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Will public servants become agents of the party rather than the state?

5 0
27.01.2025

One of the strong points Anthony Albanese made before the last election was that Scott Morrison had virtually abandoned honest government, good government, accountable government and transparent government.

He had installed government by cronies and was bypassing long established systems and processes designed to ensure that government was getting best value for money. His government was handing over billions to private sector interests without tenders and without satisfactory systems either for securing the public interest or for being able to retrieve money not used for the purposes for which it had been given.

Responsibility for the moral, ethical and illegal shortcuts taken by that government lies with Morrison and his ministers, and those central departments such as Finance and Treasury charged with safeguarding the public purse. But a good deal of the waste, or failure to follow the long-established standards of stewardship was the fault of senior public servants. Some of the very ones responsible for losses going into the billions were among a committee of the most senior current officials who recently expressed their satisfaction that reforms the Albanese government had caused meant the poor management could not happen again.

It could. It could do so at the hands of many of the public servants who, as senior public servants under Morrison, were responsible for many of its administrative failings. A few public servants – ones whose identity the public service commissioner is determined to protect from public disclosure – were subject to excessively mild penalties, although we are not to be told who got what, and why. Others escaped penalties altogether because they had resigned or retired. The very light spankings administered to a small number of public servants, whose names and bad behaviour were covered up were in respect of failures over Robodebt – the only piece of maladministration to be considered by gun-shy government and their personally chosen APS leaders. There was no inquest into how senior officers of the Department of Finance neglected to ensure that taxpayers could retrieve an unspent $30 billion of money handed out virtually on demand to any private company claiming that Covid would see them shedding jobs. There were umpteen narrowly focused reviews at Infrastructure to work out how the department, then under Treasury secretary Stephen Kennedy, paid 10 times what private property was worth, but that no-one in the department could, or should be called to account. Two years have passed since the AFP was asked to consider charges against Price Waterhouse Cooper when it used confidential knowledge obtained about tax plans to sell to transnational companies on how to avoid paying the tax in question. PWC is a partnership, and every PWC partner about the world is liable for the sins of other partners, and in other countries such as the USA, they would be paying over $1 billion in civil penalties, with actual lawbreakers most likely going to jail. PWC has been excluded from some commissions. But if there were any justice, they would not be off the hook for........

© Pearls and Irritations


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