John Barilaro
John Barilaro (Image: AAP/Joel Carrett)

Despite producing one of the most significant and reforming budgets of recent decades, NSW Premier Dominic Perrottet is busy trying to extricate himself from the scandal of former NSW Nationals leader John Barilaro’s appointment to a $500,000 trade commissioner job in New York.

The job itself is a waste of money. There is no evidence that state trade commissioners — or for that matter national trade commissioners — deliver any value for money. Governments appear reluctant to test the benefits of the position against the costs not merely of paying commissioners but supporting them and maintaining an office.

But Barilaro and then premier Gladys Berejiklian announced a doubling of trade commissioner positions, including the New York one, in late 2019 as part of a “global NSW” strategy — although good luck finding an actual strategy document anywhere. There appears to have been no cost-benefit analysis done of whether the 10 extra trade commissioner positions would deliver any value to taxpayers.

Other appointees to the trade commissioner roles are no mugs — they include two former big four consultants with long in-country experience in their respective appointments, a 20-year Macquarie Bank Japan veteran for the North Asia post and a long-serving Business Australia CEO to Europe. The appointee to the China position, announced at the same time as Barilaro’s appointment, is the former CEO of the Australia China Business Council.

And then there’s Barilaro himself, whose trade and US experience consists of running a timber doors business in Queanbeyan.

No wonder the stench is overpowering a government that faces an election against a reinvigorated, and wholly cynical, Labor opposition next March.

Perrottet has thrown the bureaucrat responsible for the appointment under the bus, in effect blaming the secretary of the Department of Enterprise Investment and Trade, Amy Brown. Until his departure from politics, Barilaro held that portfolio, along with regional development, so he used to be Brown’s boss.

There’s no doubt we’ve — at long last — entered a period of intolerance of traditional forms of political opportunism. Pork-barrelling is increasingly seen as a form of corruption. Jobs for the boys and girls now seems to be next on the list of traditional behaviours that are annoying voters — and as Nick Greiner discovered three decades ago, it comes with some risk when following a sudden departure from politics. Already comparisons with the Metherell affair are being invoked.

Greiner’s was an excellent government undone in 1991 by political stupidity, a cynical Labor opposition (Bob Carr invented the idea of a state GST and campaigned against that) and issues like inadequate disaster response and toll roads. The resonances 30 years later are powerful, even if Perrottet leads a much older government that will be seeking 16 years in power next year: this has been a quality, reforming government prone to spectacular misjudgments and blamed for poor disaster response and remorseless growth in tolls, facing a Labor Party already labelling stamp duty reform as the Liberals’ “forever tax”.

The Barilaro scandal is a classic case of the kind of misstep that cuts straight through to voters uninterested in big-picture government, historic changes in the economic empowerment of women or complex tax reforms. Unless Barilaro bails out of the appointment, he’ll seriously damage Perrottet’s chances next March.