Winner takes all: politicians with power

Throughout the Bjelke-Petersen era (1968-1987), complaints about executive domination were commonplace, but executive domination was a feature of Queensland politics before Bjelke-Petersen, and it has continued to characterise Queensland politics thereafter.

Recent royal commissions, external reviews, and whistleblowers have highlighted how Queensland’s weak unicameral parliamentary system has encouraged a lack of ministerial responsibility, party-political determination of public service appointments and secrecy in government decision making.

It is these issues that lie at the heart of the State’s hospitals, childcare and energy scandals. The 2005 Davies Royal Commission into overseas doctors in Queensland’s public hospitals identified how successive health ministers and cabinets avoided freedom of information laws and deliberately distorted the accurate public reporting of public health issues.

Davies concluded that successive Coalition and Labor governments had released information on hospital waiting lists that “was misleading” and had acted “contrary to the public interest” in relation to the overseas doctor scandal and the management of the hospital system.

Overall, Queensland’s present parliamentary system offers few opportunities for external probing of executive government actions and even fewer pressures to reveal information. Royal Commissions are instituted only when the magnitude of a crisis makes it unavoidable. Government in Queensland is for major party and big institutional players only. There are few countervailing influences and little opportunity to discover what is happening and for representation of regional and minority interests.

Despite efforts to establish a strengthened committee system in the aftermath of the Fitzgerald Inquiry, parliament remains hamstrung in its capacity to scrutinise the government because the government enjoys a controlling majority in the Legislative Assembly.

Nonparliamentary agencies, such as the Crime and Misconduct Commission and occasional royal commissions have helped to hold the administration accountable, but their roles are tightly circumscribed by legislation, their short term duration, and their lack of democratic legitimacy.

Governments and administrations need to be scrutinised not only for traces of corruption and serious misconduct, but also for incompetence and poor policy choices. Only representative institutions which are not controlled by the government have both the capacity and the legitimacy to investigate on all of these levels, following the trail wherever it leads.

When things go wrong in Queensland the state’s weak parliamentary system, watered down freedom of information laws, and government secrecy, means it is difficult to know what is happening. When scandals erupt it is even more difficult to allocate responsibility. Thus, despite the present Queensland government’s commitment to reform the health system, it failed to establish a parliamentary committee to monitor health issues as proposed by the 2005 Forster Review of Hospital Management, and thus an opportunity to establish a connection between executive government administration and parliamentary public accountability was squandered.

Reintroducing an upper house in Queensland

The reintroduction of an upper house in Queensland would be no simple panacea; much would depend upon its composition, power and procedures. However, in the specific circumstances of the Queensland political system, an appropriately designed second chamber would have the potential to provide an effective mechanism by which government decisions - and, indeed, government indecisions - could be more closely scrutinised, evaluated and held to account. A revived upper house could help overcome Queensland’s severe “democratic accountability gap”.

It is sometimes argued that electoral reform and, in particular, the introduction of proportional representation would not only make the parliament more democratically representative, but would also help to strengthen its capacity to hold the government to account. However, while reform along these lines would almost certainly help, the Legislative Assembly would remain limited in its capacity to become a house of review because it would remain, fundamentally, the house of government - governments would continue to command the support of a majority in the house.

Proportional representation in a unicameral parliament can certainly strengthen the hand of individual members and parliamentary committees both to scrutinise and challenge the government, but the corporate powers of an entire house of parliament are of an altogether different order to the powers of members and committees.