How Beattie wrecked Queensland
PETER Beattie's return to the political amphitheatre has hardly been greeted with enthusiasm.
And there are good reasons for that.
Despite his jovial exterior, Queenslanders will remember Beattie as the Premier who helped set up Queensland for a colossal fall.
His weird return invites an examination of chaos of failures in the Beattie-Bligh era.
Beattie turned Queensland's public sector into a sheltered workshop for unionists where rorts and sweetheart deals flourished. And we are still feeling the pain.
When Beattie quit in 2007, his successor Anna Bligh continued to indulge the unions.
So I was especially annoyed last week when Kevin Rudd welcomed Beattie back to the fray and made special mention of his job creation skills.
Beattie's most successful job creation program was to further expand a bloated public service.
And it turned into a costly disaster, as former Treasurer Peter Costello and his team pointed out in their commission of audit.
The size of the public service jumped by 40 per cent from June 2000 to June 2012 and was unsustainable, Costello reported.
At that time there were 243,250 people on the payroll representing 205,332 full-time equivalent positions in a public service he said was inefficient and inflexible.
By 2012 wages and related costs of maintaining the public service soared to $18.2 billion, or 38.9 per cent of the Queensland government's total recurrent expenses.
(There are now 193,683 full-time equivalents, new workforce profiles show.)
Costello quoted from Public Service Commission documents revealing only 68 per cent of employee roles "were essential for service delivery".
He said convoluted work practices, an absence of strategic plans and deficiencies in data collection made it difficult see exactly where the public service was going.
Blame Beattie. Blame the unions.
The spirit of the age is revealed in an official government directive to senior staff in September 2000 while Beattie was premier.
"The Queensland Government has made a commitment to encourage union membership among its employees,'' it began.
Managers and supervisors were instructed to foster unionism and told to "honour this commitment and comply with its legal obligations''.
How could Beattie and Bligh approve such a deal?
The letter continued: "Passive acceptance by agencies of membership recruitment activity by unions does not satisfy the requirements of the agreement.
"Encouragement requires agencies to take a positive, supportive role.''
Shamefully, union officials and delegates were even given "full access" to staff during working hours, and provided with telephones, computers, email, photocopies, facsimile machines, storage facilities and notice boards.
So Beattie, then Bligh, made Queensland taxpayers subsidise union recruitment during office hours.
Absenteeism soared while productivity slumped.
Unionism led to complex arrangements and inefficiencies.
Public servants are employed under 10 different acts of Parliament, each with its own rules.
Costello spoke of "anomalies and inconsistencies in employment conditions".
He wasn't kidding.
In an orgy of unionism under Labor, 750 pay points were created across 250 different classifications.
Public servants must get a fair wage in return for honest labours.
However, Costello said there were somewhere between 50 and 60 industrial agreements within the public service, "resulting in increased costs''.
"The existence of multiple classification levels and pay points tends to inhibit flexibility and mobility of employees, and encourages multiple layers of management within agencies,'' he said.
"It is not consistent with the objective of having a more streamlined and efficient public service."
Costello also reported that the cost of public servants soared because of "classification creep" with public servants gaining undeserved promotions. There was a 164 per cent increase for the upper levels of A07 and above.
A public servant on the A05 level on $77,644, for instance, would get up to $98,342 once promoted to an A07.
Costello blew the whistle: "Classification creep in the Queensland public sector has resulted in agencies that are top heavy, with too many layers of management, which add unnecessary costs to agency budgets.
"They also engender cumbersome decision-making processes, thereby making the public service less responsive to changing service delivery requirements and government priorities.
"These changes effectively represent de facto wage rises.
"It would appear that some promotions to higher classification levels - often without a significant increase in responsibilities - have also been used as a substitute for pay rises.''
He said adding extra layers of management resulted in "slower and less effective decision making.''
At the same time poor performing employees were not disciplined. I'll take a guess and say this was because managers feared union reprisals.
How could honest, hardworking public servants serve two masters, the unions and their public?
The answer is they can't.
In an ungracious snipe, Beattie this week attempted to distance his administration from Bligh's. It won't wash. Both are to blame because both encouraged unionism so the public service became a milch cow for unions which in turn contributed millions to the ALP.
It was a cosy round robin and you paid for it. Beattie must accept his share of the blame.
Reforming the public service remains Campbell Newman's biggest challenge.
When the LNP swept to power a number of dirty little secrets emerged.
Thanks to the unions, some public servants were paid to do nothing.
"They did no work for 10 years,'' said a whistleblower.
When their jobs evaporated they could not be sacked or transferred because there is no forced redundancy under their union agreements.
Because of poor management, Queenslanders were still paying rental for phones that no longer existed.
Embarrassments like these were overshadowed by the $1.25 billion payroll debacle, reputedly the worst public administration blunder ever in Australia.
A Queensland Health credentialing bungle left Jayant Patel in charge of surgery at Bundaberg, and the great flood of 2011 that caused $2 billion damage was a "dam release flood" that may have been avoided.
The heroic failures under Beattie-Bligh Labor - and over spending on white elephants like the Tugun desalination plant - are the result of poor governance. Beattie seeks to blame Bligh for the loss of the AAA credit rating. Both are responsible.
In the next year or so state debt will top $80 billion.
Interest payments alone will be $11.6 million a day or almost $500,000 an hour.
Beattie has a hide asking for another turn in Parliament.
