During the height of the Morrison multiple ministry controversy, Anthony Albanese pinpointed where he believed the rot had set in.
Power was centralised, he said, because Coalition ministers had “ticked off on the arrangements that had Scott Morrison as the only member of a cabinet committee … so as to avoid scrutiny”.
He was referring to the Cabinet Office Policy Committee (COPC), a secretive committee of one that Labor labelled an abuse of process designed to defeat transparency measures such as freedom of information laws, which do not apply to cabinet documents.
If the prime minister could sit down with any collection of ministers, backbenchers, public servants and non-government stakeholders and call it a cabinet meeting, then nobody had a hope of finding anything out. In another interview, Albanese said Morrison would “pretend” COPC meetings “were cabinet subcommittee meetings”.
Guess who else likes to play pretend? The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) under Albanese.
I have been locked in a dispute for over a year with the PMC seeking COPC minutes from the term of last parliament. I naively thought that because the Albanese government had stopped pretending national cabinet was a subcommittee of the commonwealth cabinet, the same would apply for COPC – especially because the boss had so publicly bagged it.
Alas, no. The PMC has once again claimed the blanket exemption to FoI law because the minutes are “cabinet documents”, apparently under the misguided belief it is obliged to shield the Morrison-era chamber of secrets with incantations that their own boss has said are hocus-pocus.
The FoI system is broken, as we were reminded again this month by a Senate committee report. Reviews by the office of the information commissioner can take years.
The committee recommended FoI applicants should be able to go straight to the administrative appeals tribunal for review, something that could speed up decisions such as Justice Richard White’s ruling in favour of Rex Patrick that national cabinet is just an intergovernmental body – not part of the real cabinet.
One interesting detail did tumble out of the Kafkaesque communications I have received from the PMC on this topic: “The department notes that a COPC was a type of cabinet committee constituted in 2018 under the government of the former prime minister, the Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP.”
Despite Albanese repeatedly fingering Morrison as the culprit, his department now says this was a Turnbull innovation. Searching the Wayback Machine internet archive confirms in February 2018 COPC already existed and it had just one permanent member: Turnbull.
Perhaps that’s why Barnaby Joyce defended it as “nothing distinctly different” to how Turnbull used to run meetings. Turnbull insists there is nothing untoward about it, and notes its decisions still had to go to cabinet.
In 2020 the then finance minister, Mathias Cormann, also defended COPC as part of “good public policy development” to get the “broadest possible input” to government decision-making, accusing Labor of “confected outrage” on the issue.
According to the archive, COPC was designed for “specialist advice on nationally significant issues and rapidly evolving situations” and “is responsible for preliminary discussion … during the early policy development phase that are intended for subsequent consideration by [expenditure review committee] and/or cabinet”.
Everyone loves a brainstorm. A bit of blue sky thinking. An ideas boom, if you will.
But the cabinet exemption to FoI law already covers documents created for the “dominant purpose” of going to cabinet, briefings to the minister about them and drafts of both.
A blanket exemption for anything said at COPC – regardless of whether its dominant purpose was to go to cabinet – puts the invisibility cloak over any old hare-brained scheme or try-on.
Under Morrison, a body designed to help Australia recover from Covid ended up advocating for a gas-led recovery. With a public policy pedigree like that, who knows what other gems of policy development are contained in the COPC minutes?
There is an easy shortcut out of an appeal: the department or prime minister have a power under the FoI Act to set aside or vary a decision, which I have now asked them to do.
In many respects Albanese has been forensic about prosecuting the governance failings of his predecessor. Calling a royal commission into robodebt and the Bell inquiry into the multiple ministries were both no-holds-barred pushes to get to the bottom of what was going on.
Yet the prime minister’s own department is an accessory after the fact to a scheme Albanese said was “designed to avoid” FoI law.
I don’t know why this particular stone remains unturned. The fact Labor doesn’t have cabinet committees of one is not enough to ensure it never happens again. This is a double standard that must end.
