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Here’s a simple question for the State Government: Is it right or wrong?

A blizzard of ever more complicated ethics legislation cannot replace simple common sense when it comes to doing the right or wrong thing, argues Robert MacDonald.

Feb 21, 2022, updated Feb 21, 2022
Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk badly needs to take control of some looming landmines. (AAP Image/Darren England)

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk badly needs to take control of some looming landmines. (AAP Image/Darren England)

How bad is the Palaszczuk Government’s ethics problem?

It has a website, www.ethics.qld.gov.au, which would seem like a good place to start inquiries.

But it isn’t. The link, which I found on the last page of the State Government’s 14-page Public Sector Code of Conduct, isn’t working properly.

When I clicked on it, Safari warned me, “This connection is not private”.

“This website may be impersonating www.ethics.qld.gov.au to steal your personal or financial information,” it advised.

“You should go back to the previous page.”

In other words, I couldn’t visit the Government’s advertised ethics site because it might be corrupted.

Actually, it wasn’t. A tech friend investigated and found a glitch with the identity certificate, which, when resolved, let me link to a rather dull State Government page about “employment management, conduct and performance”.

Just a technical hiccup then, rather than an ironic statement of the current state of affairs. And, you can, in fact find a good rundown of the government’ various programs to encourage “fair and accountable government” at the Queensland Ombudsman’s site.

But it still highlights one huge problem.

For the past 30 years, successive post-Fitzgerald Inquiry Queensland governments have been passing laws and creating oversight bodies in the name of stamping out institutional corruption and encouraging high ethical standards.

The result has been a regular blizzard of new rules and new jobs to monitor those rules.

I’d argue this has confused rather than crystallised the path to ethical and corruption-free government.

Simple housekeeping, like remembering to keep the on-line link at the bottom of the Public Sector Code of Ethics, published in 2011, up to date, gets lost in the never-ending determination of the government-of-the-day to prove its ethical standards with yet more new laws.

It began with the 66-page Criminal Justice Act, 1989, which established the Fitzgerald Inquiry-recommended Criminal Justice Commission (CJC).

This was replaced 11 years later with the Crime and Corruption Act 2001, which created the Crime and Corruption Commission – the latest iteration of the CJC.

That Act started life as a 256-page document. But endless tweaks and amendments have boosted the its page count to the current 440 pages.

The Integrity Act, 2009, which created Australia’s first full time Integrity Commissioner – to help politicians and public servant do the right thing – was originally 19 pages. It’s now 74 pages.

The Public Sector Ethics Act of 1994, which introduced the Public Sector Code of Conduct, was, initially, a modest 15 pages long. It’s now 26 pages.

There’s also the Local Government (Councillor Complaints) and Other Legislation Amendment Act 2018, which is 116 pages long and hasn’t yet been amended.

Each of these new bits of law was presumably introduced with the best of intentions – to close a loophole, or to clarify this or that point of acceptable behaviour.

But all this endless codification of ethical standards hides the simple fact that knowing right from wrong isn’t the most complicated thing in the world.

Do we really need hundreds of pages of laws and assorted oversight agencies to help ethically challenged politicians and public servants answer that simplest of questions, “What would your mother say?”

Or, more cynically, “Would you be happy to see this on the front page tomorrow?”

The more rules you put in place, the more room you give to clever operators to manoeuvre their way through the system.

One of the ethical issues the Palaszczuk Government is currently facing is the role of Labor Party-connected lobbyists, who work for the ALP during election campaigns and then hang out their shingle for private sector clients during the off-years.

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To my mind, this is a pretty fundamental conflict of interest.

One day you’re deep inside the campaign tent, helping the premier and her team get re-elected. And once they’re re-elected, you’re outside the tent selling your inside-the-tent connections.

But the rules say otherwise. As long as you fill in your various registers and records of who you met with in government and follow all the requirements  of the Queensland Lobbyists’ Code of Conduct, you’re fine.

Which, I think, gets to the heart of the question of how bad the Palaszczuk Government’s ethics problem might be.

The brown paper bags seem to have gone – apart from former Health Minister Gordon Nuttall’s 2009 conviction for corruptly receiving several hundred thousand dollars in the earlier 2000s.

But in their place, we have an ever-flourishing forest of rules and regulations, which  provides plenty of room and cover for manoeuvring.

“It’s in the rules,” the insiders can say whenever they’re asked the question. Yes, but is it right or wrong?

Pollyanna-ish I know, but if Premier Palaszczuk is seriously committed to her government’s ethical standards she should be aiming for fewer, simpler laws that spell out with certainty what’s right and what’s wrong, rather than yet more regulation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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