After the icare workers' insurance scandal was exposed by The Sydney Morning Heraldand Four Corners, NSW Treasurer Dominic Perrottet stood up in Parliament and declared that icare was doing a “superb” job. Who authored that line – and for what purpose – has now become a fair question for reasonable observers to ask.
That's because, as we've since discovered, icare was paying the salaries of the Treasurer's policy adviser and another staff member. That's right, icare was their paymaster.
On Thursday, Perrottet's chief of staff took the fall and resigned, while the seconded icare payees left the Treasurer's office. But what about Perrottet's job? What of ministerial responsibility?
Perrottet’s failure to discover and disclose these pay arrangements – even while he was staunchly defending icare in the NSW Parliament – might seem to be a trivial matter when compared with the existential threats posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. That is not so.
As Premier Gladys Berejiklian and senior ministers constantly remind us, the people of NSW are living on a knife-edge – teetering between containment of a highly contagious virus and a surge in its transmission that could result in a radical return to lockdown of the kind now endured in Victoria.
Nobody – least of all the Treasurer of the nation’s economic powerhouse – wants that to happen. Yet, for all of the heroic work undertaken by people at the front line, despite the development and application of carefully calibrated policies by government, how events ultimately unfold lies in the hands of each and every person living in NSW. That will end up being one of the most powerful lessons of the pandemic: that every individual action counts, that the aggregate effect can be profound, and that our choices really matter.
Our governments know this to be true. They may appear to hold the reins of power but they can only shape events with the consent and co-operation of the citizens they serve. That is why the dominant message promoted by the Prime Minister and premiers has been to push responsibility back on to we, the people.
So, when a senior minister in a government acts in defiance of well-established conventions and does not acknowledge any personal responsibility for what has happened in his office, it is bound to strike the public as yet another case of hypocrisy from our political leaders.
In response, some people might shrug their shoulders, that it's conduct of a kind we have come to expect. But the times in which we live are not – to any degree – "typical". They require something extraordinary … from everyone and especially our elected leaders.
How can we expect ordinary people to act with utmost care and responsibility if members of the government do not? How can we hold citizens accountable for their actions – even to the point of policing and fining poor conduct – when those holding the highest public offices appear to be unaccountable?
It might be claimed I am not comparing like with like, that there is a significant difference between recklessly exposing others to the risk of infection and a government minister failing to declare a breach of ministerial regulations. The former exposes people to a virus that kills and maims in ways that we still do not fully understand. The latter undermines the conventions on which representative democracy rest.
I say both acts are linked. Both can have terrible consequences – especially if the erosion of trust in our political leaders causes even one infected person to break bounds and create a new cluster of community transmission.
The problem is that I do not think our politicians recognise the validity of the link I have proposed between their professional conduct and the community’s response to the pandemic. Instead, they have learned to live with the cynicism that they constantly encounter – discounting its importance or accepting it as just "part of the job".
I think we need to move beyond that point – because it is too dangerous to damage trust in government at a time when it has never been more needed.
The shallowness of much of modern life has fed into our politics – an arena within which marketing spin too often takes precedence over substance. Some seek to excuse this tendency by saying our politicians merely reflect the society they represent. It is said that we should demand no more of political leaders than we expect of ourselves.
Really? Is that good enough?
Many will be calling for the Treasurer’s head. As noted above, I think he has to accept responsibility for what has occurred in his office and what it has omitted to do. Ministers are ultimately responsible, not their chiefs of staff. What happens next is a matter for the Premier and Treasurer. At the very least we should hope neither pretends that such events do not matter.
As for the rest of us, let’s ask our politicians to rise to the occasion – to prove to us (and perhaps to themselves) what they could be. Let’s appeal to the neglected idealist living buried beneath the callouses. Let’s tell them that they are needed, that they have a noble calling.
Let’s enrol them in our dream of a better democracy, one that truly serves the interests of its citizens. Let them be our champions. Let them drive out of their ranks anyone who refuses to be and do better.
Dr Simon Longstaff is executive director of the Ethics Centre: www.ethics.org.au
