Senate estimates are always good for theatre, but with the election nearby and the currency of some high-profile issues last week, passions — real or conjured — were running high.

It kicked off in late February with Michaelia Cash and James McGrath raging at Penny Wong’s refusal to answer any questions about the Dural caravan incident. Wong was at the financial and public administration hearings, not as Foreign Affairs minister but representing the prime minister. She told them she was taking all Dural-related questions on notice. So unhappy were Cash and McGrath that they ate into their own time talking over the top of each other at Wong — not to mention over Wong herself — while she stuck to her line that the Federal Police regarded it as an operational matter and thus not suitable for public comment. 

At one stage Cash demanded of Wong, “Do you yourself know when the prime minister was first briefed on the Dural caravan affair?”, forcing Wong to explain to Cash that she was not there as Penny Wong but as Anthony Albanese. Later, McGrath and Cash turned their frustration on PM&C officials, who were similarly unhelpful.

There was more tension when the Australian Federal Police appeared before Tuesday’s legal and constitutional affairs committee to face the same line of questioning and provide the same lack of response. At one stage, AFP commissioner Reece Kershaw responded to opposition Senator James Paterson’s probing with “you’re not a police officer investigating these crimes. Maybe we could bring you along one day and we could do ride-alongs to show you deeper about the thinking that goes into how deep we go into our thinking about operational strategies and how we actually gather the evidence to be able to prosecute someone down the track, not just disrupt them.”

Ouch. Of course, the head of the AFP has more licence to be blunt to senators than most public servants — politicians live in fear of being shown to be undermining police. Most witnesses attending Senate estimates have to feign a certain obsequiousness.

The hypocrisy in all this is that if Penny Wong were still in opposition, she would be making exactly the same demands as Cash. In fact, Cash quoted Wong verbatim from 2019, saying “I accept that the prejudicing of an ongoing investigation is a reasonable ground of public interest immunity claim in respect of a request for documents — it is not a kind of blanket response that deals with everything. The harm needs to be specified. The basis of the assertion needs to be made.”

Indeed. And all this over if and when the prime minister was briefed about the discovery of a caravan that may have been a prelude to a mass casualty attack — or might have been an obvious set-up involving decades-old explosives.

Personally, I have a particular gamekeeper-turned-poacher annoyance about all this. As a public servant, I was happy to play my part in minimising transparency for the Howard government, finding ways to block or curtail freedom of information requests, to minimise the amount of hard information made public, and draft talking points for occasions like Senate estimates, designed to be as uninformative as possible. I also watched other public servants get bullied at estimates, usually by Coalition senators, in pursuit of ideological agendas. But more recently, I’ve been the one making the FOI requests, trawling estimates transcripts for information, and, on more than one occasion, providing questions for senators and MPs — and not always non-government ones — to ask in committee hearings. I thus speak from a position of experience, if not consistency.

It’s true that estimates occasionally produces worthwhile information on important topics. It does so more often when Labor is in opposition — for whatever reason, Labor senators tend to be more effective at the forensic stuff than Coalition senators, even if no one currently in the upper house can hold a candle to John Faulkner or Robert Ray in their prime. 

But the entire system of estimates — an expensive system that occupies considerable parliamentary time every year and calls on substantial APS resources for officials and ministers to be properly prepared — is fatally flawed, for precisely the reason demonstrated by Cash quoting Wong’s demand that operational reasons not be a catch-all excuse for not answering questions. If the Coalition wins the next election, it will be Cash stoutly defending the need to take on notice questions impinging on operational AFP matters, and expanding that need to encompass as wide a range of questions as possible (Wong, one feels, won’t be there to quote back at her her own words — at 56, it seems unlikely she’ll be sticking around for another stint in opposition).

This fatal flaw in estimates arises from the fact that under the system of government we were lumbered with by the British, the executive is based in the legislative branch — the government is an emergent property, if you like, of Parliament. In contrast, in the US (and to a lesser extent France, depending on which way you read the French constitution), the executive is separate from Parliament. That enables greater accountability of the executive — even congressmen and women of the party holding the presidency are not in government, and may not even be in majority in their own chamber. Congressmen and women might pull their punches a little if they want to spare the White House embarrassment, but they have little motivation to take it easy on federal public servants no matter who is in office. 

Of course, that’s how it should work, and how it’s worked in the past. It’s not working that way currently, because Congress is so cowed by Trump and Musk that it is abdicating its role in the separation of powers.

In contrast, Senate estimates are dominated not by the demands of scrutiny and accountability but by partisan warfare between people either in the executive branch or hoping to replace the current executive branch members. It’s only the minor parties and independents who are really committed to accountability because they know they’ll never be in government.

Public servants are just cannon fodder in this partisan warfare. The assumed approach is to ensure the executive is embarrassed as little as possible, regardless of the public interest in revealing embarrassing matters. It’s a frustrating process all around, especially if you think greater transparency serves the public interest. 

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This article first appeared in The Mandarin.