“”The media will get you in the end, comrade.”
The words of the Great Gough.
Kate Carnell is probably thinking along similar lines now, though she is probably slightly more optimistic.
Nothing excites political journalists more than the prospect of a ministerial (or prime ministerial or chief ministerial) scalp. A leadership challenge comes a very close second (or even equal first) and an early election comes a third.
It is as true on the big house on the hill as the little house in London Circuit as it is in the shire council in Pearl Bay. It cannot be put down to the Australian cut-down-the-tall-poppy syndrome. It happens in the UK and the US, too. And it goes back a long way. Witness the Prufumo (chk sp) scandal in Britain in 1963.
More recently, witness the pursuit of ministers in the Howard Government.
It has been likened to a feeding frenzy, but the zoological metaphor begins before that. It begins with media lions chasing the herd of politician gazelles. Opposition hyenas loiter around the action.
The lions see the gazelle with a slight limp, or one that strays a little from the pack. The lions see a slight vulnerability and single it out. The media (us included) saw a slightly vulnerable Kate Carnell. She had overspent a bit on Bruce Stadium. She had not quite crossed all the Ts or dotted all the Is. So they circled around her and isolated her.
The hyenas sniffed outside the pack for a while and waited. The hyenas move only when they sense the lions are at least likely to produce a meal.
Then the whole thing gathers a momentum of its own.
But the point must be emphasised that without the initial error or weakness, the mad chase and the subsequent feeding frenzy would not take place.
And Kate Carnell has exposed an initial error. There has been a certain amount of twisting and dodging to avoid the chasing lions and hyenas, but as Carnell turns she finds another lion or hyena, mainly because the initial dodge was defective.
She said the spending beyond parliamentary approval was permissible because every agency in a given year goes over its net spending. Provided it come sin at the end of the year under its net appropriation all is well.
The trouble with that was that Bruce was so overspent that at the end of the year it was still overspent. So Carnell turned again. She borrowed the day before the end of the financial year and repaid in the first day of the new financial year. It was still not good. There was no provision for the repayment under territory financing law. A lion had managed scratch. The hyenas were excited.
So Carnell turned again, with the lions and hyenas in hot pursuit. This time she said that the money put to the Bruce redevelopment was an “”investment”. Investments were permitted by the Executive without the approval of the Parliament, she argued, springing rapidly in a different direction hoping to shake off the lions and hyenas. But the lions got another bite, further weakening her position, and the hyenas salivated at the thought of getting a fee meal, complete with gravy train.
This time, the investment provisions had a slight weakness. The Financial Management Act required guidelines for investments be issued before an investment could be made. Alas, no guidelines had been issued with respect to investments into territory-owned properties.
Guidelines had been issued with respect to the sorts of investments that governments do with spare cash: bonds and the like. The trouble for Carnell was that she was a victim of her own desire for financial flexibility and accountability. She introduced the Financial Management Act precisely to enable a greater range of investments but with greater accountability than the old Audit Act. If she had left well alone, the Bruce investment would have been okay under the Audit Act, but under the new Act it required a Treasurer’s guideline to be lawful.
Now we enter a new element of the debate and the chase: the question of “”broke the law”. If Carnell had issued a guideline before making the payments to the contractors who redeveloped Bruce all would be well. The Parliament would not have had to give permission. She would have been clear. So she tried to issue guidelines retrospectively, once again turning to shake off the lions and hyenas.
Lions and hyenas aside, this illustrates the technical nature of the “”broke the law” argument and the argument about spending money without the approval of Parliament.
Parliament never had to approve the Bruce spending, and the law never had to be breached if (ital) under her own hand (ital) Carnell had issued an investment guideline. It was not as if she had circumvented necessary scrutiny or dodged a necessary legal requirement.
And when the phrase “”broke the law” is used, it is not as if she committed a typical criminal offence for which the law provides a penalty, like speeding or arson. There is no penalty clause in the Financial Management Act. Rather there are a set of bureaucratic requirements. Sure, she did not comply with the requirements and that makes her vulnerable to the lions and hyenas (and rightly so). But Carnell cannot be prosecuted for a crime.
Now the guideline approach appears to have failed. And still the gazelle moves to avoid the hyenas and lions.
Then there is the danger within. Typically, herds of gazelle and other grazing animals protect each other by staying in a group. Sometimes, however, some in the group are willing to make a sacrifice of one of their kind, particularly if the sacrificial gazelle is wounded.
Carnell senses that. She already had one of her kind defect as a loner, ready to seek revenge for being pushed out of the herd. Now there was a danger that the whole herd would feed her to the lions and hyenas. She has now cleverly twisted back into the herd and obtained their protection. Either none of us get fed to the hyenas, or we all get fed to the hyenas, is her very effective argument.
As I mentioned earlier, there is only one thing close to a ministerial scalp for the lions and hyenas: a leadership challenge.
A leadership challenge is like the challenge of the young sea lion, or young moose tackling for supremacy. The other side in politics and the media are like the bemused but interested females who wonder which testosterone filled males is going to what to them when.
That is not happening today. Indeed, Kate Carnell has cleverly avoided it.
The question has to be asked, do the hyenas deserve a feed. Do they deserve victory now.
For a start the Labor Opposition has only picked up after the media has done the lion’s share of the work. Secondly, the extent of Carnell’s transgression has been exaggerated. No money has gone astray. It has all be spent on Bruce Stadium. And the majority of Canberrans regard the redevelopment as a Good Thing. But it is another example of a cavalier disregard for details of process that could so weaken Carnell in the long term that the hyenas could get their meal.
Now to the last part of fable. Very often when the lions and hyenas launch an attack on the gazelles, they miss out altogether. Even a wounded herbivore can get back tot he safety of the herd. And, remember, the gazelles and other herbivores can run faster and turn more quickly than the lions and other carnivores, at least over medium to long distances, even though the lions work well in spurts.
But the lions and hyenas return to hunt another day.