Well, what a week it’s been for the Newman Government. Plastered all over the front page of The Courier Mail every day, and not for any good reasons. Scandals-a-plenty with nepotism and clandestine contact with lobbyists and other family matters being revealed and discovered.
The biggest scalp so far has been former Minister for Housing and Public Works, Dr Bruce Flegg. A couple of sackings of staff in his office raised quite a few eyebrows before one of them turned on him and released a bunch of emails showing the Minister had lied about the amount of contact he’d had with his lobbyist son.
The nature of that contact also came out with other emails showing that the son was making recommendations on who Flegg should appoint to senior management positions within his department. Most children of Doctors ask for a new car. Flegg junior asked for a new Deputy Director-General.
The revelations obviously meant Flegg had to resign and he did. But not without a mea culpa where he blamed it all on ‘sloppy administrative processes’ on the part of his former staffers and even had a go at the media and Opposition for dragging his family into the whole sorry mess.
Ah mate, I think your son brought himself into it and with your compliance. If he didn’t want to be involved in politics, why is he working as a lobbyist and attempting to take advantage of the fact his father is a Minister?
The other big story this week has been the continuing saga of Ros Bates, Minister for Science, Information Technology, Innovation and the Arts, the fact her son gained a public service job when thousands were being sacked, and her very own lobbyist register.
The son and his job issue has been played out for months and is still the subject of investigations by the Crime and Misconduct Commission and Parliament’s Ethics Committee. Consequently, the inns and outs of it have been well-documented so I won’t go over them again.
But this week Bates was forced to correct her lobbyists register for the fourth time since April to include details of 11 discussions she’d had with a lobbyist Luke Myers, who is the brother of the Premier’s Chief of Staff, and a whole string of meetings she’d had with Santo Santoro, former Liberal Party Senator and probably the most notorious lobbyist in the State.
It obviously begs the question how such significant contact and numerous meetings with lobbyists could be left out of the report in the beginning. And it’s certainly not a good look for the Minister to keep having to come back and report to Parliament, that yet again, the original report was incorrect and incomplete.
Once or twice maybe you’d say fair enough. But four times really makes you wonder about what’s trying to be hidden. And her reasons for this latest correction? “Teething problems” and errors made by her staff. Or in layman’s terms, ‘the dog ate my homework’.
And then the inevitable happened yesterday. The Premier took to the airwaves defending his former and current Minister and crying poor over the media coverage. “These things happen”. “Nepotism is just how the world works”. “Lobbyist contact is fine as long as its (eventually) declared”. “Labor was worse”, was basically the jist of it.
Yes, there is nothing wrong with having contact with lobbyists, and yes, it’s not unethical to talk with lobbyists just because they are family members of other Cabinet members and their senior management.
The thing is though, the ‘other side did it too’ claim misses the point by a country mile. There was certainly no shortage of scandals from Labor over their 12 year reign, particularly in relation to lobbyists, but Newman and the LNP promised us they’d be different and that they’d hold themselves up against a higher standard of ethics and integrity.
In fact, they promised us that ad nauseum during the election campaign with one of their main election commitments being:
"We will establish a real Ministerial Code of Conduct and set the highest standards of performance and behaviour of our Ministers and staff, including restoring the Westminster convention of Ministerial Responsibility."
So that’s where the public and the media’s disappointment and disgust are coming from. It’s not so much the acts themselves which really aren’t too dissimilar to what went on before under Labor. No, it’s about the fact the Newman Government was voted in because they promised they’d be different and they’d be better in terms of accountability and integrity.
That’s why there is so much dissatisfaction with these ongoing scandals and continual sagas. Our expectations were raised, but now they’re being dashed on an almost daily basis. And trying to hark back to say “the other mob did it” as an excuse just doesn’t cut it in those circumstances.
But good luck to Minister Bates in her efforts to survive this latest scandal. Although lady luck has already smiled on her by ensuring Flegg’s ‘administrative error’ was discovered and revealed before hers.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, ‘to lose one Cabinet Minister in a week could be regarded as misfortune, but to lose two Cabinet Ministers in a week looks like carelessness’.
EDM.
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