Queensland leaves federal Labor a distant second in transparency

More than a year ago, Crikey noted that Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Queensland government had committed to significantly expanding ministerial meeting diary requirements to provide detail about the interaction of government with lobbyists. Even if the changes were the result of lobbying scandals involving Queensland Labor, the Palaszczuk government has proven to be a positive force in political transparency, particularly with its low reporting thresholds and real-time disclosure rules around political donations and campaign spending caps.

At the time, Palaszczuk also committed to implementing a recommendation of the Coaldrake review to release cabinet documents after just 30 days rather than 30 years. It has now passed legislation to facilitate that.

Whatever its other faults, Queensland Labor is now the standout leader in Australia on political transparency among major party branches. While the extent to which redaction is used on released documents will be an important test, the change to the release of cabinet documents is that rare thing in Australia, a truly radical reform that dispels the myth around cabinet documents that they are somehow sacrosanct and the public should not be allowed access to them until several political generations have passed.

In a former life I worked on plenty of cabinet documents. There’s nothing special about them, except for the bureaucratic hurdles one has to jump through to lodge them with Prime Minister and Cabinet — hurdles that became ever more absurd under the Howard government. They’re distillations of policy options for ministers to discuss, but they’re treated as sacred texts that can’t be revealed to the eyes of the politically unclean.

John Faulkner was the only minister to ever try to dispel this nonsense. He convinced the Rudd government to reduce the waiting period for the release of cabinet documents from 30 years to 20, meaning documents could be released that might actually be within the working lifetime of journalists who covered the original issue, and the memory of voters. But since then, Labor has lost interest.

Faulkner’s successor on transparency and integrity is Mark Dreyfus, who is strengthening whistleblower protections, overhauling secrecy laws and restoring intra-government information institutions after nine years of Coalition efforts to destroy them. Like Faulkner, the changes won’t win Dreyfus any friends among his colleagues.

But on another area of transparency, Special Minister of State Don Farrell continues to drag his feet. We wondered in 2022 why Labor wasn’t moving to implement its election commitments regarding reducing the political donation disclosure threshold and introducing real-time reporting of donations. Instead the issue was fobbed off to the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, which didn’t even begin its traditional review of the previous election until August last year.

When that committee published an interim report in June recommending a disclosure threshold of $1000, real-time reporting and donation and spending caps, Farrell said he’d wait until the final report, and that “electoral reform should be undertaken in a consultative and bipartisan manner”.

Remember, Labor went to the 2022 election with an election commitment of a $1000 disclosure threshold and real-time reporting. The government doesn’t treat its other election commitments as needing to be implemented “in a consultative and bipartisan manner” but it seems that commitment is different — so, halfway through the parliamentary term, no reform is in sight. The committee recently produced its final report, saying nothing about the disclosure threshold or real-time reporting, though it proposed exempting charities from the donations cap proposed in the interim report.

Meanwhile, the media keep reporting that disclosure changes “loom” and are on the way, without any sign of movement from Labor. At this rate, any legislation may not be passed until the middle of 2024 — raising questions about just how much of the money flowing to the major parties ahead of the next election will be captured.

And Queensland-style transparency such as cabinet documents being released or ministerial diaries being published along with lobbyist meeting details appear off the agenda altogether. Federal Labor isn’t even in the same league as its Queensland colleagues.

Should that secret squirrel stuff be out in the open? Readers, we want to hear from you — especially while our comments are closed due to our website upgrade. Send us your thoughts on this article to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.