Queensland’s Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie officiating a wedding for the Public Sector Commissioner has sparked debate over the separation of executive government and the public service, with concerns raised about perceived conflicts of interest and erosion of public confidence. The report also touches on uranium shares held by senior figures and public sector pay rises amidst budget constraints.
Queensland public sector column, Public Circus. This week: the deputy premier’s celebrant services cause a stir, senior figures’ uranium shares, an inflation-driven pay bump amid budget blues, and more.
More notable was the identity of the celebrant for a groom tasked with embodying the apolitical nature of the sector: Deputy PremierQueensland Deputy Premier Jarrod Bleijie and Public Sector Commissioner David Mackie at the latter’s wedding in April, in which Bleijie acted as a celebrant in a “private capacity”. Current and former public servants appear taken aback at the blurring of, well, the church and state that is the executive and the public service in a Westminster government.
We can now report the marriage was officiated by Bleijie for no cost, in “a private capacity”, according to Mackie. Not bad for something that could set you back an easy grand. Neither responded directly, but both pointed to the fact there were guests from both sides of the aisle in attendance and Mackie had worked for both.
“Whilst a number of guests that attended had different political persuasions, their attendance was purely in a personal capacity,” Mackie said. A spokesperson for Bleijie said he was “more than happy to officiate the wedding in a personal capacity for someone who has worked under numerous governments and is well-respected by both sides of politics”. While that may all be true, it misses the point, that the public sector must be perceived to be independent of executive government.
“No one should model this more than the public service commissioner,” said one former senior public servant, granted anonymity to speak candidly about the sensitive matter. “I would never ask a minister in a government I was serving to carry out such a role at my wedding. Just too close. It erodes public confidence … There is clearly a very close relationship there.
” Given how the public sector views personal events like weddings in the conflict-of-interest space, that relationship will likely now need to be disclosed in matters involving the pair. Difficulties with a minister are also among the topics on which bureaucrats can seek counsel from the public sector commissioner. Mackie, of course, has been a stalwart of the Queensland public sector for decades. Most frequently, he has found himself in the Department of Justice and Attorney-General.
He continued in that role through the Palaszczuk government – including under D’Ath, with whom he was also close – until his appointment as commissioner in 2023. Mackie was also in the box seat for the change of government, briefly elevated to the head of Premier and Cabinet during Bleijie and PremierBleijie discloses the celebrant role in his register of interests.
We’ll be waiting keenly to see if anything lands on the public sectorSpeaking of directors-general interests, this masthead’s reporting about the shareholdings of Sosso has also prompted reader feedback. Queensland State Development, Infrastructure and Planning director-general John Sosso and Public Sector Commissioner David Mackie both, until recently, held shares in a uranium mining company with the largest deposits in the state – despite a ban on their extraction.
Sosso still does.to our questions about the timeline and scale of his shares in Paladin Energy, one former public servant felt strongly enough to be willing to be quoted. The premier’s office, readers will be aware, didn’t respond to our questions last week about Sosso’s holdings in what would be the largest uranium miner in the state if a politically seesawing ban on mining the metal was lifted.
But we’re not ones to let a brushing-off dampen our digging. And we’ve uncovered some more details on another senior public sector figure who has held shares in the miner: Mackie. Department bosses have had to declare their interests for decades, though it wasn’t until the Palaszczuk government that such disclosures became public-facing. Mackie hadn’t previously answered our questions about when he bought and sold his Paladin shares, but this week agreed to share all iterations of the public document.
Thanks to that, we can now see Mackie first declared the Paladin shares in July 2021, and dropped them off his disclosure form in February this year. Not so hard. Sosso continues to hold the shares, which Transparency International Australia chief executive Clancy Moore has said give rise to a “strong case for a potential, perceived or actual conflict of interest”.
Circus suggests no wrongdoing by either Mackie or Sosso, only that questions around Sosso’s public share declarations have not been answered, and that some have suggested they should be. , many Queensland public sector pay packets will get a further bump of up to $500 to try to keep up. , well above the 3 per cent trigger, all those with deals struck last year will now have an extra – backdated – 0.5 per cent on top.
This includes more than 100,000 police, firefighters, paramedics, nurses, doctors, health administration staff, non-teaching school staff and others not in arbitration. But the inflation figure triggering those clauses will also mean the starting point for talks around several other deals up for renegotiation will now also be a 3.5 per cent rise.for unsworn police, youth detention centre youth workers, youth justice administrative workers and their child safety counterparts, and the core public service agreement.
For a public servant on the average sector salary of about $100,000, the 0.5 per cent bump could add up to $500 to their base annual pay, and form a higher floor for future rises. The government, of course, set aside $169 million in its December budget update to cover the potential pay bump – amidthat the filling of vacant positions has been stifled by the heavy weight of upward management at Transport and Main Roads and the Queensland Fire Department.
Approval to advertise any position that isn’t a custodial boots-on-the-ground role now has to be run up to the relevant deputy commissioner to help identify savings, instead of the usual director level, one Circus source with knowledge of the matter tells us. s media crew for clarity on it all, a department spokesperson said only: “there is no recruitment freeze”.
It all sounds awfully familiar to Transport’s “vacancy management plan” and the Establishment and Resource Governance Subcommittee spun up by the Firies, and those departments’ various responses.in one staff email that his team would “continue to scrutinise how we operate to find efficiencies and cost savings”.conflicting web of promises around fewer and/or lower taxes, no forced public sector sackings, and a lowering of the state’s debt. Watch this space.
There’s little news yet from the bargaining rooms of those workplace deals up for negotiation this year. According to an update to union members sent Circus’ way, the drawn-out teachers arbitration has had a new date set down for … August 24. That still leaves some time before the Queensland Industrial Relation Commission will consider the Queensland Teachers’ Union interim salary increase application, and the Education Department’s response.
“We are also in ongoing discussions with the Department of Education and the Crisafulli government regarding our State Budget Submission, which addresses issues that sit outside the arbitration process that can have a positive effect on the working lives of QTU members and improve state school education in Queensland,” the union told its members. The board in charge of the critical job of Queensland’s water and wastewater services is on the hunt for a new chief executive afteron Friday that Arnold would step away later this year after four years running the statutory authority that has an annual operating revenue of more than $1.6 billion.
Little detail has emerged from this team reshuffle, but it’s clearly a tricky time for a highly scrutinised department that is managing a public probe as well as the ongoing fallout from thewill this week step into the senior role in the department of state development. Marszalek arrives at 1WS after nearly three years with PR firm 89 Degrees East.is a reporter at Brisbane Times covering state politics, parliament and the public sector.
He has previously worked for newspapers in Tasmania and Brisbane community radio station 4ZZZ. Contact him securely on Signal @mattdennien.15is the News Director at the Brisbane Times. He is the former Queensland correspondent at The Australian Financial Review and has reported for a range of mastheads across the country, specialising on political and finance reporting.
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