Lenore Taylor, political editor
theguardian.com, Friday 20 September 2013
Losing such talent just to send a political message undermines the prime minister's claim to respect an independent civil service
Tony Abbott talks to treasury secretary Martin Parkinson, who will 'voluntarily' leave his position next year. Photograph: Saeed Khan/AFP
"We will be a problem-solving government based on values, not ideology," said the newly sworn in prime minister Tony Abbott in a short speech on Wednesday before he presented his new ministry to the governor general, Quentin Bryce.
But he'd already begun the process of sacking or moving on four of the country's finest public servants – with ideology the only apparent motive.
Martin Parkinson and Blair Comley appear to have been punished because of their roles in implementing the former government's policy on climate change, Andrew Metcalfe for advising the former government on asylum policy and Don Russell for having once been a senior adviser to former prime minister Paul Keating.
Parkinson, Comley and Metcalfe had served former Coalition governments with distinction. The Abbott government didn't even wait to see how well it could work with Russell. Losing that kind of talent just to send a political message made Abbott's subsequent protestations about having the utmost respect for the independent public service sound particularly hollow, even to some Coalition ears.
Within hours of taking the job, treasurer Joe Hockey was also writing to the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, telling the board to immediately cease operations, contrary to its obligations under the law of the land, which says it has to keep making "green" investments until such time as the parliament abolishes it. (The CEFC itself paused new investment decisions during the election campaign and is continuing that stance until it can talk to the new government, but believes it is not legally possible to stay in a holding pattern if the Senate refuses to pass repeal legislation until next year.)
It is true the Coalition had made its hostility to the so-called green bank absolutely loud and clear – in fact its starting threat was that it would "tear up" any loans or investments the CEFC entered into before the election.
But if it isn't driven purely by ideology, it's a hostility very hard to understand. The CEFC is investing in exactly the kind of projects the Coalition needs to make its alternative Direct Action climate plan work – energy efficiency fit-outs, renewable energy and the like. And it is making a commercial return for the government. Instead of spending $23 a tonne to abate carbon emissions, like the current carbon price, or about $15 a tonne, as envisaged under Direct Action, the CEFC helps abate emissions and earns money for the government in the process.
In his Government House speech, Abbott also said "we hope to be judged by what we have done rather than by what we have said we would do".
So far on that basis we can question his claim that he will base decisions on values and not on ideology.
