Scott Morrison’s secretive cabinet committee of one permanent member appears to have met hundreds of times in the last term of parliament, documents released under freedom of information have revealed.
The cabinet office policy committee (COPC) – of which Morrison was listed as the only permanent member – created 739 sets of minutes from meetings, the information released by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PMC) showed.
It has sparked fresh warnings from the former senator Rex Patrick that the body was an “abuse of process”, and prompted calls to release its documents, or to expand the inquiry into Morrison’s multiple ministries, as proposed by the Greens.
But Anthony Albanese’s criticism of the “cabinet committee with one member on it” has spurred a response from Morrison – who has claimed through a spokesperson the deputy prime minister, treasurer and finance minister “were co-opted on to all meetings of any COPC [that is] an automatic participation”.
In 2019, Morrison was on the hunt for new policies and ordered his ministers to conduct policy “deep dives” to find them through consultations with stakeholders, including business.
In Senate estimates, Labor discovered this was achieved through the establishment of the COPC, a body PMC confirmed had just one permanent member: Morrison. Until now, nothing has been known about how often it met.
In response to Guardian Australia’s FOI request for “all minutes” of its meetings from 2 July 2019 to 11 April 2022 (excluding duplicates), the department said the “requested documents, [comprise] 739 minutes of the former government’s COPC”.
These included the minutes of meetings of subcommittees of the COPC, including the national cabinet, which met 66 times in the last term, and women’s safety taskforce, which appears to have met eight times.
That leaves as many as 665 sets of minutes unaccounted for, implying hundreds of previously undisclosed meetings, even if some may have had multiple note-takers.
A PMC spokesperson said meetings “may have multiple minutes” but declined to answer questions about how many times the COPC met. “It is inaccurate to equate the number of minutes to the number of meetings.”
Patrick, the transparency campaigner and former senator who has been locked in a dispute seeking dozens of minutes from national cabinet, said Morrison’s establishment of the COPC “was an abuse of process”.
“A committee of one is not a committee,” he said. “It allowed Mr Morrison the ability to meet with anyone, including his gardener, and wrap a 20-year secrecy blanket over what was discussed.
“Thankfully Mr Morrison has been ousted from office, but a repeat by some future PM can’t be ruled out and is a worry.”
The Greens justice spokesperson, senator David Shoebridge, said Morrison’s behaviour was “deeply anti-democratic”.
“It’s time for the Albanese government to comprehensively distance itself from these sneaky tactics, and commit to releasing the minutes of these meetings of what is at best a pretend cabinet.”
In August, Albanese said he “cannot conceive” how the former prime minister had been allowed to centralise power by creating the COPC.
The prime minister told Studio 10 the mechanism allowed Morrison “to avoid scrutiny for meetings” and to “pretend they were cabinet subcommittee meetings”.
He told 4CA Radio it was “to avoid [FOI], designed so that any meeting that Scott Morrison was in he could say, ‘Oh well, that was a meeting of this cabinet committee of which I was the only member.’”
Despite Albanese’s criticism that the COPC was the start of a “slippery slope” towards secrecy that ended with Morrison’s appointment to multiple ministries, the inquiry by former high court justice Virginia Bell is focused only on the ministries.
Shoebridge said the Bell inquiry “should be expanded to cover all potentially inappropriate uses of ministerial and cabinet discretions”.
“Ultimately whether a meeting was a cabinet meeting or not is a matter of law and substance and is not decided by the prime minister waving a magic wand and just saying it’s so,” he said. “At least that is how it’s meant to work.”
Morrison defended the COPC, telling Guardian Australia through a spokesperson it allowed ministers, officials, experts and members of parliament to participate in “deep dive policy discussions” in a process that was “more targeted, effective and dynamic” than regular cabinet subcommittees.
These assisted the government’s response “to significant issues, consider strategic policy direction and to assist in the early stages of preparing cabinet submissions, including budget submissions”, the spokesperson said.
“Numerous meetings were held across the full spectrum of federal government policy responsibilities. The COPC process proved very effective and practical in working though complex policy issues.
“The process was modelled on the [national security committee] and [expenditure review committee] process, where officials and experts join these discussions to assist with discussion of policy development.”
In its FOI decision, the department agreed to release six previously released minutes from national cabinet and blocked the remaining 733 documents.
It cited FOI exemptions including cabinet confidentiality, harm to commonwealth-state relations and adverse effects on an agency’s operation.
“A COPC was a type of cabinet committee and was constituted as needed,” the decision said.
A spokesperson for PMC said it assessed all FOI requests “consistently with the FOI Act”. “Cabinet documents are confidential to the government which created them,” they said.
