[Peetwo]

Sandy comment to - Via the Oz:   

Alexander

12 HOURS AGO

“Secondly, provoking the ‘animal spirits’ in our economy by ­removing regulatory and bureaucratic barriers to businesses investing and creating more jobs.“

This will cut no ice with the few thousands left in the General Aviation (GA) industry which has been devastated by years of Parliamentary neglect while the independent corporate regulator has run amuck with the worst, most expensive and unworkable rules rewrite, still not finished after 32 years. 

The National Party has had the Ministerial portfolio throughout the many years of Coalition Government but those ministers abrogated their responsibilities and allowed the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) to feather it’s own nest without regard to the reasonable aspirations of aviation minded Australians. Thus the loss of hundreds of flying schools and maintenance businesses and the importing of airline pilots. CASA has imposed swinging operational fees for all sorts of unnecessary permissions and whole miserable bureaucratic paraphernalia is supported by Parliament. 

Parliament having rubber stamped the wholesale migration of what used to be (appropriately) civil aviation law into the criminal code with strict liability and huge penalties for even the slightest and most innocuous infringements, many of which supposed criminal acts don’t ever rate a mention in the most mature and successful GA industry, that of the USA where increasingly Australians are heading for their flying training. 

Incumbent since the demise of Barnaby Joyce, Minister for Transport Michael MacCormack talks but does nothing. ScoMo and the Libs have no way to force reform for fear of upsetting their socialist partner, the Nationals. 

Laura tingle does a footnote to Sandy's comment...

LT via ABC News:

Scott Morrison has the public service and accountability in his sights, but what's behind the rhetoric?
7.30 
By Laura Tingle
Posted about 4 hours ago


PHOTO: Will Scott Morrison's push for greater accountability include ministers as well? (ABC News: Luke Stephenson)

Five days after the May election, cameras were invited into the Cabinet Room at Parliament House to document a meeting of newly re-elected Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack with the heads of their departments.

"A big part of the way I intend to direct over the next three years," the Prime Minister said, "is there will be very clear targets about performance levels we expect from the delivery of the public service: that Australians should expect to see things turned around quickly; that investors that are looking to invest in Australia, the blockages that often frustrate them, they will be dealt with.

"I want to see some congestion-busting in the bureaucracy, ensuring that we get things done. So when your ministers are appointed and you sit down with them, you can expect them to have very clear views about the direction that the Government will be taking."

There was also talk, among the rhetoric about congestion busting and a new way of delivering services to the public, of making ministers and public servants more accountable.

Someone who won't be staying around to oversee those changes — whatever they actually mean in practice — is Australia's most senior bureaucrat, Martin Parkinson.

VIDEO: Scott Morrison appoints former chief of staff to head department (ABC News)

Hard yakka in the PM&C

The secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet will leave his job on August 30, a few months before his fixed term contract is due to expire.

Drafted back to Canberra in 2015 by Malcolm Turnbull when Tony Abbott was toppled, Dr Parkinson never saw the PM&C job as a long-term proposition, whoever was prime minister, or whoever won the election.
The job he had really loved was as secretary to the Treasury, the job he held when Mr Abbott had become prime minister in 2013.

In punishment for his association with Labor's climate change policy, Dr Parkinson (along with a number of department chiefs) was told his services would no longer be required by the incoming prime minister, though in Dr Parkinson's case, he would stay on in the job for more than a year overseeing Australia's preparations for the G20 meeting in Brisbane.

There was no doubt some satisfaction, when Mr Turnbull called him up, in being able to come back and finish his public service career on a better note.

But the PM&C job is hard yakka for anyone: rather than making and implementing policy as you might do in Treasury, the head of the Prime Minister's Department is most often involved in cleaning up the daily political road kill.

You do, of course, have the ear of the prime minister, and an over-arching view of what the public service is doing.

So there is probably no-one with a better idea of what the Prime Minister has in mind behind the congestion-busting rhetoric.

VIDEO: Martin Parkinson retires from public service (7.30)


Can't avoid the A-word

Dr Parkinson saw going earlier rather than later a sensible move, given he didn't want to hang about for another full parliamentary term. But he is a keen supporter of the Prime Minister's message.

Asked in an interview for 7.30 this week what the Prime Minister meant when he spoke of making bureaucrats more accountable, Dr Parkinson told me:

"I think what he means is that unless there are clear lines of accountability, as in who is responsible for doing what, no-one is accountable, and sometimes accountability gets blurred.

"He has got a very clear focus on wanting to achieve the delivery of a whole range of his priorities through this term and he wants clearly measurable and reportable metrics.

"That will create a focus for his ministers on what they need to deliver and in turn that will create a focus for secretaries and departments on what they've got to deliver.

"So I personally think it's a very good initiative."

This might sound just a little bit obvious. But it seems the lines of accountability have got a bit lost in recent times in the public service.

More important, though, is the question of whether they have become more lost than the ones involving ministerial accountability and responsibility.

Asked whether he believed the Prime Minister's ambition was also to make ministers more accountable in future, Dr Parkinson said:

"Oh I think so. If you look at Prime Minister Morrison, I think he is attempting to run a cabinet government that is much more akin to that of Bob Hawke and John Howard, and if you recall they both had a very clear focus on what is the role of the minister."

It seems almost an old-fashioned notion these days, but the role of a minister used to be to be accountable for what happened in his portfolio. If there was a stuff-up, he or she was accountable to the parliament, and responsible for it to voters.

Ministers would sometimes actually resign over things that had gone wrong in their portfolio. (Yes, quaint, isn't it?)

Ministers felt an obligation to actually answer questions about their portfolios in the parliament, rather than just subject us to a load of political drivel and avoid the answer.

Equally, since Question Time started to be televised in the 1990s, oppositions have ramped up the political embellishments on their questions to ministers in the hope that these would get on the nightly news, which they rarely did.

A change is coming to QT

If the Prime Minister is trying to change the dynamics of accountability of the public service, Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese is also trying to change the dynamics of Question Time.

Gone are the long-winded political statements dressed as questions and mostly directed at the Prime Minister. This week, it was Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor in Labor's sights, with short, very specific questions seeking information.

First, the Opposition went after the Government's assertions about emissions reduction. But it spent much of the week probing the Minister's connection to a company called Jam Land.

Labor claims Mr Taylor breached ministerial standards by failing to properly declare his indirect part-ownership in the company, which is being investigated for alleged illegal land clearing after 30 hectares of critically endangered grasslands were allegedly poisoned.

It wants to know if Mr Taylor disclosed his stake in Jam Land during a meeting with Environment Department officials in 2017 into rules protecting grasslands at the same time the investigations into land clearing were underway.



PHOTO: Labor claims Mr Taylor breached ministerial standards. (ABC News: Jake Evans)

Mr Taylor repeatedly denied any wrongdoing and accused the Opposition of mounting a "grubby smear campaign".

Labor's Terri Butler observed that "the Minister now oversees the department that is investigating alleged poisoning on land that he part-owns".

As lines of accountability and responsibility go, this would seem very blurred. Just as well the Prime Minister is on the case.

Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.

MTF...P2