“Wrong decision.” “Not a good look.” “A judgment call.” “The rules must be changed.” “A shocker, a major mistake.”
Those are some of the terms used by NSW Labor Premier Chris Minns and his (for the moment) transport minister, Jo Haylen, about the latter’s repeated use of government vehicles for personal purposes, including at least one winery trip with Housing Minister Rose Jackson for which a government driver had to work for 13 hours carting them to the Hunter Valley for a boozy lunch.
Haylen’s position looks increasingly untenable as more and more details emerge. She seems to have little clue exactly what the problem is — her brave admission that she made a “wrong decision” and a “mistake” makes it sound like she ordered a cab sauv with her fish main, rather than abusing the perks of office. For his part, instead of sacking her, Minns has emphasised the rules are vague and allow personal use and has promised to overhaul them. That’s nice of him.
But ask any taxpayer in New South Wales — or Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia or anywhere else — whether it’s okay for ministers, or any politician, to be allowed to use government resources for personal use, guidelines or not. Ordinary taxpayers don’t have a government chauffeur to take their kids to weekend sport, let alone piss-ups at wineries. There’s no failed “pub test” here, as Haylen claims. There’s a basic sense of indecency.
Haylen is a Labor lifer, who knows little but the cosy world of public office. She was a staffer for Julia Gillard and Anthony Albanese, then in local government, before entering state Parliament in 2015. This is a person well used to having taxpayer resources at hand.
Haylen began her ministerial stint with a major scandal when her office manoeuvred Iemma-era Labor hack Josh Murray into the top job in Haylen’s department, earning a cool $588,000 a year. Haylen stared down calls for her to resign over this especially egregious case of jobs-for-the-boys and politicisation of the public service. Under Haylen and Murray, Transport in NSW has been one debacle after another: major delays to projects and yet more problems with new ferries and industrial relations chaos on Sydney’s rail system. Nonetheless, Haylen, along with Jackson, thought it fit to reward herself with a trip to a winery.
But to be fair, she’s hardly atypical of a government that is mediocre on its best days. Only a few months after entering office, Minns was forced to sack Tim Crakanthorp over undeclared conflicts of interest involving his family’s extensive property portfolio. And Minns himself and Treasurer Daniel Mookhey did a rotten deal with the disgraced Star Casino outfit to reduce their tax payments, despite the company ripping off NSW taxpayers.
His government continues — at the behest of the state’s powerful and generous clubs and pubs industry — to put off any outcomes from the farcical cashless gaming trial Minns devised to prevent any meaningful action on pokies reform. Minns is also handing $450 million to fossil fuel giant Origin Energy to keep its antique Eraring power station ongoing, and ordered an end to public servants working from home in order to look after the commercial property sector, with whom he spent a day meeting in August. This isn’t a government; it’s a corporate concierge service.
But Haylen’s “mistake”, and Minns’ ineffectual response to it, suggests something worse: that NSW Labor, in its three terms in opposition after the spectacular scandals, blatant corruption and in-fighting of its post-Carr years in government, learnt nothing about the importance of integrity in public office and its role in good government. It learnt only how to be electable again. It’s still a party that treats public resources as a private treasure chest, that gleefully politicises the public service, that sees only a seamless union of the private interests of MPs, the interests of NSW Labor and its union backers and the extended Labor family, and the public sector.
Its actual ideological beliefs, if any, are hard to determine. Certainly they don’t reflect those of the communities that elect Labor MPs, as Minns’ assiduous suppression of any criticism of the Palestinian genocide from within his own ranks illustrates. After all these years, NSW Labor believes only in itself and its interests — whether Haylen is minister tomorrow or not. A movement that once produced Neville Wran and Bob Carr is now a dried-out husk dedicated only to serving itself.
