The Minister for Indigenous Australians has this week announced new appointments to the Board of Indigenous Business Australia (IBA) (link here). There is only a single new appointment, Mr Rick Callaghan (link here). On its face, this appears to be a sensible appointment of a qualified and experienced Director.
The Minister has announced the reappointment of the Chair
Mr Eddie Fry and two other existing Directors. The Minister’s media release
omits mention of the terms of the new appointments, but notes that each of the
three re-appointees have been on the IBA Board sine 2014.
There are a number of intriguing issues at play here. Good
governance principles would normally dictate that after seven years, there
would be significant rejuvenation of the
Board. This might particularly apply to the Chair, not least as the Minister previously
expressed a lack of confidence in him in relation to his chairmanship at the ILSC
(link here).
Mr Fry was recently replaced as Chair of the ILSC (link
here). The Minister has never explained how it was that Mr Fry lost his confidence
as the ILSC Chair, but was able to stay on for the best part of a year as Chair
of ILSC and has now been reappointed as IBA Chair.
Second, the IBA page on the Government’s online directory
(directory.gov.au) lists IBA’s Directors and their terms. In relation to the
three reappointments, the Directory includes start dates of 1 December 2021 and
end dates of 28 February 2022. The page indicates that it was last updated on
25 October, but that may be an error. In any case, it appears that the three reappointments
are for only three months.
So what might be the explanation for this ?
Perhaps the Minister’s reluctance to mention the appointment
terms stems from a concern that by announcing what are clearly interim arrangements,
it might suggest that he has been unable to obtain Cabinet approval for his
preferred choices, and thus lacks influence within the Government.
An alternative , and more cynical, explanation might be
that the Government is determined to make new appointments before the election
that extend through the term of a potential new Labor Government.
A third explanation might be that the Minister just didn’t get
his act together in time to make new appointments and was forced into making
interim appointments.
None of these explanations reflect well on the Minister and
has administration of the portfolio. It would have been better if the Minister
took interested citizens into his confidence and provided a fuller explanation for
his decisions.
A more worrying possibility is that the Ministers recent announcement
applies to the post February terms of the three Directors. If so, this would lock
in a serious failure of good governance principles.
Finally, the fact that the Minister has left us unclear as
to what he has actually done, while purporting to keep us informed of his
actions, reflects poorly on his commitment to open government and the highest
quality of public administration.
The deeper issue that underlies the process of appointments
to statutory offices within the Indigenous Australians portfolio (and no doubt
beyond) is the increasing levels of politicisation of appointments.
It is time that the Parliament stepped up and legislate for
much more transparency around the basis for appointments. The fiasco within the
Board of the ILSC over the past two years (link
here and link
here) demonstrates unequivocally that the present system is broken. These most
recent interim appointments confirm that conclusion. In particular, while there
is a case for Ministerial decision making, there is a need for the establishment
of multi-partisan/independent selection committees that propose a merit based short
list to the minister for each vacancy. The process used for the ABC (link
here) and largely ignored by recent Prime Ministers is one potential model.
I would go further and propose that where Ministers ignore an independent selection
committee shortlist, their nominees should stand down with a change of government.
Statutory corporations such as IBA are given independent
remits for a reason. Governments should not be able to control their activities
by default through informal influence over appointments.
