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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2017-09-27 Daily Xml
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Public Service Appointments

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (15:45): I rise to condemn Premier Weatherill and the Weatherill government for the mismanagement and abuse of appointment processes within the Public Service. I must say, in my experience this is the worst government and the worst Premier, in terms of the level and quantity of abuse of appointment processes, that I have ever seen and I think many have ever seen as well. If I can briefly quote from one of many letters I have received in relation to recent practices, which states:

Thank you for highlighting the poor HR practices within DPC. As a longstanding former public servant who was in DPC and other departments, I am appalled at the blatant nepotism and lack of merit-based processes. The inept management that we now see, not only limited to DPC, leads to poor public policy and the public administration. In the Public Service I held the notions of impartiality close. This is now not the case. Unless you kowtow to the whims, including appointments, of the advisers and fellow travellers, you are out. So much for diversity of thinking to improve outcomes. It is a pity the Commissioner for the Public Sector is silent on matters that form the heart of her responsibilities.

I have received not only that correspondence but from many others over the last 12 months expressing their abhorrence at the practices of the Premier and senior ministers of the government. I have highlighted previously many examples of ministerial staffers and fellow travellers of the Labor Party who have been parachuted into senior positions in the Public Service. Names like Rik Morris and Paul Flanagan and many others have been listed before.

Only recently we have seen the son of a former Labor MP, Sam Crafter, appointed without a merit-based selection process to a very senior position in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet straight out of the Premier's ministerial office. Can I say at the outset, the Liberal Party accepts that in very limited circumstances direct appointments without merit-based selection are an appropriate option for public sector administration. Labor and Liberal governments over the last decades have used them in limited fashion. What we are seeing now is a flagrant abuse by the Premier and the government of what in the past has been a limited practice.

We saw a most grotesque example in relation to the position of Mr Flanagan recently. He was appointed without merit-based process to a senior position in the DPC. He was then terminated, for reasons unknown, paid out with a six-figure sum, and now we have seen in recent weeks he has been reappointed to a chief of staff position for minister Leon Bignell, on approximately, I would assume, about $150,000 a year. He has eight months to go until the next election. Having already received one six-figure termination payout he, if the government is unsuccessful or if he decides to move on himself, will get another four-month termination payout for an eight month period of service as chief of staff to the Minister for Agriculture.

We have seen the recent examples in relation to the appointments in the Department of the Premier and Cabinet. At a recent Budget and Finance Committee, the CEO of DPC acknowledged that nine or 10 recent executive appointments he had appointed had been done without merit-based selection processes. He had hand-picked those particular people to those particular positions. Time does not allow me to go through the detail of all of those.

What we have seen is a culture of abuse that is occurring and what that has done is it has encouraged, right down the system, sloppy HR practices in relation to appointment of executives. Even with those where there are selection panels used, clearly there is no proper due diligence conducted through proper checking of CVs or referee checks. We have seen in relation to the recent revelations and controversies of appointments in DPC that clearly even police checks were not conducted in relation to the background of people who had been appointed to very senior positions, on very significant salaries, in charge of very sensitive information in the ICT area, and clearly the most basic of checks were not conducted.

All of that is symptomatic of a government that is led by a Premier and ministers who have given up any semblance of trying to follow the long tried and true practices of impartiality, merit-based selection within the public sector. For that, the Premier himself should be condemned but those two of his ministers who are fellow travellers in relation to such appointment abuses within the public sector, also stand condemned for their failure to act as well.

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