Five key questions that went unanswered in the first week of Qld’s scrutiny show

For five (often long) days, Queensland ministers and their public sector officials have faced questions of varying difficulty in the annual show of budget scrutiny by state parliament.

I say “show” because the structure of parliament and its committee system – meant to replace a uniquely lacking upper house – means the government of the day has full control.

The result? Government MP interventions to allow ministers or officials to run down the clock with lengthy and context-heavy answers in the finite time for non-government questions.

But also the shutting down of questioning deemed to run foul of committee rules or, in one case this week, the complete lack of a question offered to the sole crossbench MP.

Towards the end of the 90 minutes available to ask questions of minister Dan Purdie and officials within his police portfolio, Maiwar Greens MP Michael Berkman even pointed this out.

The hearing’s chair, Deputy Speaker and LNP MP for Scenic Rim Jon Krause, said he hadn’t been aware that Berkman was at the table with him, before then going to government questions.

“It’s clear that this government will go to any lengths to avoid scrutiny, including refusing questions from the committee’s only crossbench member,” Berkman said in a statement to this masthead.

“The QPS [Queensland Police Service] has serious questions to answer about their conduct in the face of a massive loss of public trust.”

Even among questions that did get asked across the first week (yes, there is another one coming), not all received explicit answers in the responses that followed.

Some answers, however, were promised by the end of a session but never materialised; others were blocked through government control of the committees. Here are five examples.

Has Crisafulli’s LNP agreed to a deal protecting it from being sued?

On Tuesday night, Labor MPs tried to table a leaked Treasury briefing for Finance Minister Ros Bates in March ahead of a meeting with government-owned CS Energy about its joint ownership of the Callide C coal power station.

This included mention of a $495 million offer by private partners Sev.en for CS Energy to acquire its half of the station, on the condition that it still be allowed the right to pursue legal claims for incidents under former governments.

The foreign investment firm launched a claim against CS Energy for more than $1 billion late last month.

On Tuesday, opposition MPs peppered Under Treasurer Paul Williams with questions, which he largely declined to answer citing commercial confidentiality and the ongoing legal matter.

Ultimately, Coomera LNP MP and governance committee chair Michael Crandon suggested the committee move into a private session to withdraw the standing right that MPs have during the hearings to table documents for public release in that case.

After a seven-minute closed-door session, proceedings resumed with the following statement from Crandon: “The document will now not be published, and the document will now not be referred to again in these public hearings.”

Did Dutton meet investment body’s needs for board skills?

On Wednesday, shadow treasurer Shannon Fentiman quizzed Bates and Williams about former federal opposition leader Peter Dutton’s appointment to the board of the Queensland Investment Corporation in April.

Asked if QIC had given a “skills matrix” for potential candidates to be assessed against, Bates said standard processes were followed. She then hand-balled to Williams.

Williams said such a matrix “may or may not be used” as part of the due diligence Treasury conducts to help with such appointment processes, but he was “unaware of any”.

While questions can be taken on notice by a minister, with details then sought and returned to the committee later in the session, Bates declined to do so.

(In a later session dealing with Bates’ trade portfolio, Trade, Employment and Training director-general Peter McKay confirmed former Tasmanian Liberal premier Will Hodgman had met the requirements of a skills matrix for his board gig.)

Was a government jet used to fly to an LNP event?

Amid questions around the government’s $4.3 million bill for chartered flights (almost a quarter of which were taken by Premier David Crisafulli) on Friday, the opposition asked police about a particular flight from earlier in the year.

Shadow attorney-general Meaghan Scanlon had been seeking answers to questions about whether Crisafulli was present on any flight chartered from Brisbane to Toowoomba’s Wellcamp Airport in January, which coincided with an LNP workshop in the regional city.

While Queensland Police Deputy Commissioner Chris Stream said he only had records of flights from Wellcamp to Sydney and back to Brisbane, he noted that had Crisafulli used a government jet to travel to Toowoomba, a record should exist.

Stream endeavoured to get this detail back to the hearing, along with a full breakdown of each minister’s flights. This never came.

What are the costs to suppress the identity of the ‘high-profile man’?

The police session ended abruptly after Scanlon sought to shift into a private meeting to discuss matters around the court suppression of a high-profile man’s identity. This could have partly accounted for the lack of details here.

The married man, known only as “MM” and who is not facing any charges himself, has been named as part of an extortion case in Cairns Magistrates Court. Police have engaged Jonathan Horton KC to fight against media efforts to overturn the ban.

“Queenslanders have a right to know the cost of King’s Counsel to protect the identity of a reported high-profile man,” Scanlon said. With only minutes remaining for the hearing’s allotted time, Krause signed off before closing it to the public

Later speaking to reporters outside the parliamentary hearing, Scanlon said she was restricted from talking about what happened during the confidential part of the meeting but noted the LNP’s control of proceedings.

Did minister have involvement in LNP-linked program pick?

On Friday night, Youth Justice Minister Laura Gerber used her session to announce Jabalbina Yalanji Aboriginal Corporation as the new far-north provider of one of nine flagship “regional reset” programs after the previous one was dumped in June.

This sparked questions from Labor’s youth justice spokesperson, Di Farmer, about whether the program would be run at the Mungalli Falls Outdoor Education Centre operated by former LNP MP Michael Trout.

Youth Justice Department director-general Michael Drane confirmed that site was one of two settings for the service, along with the Daintree River Station.

When asked by Farmer whether she had excluded herself from any decision-making, given Trout’s links to the government, Gerber made an appeal to Speaker and Condamine LNP MP Pat Weir to rule the question out of order because of its “clear imputation and inference”, which he did.

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