Qld: Public servants more 'politicised', says retiring CMC head

AAP General News (Australia)
12-15-2009
Qld: Public servants more 'politicised', says retiring CMC head

By Steve Gray

BRISBANE, Dec 15 AAP - Public servants in Australia have lost much of their independence
and objectivity, retiring Queensland anti-corruption chief Robert Needham says.

Mr Needham retires this month after five years heading Queensland's major corruption-fighting
body, the Crime and Misconduct Commission.

He told AAP that the nature of the public service had changed, and long periods in
office had undermined the Westminster tradition of fiercely independent advice regardless
of incumbency.

"Now your senior public servants don't go on and serve different political masters
of different political persuasions as governments come and go," Mr Needham said.

"Now they tend to change with government, and if they change with government then they're
much more beholden to that particular government, and it's inevitable, it's human nature
that they'll be more politically aligned in the advice they give."

He said public servants in Queensland were not "overly aligned with the Labor Party",
but public services around the nation were increasingly politicised.

"I think that's inevitable, unfortunately, in our society now and I don't think it's
just Queensland," he said.

"It's federally, it's state, it's every persuasion of politics."

Mr Needham said similar changes had occurred in Britain.

The former Fitzgerald inquiry counsel said the process probably started when Gough
Whitlam's federal Labor government assumed power in 1972 after 23 years of coalition rule.

"Whenever you've got any government that comes in where you've had the other side in
power for a very long time there tends to be a distrust of the senior public servants,"

Mr Needham said.

A similar process began in Queensland when Labor won power in 1989 after 32 years of
conservative rule.

Labor has been in power in Queensland for all but two of the past 20 years.

AAP stg/pjo/srp/de

KEYWORD: CMC PUBLIC

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