The Senate’s mock outrage games shame all
Threatening corporate leaders with jail time over an accounting contrivance is part of a trend where the national parliament is becoming a theatre for showboating and mock outrage.
Tom BurtonGovernment editor
Within bureaucratic circles there has been increasing unease about the Senate committee system becoming what one mandarin this week described as “a showboating exercise for social media”.
At its July meeting, the secretaries’ board last year discussed the rising febrile nature of estimates hearings, the twice-yearly official review of government expenditures.
What concerned public service leaders was how bureaucrats were increasingly finding themselves being dragged into the political fodder as senators of all parties aggressively pressed officials in an attempt to gain partisan advantage.
Greens senator Nick McKim was looking for a scalp on Tuesday, and outgoing Woolies boss Brad Banducci was his target. David Rowe
Non-government parties have long used the Senate’s inquiry powers to seek to embarrass the ruling party. But the combination of live-streaming and TikTok-like reels have turned committees into social media fodder, as tightly edited gotcha grabs are sprayed out across the internet.
What is meant to be a powerful tool of accountability and considered inquiry has too often now become what The AFR view rightly described as a political freak show.
Officials begrudgingly accept they have to turn up. But more and more private citizens are also being dragged before hostile committees to be vilified by preening and smirking senators, some of whom have been elected with as little as 40,000 votes – about the size of Dubbo.
This includes Greens senator Nick McKim from Tasmania, who on Tuesday was threatening Woolworths boss Brad Banducci with six months’ jail time, and accusing him of “bullshitting”.
Deprivation of liberty is of course the most serious of authoritarian threats. Especially against a private citizen, who in a country that respects the rule of law, should rightly have expected a substantive claim of malevolent behaviour to be placed before him.
Apart from McKim’s cheap “bullshitting” slur, Banducci’s sin that would see him spend up to 72 days in some cold Canberra penitentiary was not knowing what his firm’s return on shareholder equity was. Seriously.
As my colleague Tom Richardson wrote, the measure is a synthetic accounting fiction, calculated from numbers that have little to do with a business’s day-to-day operations and underlying performance.
The ratio is derived from historic valuations and balance sheet quirks that make the measure meaningless in terms of understanding a firm’s relative performance across different sectors.
The measure might be at best a curiosity to actual shareholders, but it is not something that firms actually receive or get – nor care much about until McKim got his cheap headlines.
Again as readers of The Australian Financial Reviewobserved, the terms of reference for McKim’s committee is “to inquire into and report on the price setting practices and market power of major supermarkets”, with particular reference to 10 identifiable matters. The return on shareholder equity is not one of them.
In any case, the last time I checked it is not a criminal offence for a CEO of a listed company to not know what their shareholders’ return is on the difference between the firm’s assets and liabilities.
Not any sort of offence, other than the contrived offence that McKim put on for the cameras and quickly posted to Twitter.
McKim is a parliamentary veteran who first cut his teeth as a Tasmanian state MP for the Greens in 2002. He became the first Greens minister in Australia when Tasmanian Labor formed a power-sharing agreement with the Greens in 2010. Before entering parliament he was a PR flack and ad copywriter.
The point is that McKim is no rookie to the world of parliamentary theatre and would have fully known his McCarthy-like threats of contempt would make great clickbait.
Ahead of the election next year, that probably won’t hurt his chances, but what is not being counted is the damage to parliament as a place of considered and fair deliberation.
McKim let the cat out of the bag when he told his local media Banducci “needed to be taken down a peg because of the attitude that he brought into the committee hearing”.
Much of this vainglorious behaviour is fuelled by senators seeking publicity over rivals. This was on show big-time last year as MPs fell over themselves to pillory the big consulting firms.
There is plenty of evidence from the US Congress of the harm to accountability when oversight powers are abused. Witness the recent attempts to indict various administration officials, including President Joe Biden.
There is a serious question about whether the national parliament is going to follow the same path and allow itself to be a place for gimmickry, stunts and capricious threats, corroding important institutional powers designed to check executive power.
The world has changed, and both chambers can set their own rules and values. But yet again the Australian public is being required to excuse behaviours that in any other place would not be tolerated.
That in turn is cancerous to an institution that is meant to be a model of good behaviour, so it can sit above the fray and govern wisely for all. And not send supermarket executives to jail for refusing to play along with MPs’ mock outrage games.
Tom Burton has held senior editorial and publishing roles with The Mandarin, The Sydney Morning Herald and as Canberra bureau chief for The Australian Financial Review. He has won three Walkley awards. Connect with Tom on Twitter. Email Tom at tom.burton@afr.com
