Cancelling Novak Djokovic’s visa was another example of a trend towards ministerial intervention, which is undermining public trust in institutions.
The decision by Immigration Minister Alex Hawke to disallow the Novak Djokovic visa and have him leave the country highlights a disturbing systemic growth in the powers of ministerial discretion that requires wider public awareness and debate.
Dating at least from the mid-1980s when controversial migration legislation bearing heavily on detention of refugees provided highly discretionary ministerial powers there has been a steady and worrying trend to provision and use of such discretionary and divisive politicisation of potentially contentious public issues.
Constitutionally and legislatively there has always been a case for and recourse to powers of “delegated legislation” under laws scrutinised and passed through parliament. This has been in the interests generally of efficient administration of policy in the form of publicly gazetted and transparently administered regulations and subject to open appeals processes under an independent tribunal, rather than the de facto making of policy on an ad hoc discretionary basis.
Controversial issues and policies have traditionally in this way been aired in public and parliamentary debates and have accordingly been either included explicitly and transparently in the resulting legislation ensuring public political accountability.
Migration policies and particularly the vexed decisions about ongoing detention for many years of refugees in the most debilitating and inhuman of circumstances, is a highly visible form of this politicisation by ministerial discretion.
There are many other examples, all of which point to a disturbing trend to avoid political debate on policy in parliament and subvert the processes and direct public accountabilities of such debate as well as the well established framework of accountability and transparency under administrative law.
The arts minister has in recent years taken to exercising personal discretion by allocating grants to the arts community rather than respecting and maintaining the well established independent processes of grant administration through the Australia Council. This has only led to divisiveness and politicisation of the arts.
Acting Education Minister Stuart Robert has recently intervened personally, but not for the first time, in the allocation of research grants to universities to deny funding to projects recommended as the outcome of a well respected independent and highly competitive peer-review assessment process under the auspices of the Australian Research Council — the principal source of government university research funding. This serves only and unnecessarily to politicise the important role of research.
Such examples are illustrative of the erosion of public trust in the political process and its responsibilities for stewardship and indeed guardianship of the public interest.
The trend to powers and exercise of ministerial delegation is arguably part of a broader trend to a variety of forms of a culture of political corruption that has been progressively undermining public trust in institutions and our democracy.
Examples abound, but mention must also be made in this context of the increasing discretionary ministerial powers reserved to ministers over the allocation of a range of community grants, most notably but not exclusively in the case of the funding of spurious and outrageously expensive local car parks at train stations in politically sensitive electorates.
Then of course, there is the opaque election slush fund, allocation of some $10 billion provided in the May budget for “discretionary” distribution as the next election looms.
The ministerial discretion just exercised in the case of tennis star Djokovic should serve as a warning light to a systemic trend to this means of avoiding parliamentary and public scrutiny of sensitive policies and their administration by over exploiting and politicising the legitimate use of delegated legislative powers, instruments, regulations and decision-making.
A much-warranted independent public or parliamentary inquiry into this disturbing trend would cast a needed degree of hopefully disinfecting sunlight on these practices that are undermining public trust in politics and in our democracy.
Enough is enough.
Michael Lester is a public policy economist with a career in Commonwealth and State agencies, World Bank and OECD. His interests include innovation, environment, and governance. He presents programs on community radio.
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