… until Morrison chose to pursue not the culprits but those (Collaery and K) who helped expose the crime. Howard and Downer are feted as ‘statesmen’.
The mechanism of corruption is the donations to major political parties. Woodside, the greatest beneficiary, is the biggest donor. Look down the list and you find it dominated by the players in Australian oligopolies. Morrison proclaims that he looks after his mates. The donations are accompanied by winks and nods.
There is no salvation in looking to Labor which is equally guilty, merely less competent at the same rorts. There is no joy in the Parliamentary controls which are now wholly manipulated by the party machines.
We have no Bill of Rights. We have no ICAC. We have only public action in the media and elections.
Hello Jack: again attacking Labor from the left! Just for completeness: Labor lost the last four elections over climate change – acknowledged even by a Murdock media journalist (on Insiders). Your advice that they take up the sword, re-mount the white stallion, and charge into the great wind of Murdock, Costello and Stocks media is enchanting. Your claim that Labor has done nothing on corruption is a falsehood. The formidable Wong, Keneally and Gallagher have held the government accountable in estimates. Labor would have to pay to get that
reported in Big Media. Three of your first four paragraphs and the last two attack Labor. Jack, they’re NOT in government! This is the structure of the truth-deceiving Nine Entertainment papers. Are you telegraphing your availability?
If Labor would have a red-hot go, and lose with honour, they would be doing a wonderful thing for our country. Apart from lip service to the “left”, they’re not even pretending to try.
Stephen, they are but a hollow shell of a once proud but now anachronistic party of unionised male salaried workers.
Forget a RHG; a cigarette-lighter would finish them off.
Yes, the fish stinks. But, no one is asking how this happened, how our system of accountable government became so corrupted.
The answer, I think, is glaringly obvious. We are infected, we are being strangled, by a parasite. And there is this about a parasite – it kills its host.
It has happened to the U.S. and to Britain. It is happening, has happened, to France. But mainly it is in the Five Eyes countries. You can have five eyes, you can have five times five eyes, but if you cannot see, you cannot see.
Who, or what, is preventing us from seeing, from even looking? Answer that first, and then do something about it.
Good analogy- we are being strangled, we are being contaminated by the parasite.
The parasite of neoliberalism, maximum profits for the corrupt plutocrats, and minimal equity for society’s weakest members.
The Five Eyes, except for Jacinda’s NZ, can’t get rid of the parasite. France’s deadly and continuing yellow vest protests also confirms Macron’s fixation with a French version of the ideology.
Thank you Jack. You are exactly correct, the Morrison government corruption continues to spread an all pervading reeking stench across Australia, and the Labor opposition is merely holding their noses, as the deceit, duplicity and downright fraud of Smirky Morrison infects everything it touches.
What to do? Obviously, the first thing is to, as you say, haul Labor kicking and screaming up to the rooftops, equip them with a bullhorn, and kick them in the bum till they realise that the outrage expressed in so many blogs and news articles and opinion pieces is real – people have had enough. If Labor is as they say, “on your side”, they should start shouting, and not stop until the debasement and degradation of Australia, at the hands of the Morrison government is stopped.
Their delivery, all of them, except maybe Penny, is very unimpressive. Woeful really. Before they can shout from the rooftops they need voice coaches or acting lessons to give them some assertiveness and self assurance. Stop being so middle class nice. They don’t need policies, they need just need to shout.