Shouts from the desert

A public servant has called on the Governor-General to dismiss the government after claiming that Minister for Health, Tony Abbott is corrupt by reason of preventing the quarterly release of bulk-billing figures for political purposes. Abbott, of course, has denied corruption.

The call by the public servant is rather silly - it is not the Governor-General's role to act on his own to dismiss the Government in such circumstances, and if he did so it would provoke a constitutional crisis that would make 1975 look like a complete non-event. It is for the House of Representatives to decide whether to dismiss the Government, which it does by means of passing a motion of "no confidence". It is beside the point that the Parliament will not do so under any circumstances because of the strong party loyalty exhibited by both sides of politics. That is a problem for voters to address, and they will get the opportunity to do so again in 2007. Until then, unless a significant number of coalition members have an epiphany and decide to toss Howard out, the Howard-led Government is here to stay.

As for the allegation of corruption, it seems it may depend entirely on how you define corruption. The acts alleged certainly constitute business as usual in the cesspool that is our federal political system, but that does not necessarily mean they are not corrupt.

The allegation is that Abbott has made an administrative decision to withhold information for personal (political) gain - that is, that he has allowed self-interest to override the State interest in deciding to prevent the release of information that could damage the Coalition's election chances. Ministers on both sides of politics have always done this, so it seems hardly surprising that this might have happened. Indeed this is much less severe than cases in which the Government releases information they know is wrong, or fails to correct wrong information after they have since learned it is wrong.

It is difficult to comprehensively define corruption, but in my view any reasonable definition must include "making an administrative decision for collateral (non-State) reasons." By that definition, Abbott's alleged conduct is certainly corrupt. But it is business-as-usual corruption by the standards of our federal political system. In New South Wales it may be referred to ICAC, but since there is no Federal Anti-Corruption Commission, this will pass without any serious consequences.

Should there be consequences? There are two answers to this - the legal and the in-principle answers. The legal answer is "no". Our system does not punish corruption of this kind - in fact it tends to reward it. The in-principle answer is that our elected officials have an obligation to put the needs of the State before their own interests, and our system ought to remove such officials from their position when they do so. Unfortunately, the mechanism by which this is done - the no-confidence motion on the floor of the house - has been broken by the ever-increasing strength of party politics.

It is only voters who can fix this, by voting for candidates who are on the record as supporting a return to principles of accountability.