The soprano state

The latest scandals gripping the Bligh government reveal the damaging consequences of a growing public sector with its tentacles of influence stretched across the state.

The catalogue of shady dealings between former Labor ministers, staffers, business interests and the current government shows that there has been no better time to be a lobbyist than the present.

The former state Treasurer Terry Mackenroth and former federal minister Con Sciacca were reported to have shared a $500,000 "success fee" for helping BrisConnections secure a contract to build the Brisbane airport road tunnel.

The chair of BrisConnections, Trevor Rowe, was recently forced to resign due to conflict of interest concerns with his additional role as chair of the state-owned Queensland Investment Corporation.

These are also on top of the conviction and jailing of former minister Gordon Nuttall for corruptly receiving payments totalling $360,000 from mining interests.

Now questions have emerged about the role of current state ministers and the Premier's chief-of-staff, Mike Kaiser, in lobbying for a $1.5 billion resort development on the Sunshine Coast.

On the twentieth anniversary of his landmark report on corruption in Queensland, Tony Fitzgerald summarised the problems:  "Access can now be purchased, patronage is dispensed, mates and supporters are appointed and retired politicians exploit their political connections to obtain "success fees" for deals between business and government."

The damaging consequences of these insidious practices for Queensland's reputation as a destination for private investment cannot be stressed enough.

Businesses that choose to pay a lobbyist for special access to ministers risk diverting their entrepreneurial energies and incomes into a veritable minefield of uncertainty, not to mention scandal if caught out.

On the other hand, investors that refuse to toe the line of jumping on the "mates merry-go-round" risk facing significant regulatory delays and other policy obstructions affecting their ventures.

Whichever way one looks at it, business loses out as does the interest of promoting market-led development in the state as a whole.

For her part, Premier Anna Bligh has announced a grab bag of measures designed to clamp down on perceptions that the sunshine state is turning into the soprano state.

These include banning success fees for lobbyists, withholding state Labor MPs from pay-per-view meetings and fundraising events, referral of certain allegations of impropriety involving former ministers to the Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) and a green paper concerning political fundraising and ministerial codes of conduct.

Even so, the initiatives appear to smack of the "too little, too late" syndrome, coming after years of political denials that the unseemly connections between certain business and government interests ever existed.

It seems optimistic to think that these problems, as significant as they are, can be resolved completely by pushing through even more laws and regulations.

If certain interests think that it remains possible to entice government to make more expedient decisions in their favour, and weak government ministers and officials are willing to oblige them, graft risks re-emerging in new and unforseen forms.

Premier Bligh's proposals appear to address the symptoms only, and not the fundamental causes of the problem -- the growing size and scope of government, and the opportunities they present for interests to gain specific privileges at public expense.

Government spending in Queensland has ballooned from $16.4 billion in 1998-99 to $36.4 billion last financial year, with more of the same expected over time as the state budget goes into deficit freefall.

The number of pages of legislation in Queensland -- a common proxy for the amount of regulation faced by business and the community alike -- has grown from 2,584 pages in 1988 to 4,675 pages in 2008.

What this public sector growth effectively means is that the potential for influence-peddling and back-scratching deals dramatically increase over time.

The risk is that practices such as fast-tracked regulatory approvals, selective procurement contracts, customised tax concessions, streamlined project permissions and pork-barrelled spending become more commonplace as government becomes larger.

The best way to stamp out corruption in all its forms is to heed Lord Acton's age-old warning that "power tends to corrupt;  absolute power corrupts absolutely", and accordingly reduce the size and power of government.

With far fewer regulations, taxes and expenditure programs at the disposal of government ministers and their officials to dispense political favours, Queenslanders would have far greater comfort in knowing that their state is a clean one.

ADVERTISEMENT