Labor once promised to end cronyism in public appointments. The government’s rejection of enforceable rules instead entrenches discretionary power, weakens accountability and undermines confidence in good governance.

What’s the point of electing and re-electing Katie Gallagher to the Australian senate if she is going to betray fundamental principles of good government that are particularly important to and well understood by voters in her constituency?

Katie Gallagher was the face of government in rejecting an independent report calling for an end to crude patronage and favouritism in government. She knows it is an acute problem in this government, not least because the bad example comes from the very top. She knows, too, that the report from Lynelle Briggs under the apt title “no favourites” was describing and deploring bad practices that were entrenching themselves two years ago, when her report was prepared.

At that stage at least five per cent – but probably 10 per cent – of government patronage appointments were going to Labor mates and cronies, former Labor staffers, bureaucrats who had openly attached themselves to the Labor flag, and minor potentates, chiefly trade unionists, who wielded power in Labor’s factional system. At that early stage of government that was at about half the rate by which patronage jobs were handed out to the friends of coalition governments.

Patronage now probably represents 20 to 30 per cent of such appointments. With or with consultation with departments, ministers are calling the shots and often ignoring departmental advice if it doesn’t recommend their mate. Some ministers indeed interpret resistance to appointments as a form of disloyal public service obstruction, believing that they are entitled, at the end of the day, to the people they want. Surely, after all, that’s what they were elected for.

It is not as if modern ministers can’t access frankly political advisers to give them hard-headed advice about acting to their own, or the party’s advantage, and sometimes to the detriment of the public interest. Minders allow them to manage the crowds of lobbyists and urgers seeking special favours and exemptions, or control the cashing in of old political debts, before, and often after, more independent and public-interest-focused departmental advice is considered.

The modern minder system is jerry-built on to the Westminster public service tradition. But it lacks anything like the requirements for the documentation of decisions, or accountability, other than privately to the minister. Ministers have succeeded in shrouding almost all the activity of minders from external review or accountability.

The need to reform the minder system is a topic by itself, but it is not the same as the appointment of outsiders on to boards and other bodies making executive decisions about government action, the management of public resources, or the advancement of public interests in culture, finance, sport or the environment. Board members are increasingly required to have actual expertise in the fields to which they have been appointed, to act as trustees of the public interest, and to declare and avoid conflicts of interest. There is no reason to suppose that those with a Labor outlook are any better or worse at such jobs as those of other persuasions, but there are dangers aplenty when people are chosen because they are of a partisan outlook, or because they are, in effect, acting as delegates of the minister or the government. More so when they lack qualifications for the job.

For many decades, most patronage appointments were uncontroversial, if only because ministers and prime ministers insisted on balance on boards. John Howard would sometimes complain that Labor could put certain types of moderate Liberals and apolitical middle-of-the-road types on to boards because their broad outlooks were like Labor’s. Labor seemed to control the broad culture.

He wanted to change the culture of boards and was often keen to have all board members resign on a change of government, to be replaced by people who thought as the government did. Later coalition governments often had the same approach, even asking apolitical types (such as asking, for example, Gabi Hollows to resign from a civil aviation board). This may have had the effect of making boards seem more partisan and more direct instruments of the will of the government of the day. But the duties and responsibilities of board members, largely defined by legislation, did not change, and sometimes gung-ho governments came to appreciate the value of distance from boards, and board capacity to introduce new ideas to practical government.

On paper the scheme the government is promulgating does not look greatly different from the Briggs recommendations. Ministers will be supposed to appoint the best people on merit. They will also have to publicly explain how the person was chosen – from applications, from a narrow range of candidates, or by direct appointment. Departments would be expected to be more active in providing advice and guidance in the recruitment system.

The big difference is what Gallagher calls “flexibility” – the fact that ministers can use any method they want, and that the use of advertising, recruitment panels and other fairness systems is essentially voluntary. The rules, or the principles, are not enforceable. The process is a sham, implemented by a cabinet that does not want to let go its power.

“This approach ensures the framework can adapt to changing needs and circumstances, supporting robust and fair appointments in a dynamic public sector,” the minister, reaching deep into her thesaurus of meaningless words, said.

The Rudd government had a minister for integrity in John Faulkner who introduced rules requiring the advertising of positions, and interview panels. Some jobs, such as senior diplomatic and judicial appointments were specifically left out of the rules. For some reason, probably connected with Katie Gallagher’s need for flexibility, the Faulkner scheme did not last. At the current rate of Albanese public service reform, we might get back to it, as a novel idea, in about 2075, when the first nuclear submarines arrive.

Ministers will often have strong opinions about the best person for the job, or the special qualifications they are said to need. But the merits of someone best qualified should shine through an independent interview process. There’s nothing wrong with wanting someone who understands the government’s goals and priorities. But all too often it’s not about getting the best person for the job. It’s about getting the best job for the person. The point of such patronage is about using public money for rewarding party and factional friends, both with influence and income.

It’s why prime ministers are so reluctant to bring the system under external control. It is easy to understand why some politicians would prefer that there be no fixed rules, and a lot of discretions and let outs. It provides a system like that being created by Donald Trump by which stewards of public money and public power are selected for their loyalty rather more than their ability. It may prove convenient in the throne room.

Katie Gallagher knows better and we are entitled to better from her. We know this because she was a leading and articulate critic of a similar sort of patronage in the Morrison, Turnbull and Abbott governments, who were also rorting the system in extraordinary ways. So were some others, particularly Mark Dreyfus, then the shadow Attorney-General, who promised action about a coalition habit of handing out quasi-judicial jobs to former MPs, Liberal Party donors, and friends and relations of significant people in the party.

That the coalition was rorting the system was not supposed to provide an excuse for Labor, when it was its turn in government, to share the spoils in the same intrinsically corrupt way. Labor, from Anthony Albanese down promised they would be different. And not merely because they were more virtuous, or more idealistic. It was, supposedly, because they recognised that patronage was an enemy of good government. Gallagher, always proclaimed as the future public service minister as well as the person who would oversee Finance, was going to be the person who did it.

The public, including the voters of the ACT have every right to be disgusted at the breach of trust involved. More so when people such as Gallagher pretend that what the government is doing is a minor adaptation of the gold standard model put forward by Lynelle Briggs and achieves the same purpose. It doesn’t. It allows virtually unrestrained discretion to put the prime minister’s favourites, and the favourites of his more powerful ministers in any positions he likes. It allows ministers to offer jobs as incentives to stand down at the next election. It allows ministers to offer jobs, including diplomatic ones, to politicians who have lost their seats at an election, or who come to realise, perhaps with some encouragement, that they need to spend more time with their families.

It also provides significant party chiefs, including in the party organisation rather than in the ministry or the parliament, to arrange favours, including well-rewarded board seats for people who have done, or will do, the faction or party some service. It offers all sorts of channels of improper influence and power-mongering to people trading in favours. It’s the primrose path to open corruption.

Even when ministers are sincere in wanting to tap the experience and dedication of some friend of the party, the impact of blatantly playing favourites is disastrous for good government. Particularly when ministers attempt to mislead the public about their interventions and pretend that they followed a fair process and made an honest judgments about the person being the most suitable for the post. Particularly in this era when ambitious and gutless senior public servants, with no instinct for frank and fearless advice, go along with the minister’s claims. And particularly when ministers can hide their nefarious purposes by tightening the secrecy for which this government will be best remembered. Anthony Albanese, it seems, would like all the flexibility of the lawless government of Scott Morrison.

Despite claims to the contrary, “reforms” to the public service in the wake of Robodebt, and umpteen procurement and grant-giving scandals have not changed anything much. Slogans and flexibility, and, apparently, public service privacy rights, trump firm rules and public exposure. Nothing Katie Gallagher has done has led to a new culture of integrity, frank speaking, or determination to protect the public interest. Nor has there been any outbreak of accountability or any marked increase in quality, or leadership skills on the part of those getting an inside run at well-paid jobs.

I do not pick on Gallagher as a seriously bad example of declining standards in governance and stewardship, for all that she is, too often, the face of government in defending them. But she is peculiarly open to attack on several grounds.

First, she is the Minister for Finance with a particular function of stewardship over the expenditure of public money. She entered federal parliament better prepared in the arts of policy, politics and governance than any of her colleagues. She had been ACT Chief Minister, and generally one who stayed out of trouble. She may not be remembered for much in the way of concrete lasting achievement, but she showed competence, common sense and standards. She is not usually attacked, as her successors have been for profligate budgets, or tolerating sleaze or bad behaviour by ministerial colleagues or staff. Her position and her background ought to make her a leader in tough management and very high standards, not an advocate of vague and slipping ones.

She is also a senator for the ACT. I should not think ACT people are more versed in their understanding of politics than anywhere else, but the capital has many people closely involved in public service who recognise bullshit and prevarication when they see it. She is not fooling anyone and nor is Albanese. The flexibility they want will lead to worse government, not better. She should consider that at the last election, with a nationally fabulous result for Labor, her primary vote fell, and, for the first time since 1975, the Labor senate candidate came second to an independent who has made a focus on better and more accountable government. He is more attuned to the expectations of a sophisticated community than she is.

Republished from the Canberra Times