PMs culture of creeping secrecy how a flight to Sydney confirmed his aversion to disclosure

September 10, 2021 â€" 5.00am

When Scott Morrison’s office heard the media were going to report on the Prime Minister’s flight to Sydney last weekend to see his family on Father’s Day, the first reaction was that the trip did not deserve to be reported at all.

This was private business and nothing unusual, according to the Prime Minister’s advisers. They were filthy with Labor for noticing the return trip on the Royal Australian Air Force business jet, a Dassault Falcon 7X, and asking questions about the flying visit.

Watch for cover-ups: the Prime Minister was entitled to his Sydney trip, but his reluctance to disclose it is part of a bigger problem with his government.Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

The idea that Australians might want to know what the Prime Minister was doing, on flights funded by taxpayers, was dismissed from the start. It was another sign of Morrison’s incredible reluctance to accept scrutiny as part of the job.

That is why the argument about the flying visit, which was entirely within the rules, rings more alarms about the creeping secrecy throughout the federal government. Whether the government is spending $88 billion on JobKeeper or negotiating vaccine deals with Pfizer, it recoils from scrutiny.

It behaves as if disclosure is an outrage, when the secrecy is the scandal.

There was no way to avoid attention on the return trip to Sydney. It was picked up by plane-spotters on public websites that track flight radar. The Prime Minister’s office confirmed the flights and this newspaper reported the details on Monday afternoon. Others followed.

Scrutiny about flights is routine. John Howard, at the height of his power, took a RAAF flight to Melbourne to see the Boxing Day Test with some of his family. He was not aggrieved when the media revealed the trip.

Morrison has not changed his attitude since he kept “operational matters” hidden when turning back asylum seekers as the immigration minister eight years ago. It worked then. It did not work so well when he went on holiday in Hawaii and kept everything so secret that nobody knew there was an acting prime minister on duty. The deception only added to the political damage.

The Father’s Day flights broke no rules. Morrison has been cooped up like others but he has a job unlike others. He has to travel and qualifies for exemptions to do it. He did not need special treatment to go to Sydney. The Labor chief minister in the Australian Capital Territory, Andrew Barr, merely gave him an exemption to return to Canberra for work.

Did it pass the pub test? Well, that always depends on who is in the pub and how many pints they’ve had. Morrison did not cross a blockade he had imposed on others. Throughout the pandemic he has been on the side of easing or removing border controls, not toughening them.

Labor leader Anthony Albanese had a bet each way. Labor wanted the flights exposed but left it to frontbenchers such as Kristina Keneally, Bill Shorten and Richard Marles to go on the attack. Albanese held back, saying he would not criticise Morrison for wanting to see his family.

While it looked like a Labor split, it was really just a way of keeping the leader above the dirty work. It did not fool Morrison or those around him. Morrison and Albanese do not get along and their contest will get more personal as the election nears. (Next year, not December).

Morrison may recover from his allergic reaction to scrutiny over time. That would probably help him and his government, if the lessons from overseas are any guide. When researchers in London conducted “exit interviews” with former British ministers, several said the discipline of accountability meant they did a better job.

This was a message from both the Labour and Conservative sides, said the Institute for Government. Former ministers believed scrutiny helped avoid “far greater slip-ups” down the road.

What if the JobKeeper program had included a public register for big companies taking taxpayer money? That might have stopped people taking money they did not need. Only later did it emerge that $13 billion went to companies that increased their turnover â€" an astonishing feat in a country that used to consider a $10 billion surplus a real achievement.

Government departments can treat requests for information as an affront. It took Labor three months to unearth documents under freedom-of-information law about the government’s negotiations with Pfizer last year. Labor backbencher Ged Kearney lodged the request on June 4 and only received the documents on September 1.

The Department of Health found six documents and made redactions to four of them. Access to the other two was completely refused. This is a significant change from a more enlightened time when Labor’s John Faulkner allowed greater FOI disclosure during the Rudd government. (Yes, Rudd lost power, but not because of that.) The trend of the past decade has been towards greater secrecy, longer delay and more devious ways to hide documents.

This has reached a point where the government has a bill before Parliament to hide the work of national cabinet and duck a decision by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal that states the obvious: that national cabinet is not a part of federal cabinet and should not have this status and protection under FOI law.

Calls for a national integrity commission to combat corruption, meanwhile, are met with assurances without action. The government has made no effort to amend its bill for an integrity commission and heed proposals in Parliament to create a watchdog with stronger powers.

“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up,” is an old saying journalists like to use with every political scandal. But Morrison’s trip to Sydney is no crime, nor is it a scandal. A prime minister’s flying visit to see his wife and daughters is the least of the country’s problems in the middle of a pandemic.

The problem is the culture of creeping secrecy. That is a cover-up worth worrying about.

David Crowe is chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via Twitter or email.

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