The Australian: Australia: Wednesday, January 03, 2018.
More than 180
pages of secret correspondence between senior Electrical Trades Union officials
and Palaszczuk government minister Mark Bailey have been unearthed on his
private email account.
The discovery
of the correspondence, at a time when the then energy minister a long-time ETU
member was being lobbied by the union over a number of pay and industry issues has
raised further questions about his claims in parliament that the account was
only for private use. Last year, he told parliament: “In relation to that
private email account, I have made it very clear that it was a private email
account I used for private purposes.’’
A Right to
Information application by The Australian for correspondence between Mr Bailey
and ETU officials on his private email account mangocube6@yahoo.co.uk has found
“182 pages relevant to the scope’’ in a just a seven-month period, covering
July 1, 2016, to February 1, 2017.
The
correspondence came at a time Mr Bailey was under union pressure to block a
proposed merger of electricity industry superannuation funds in which they ETU
officials would have lost their board positions and as the minister was
restructuring the state-owned electricity industry.
The merger
was later abandoned, and late last year it was revealed the ETU secured a pay
rise from the government for its members up to 1.2 per cent higher than other
state employees.
Mr Bailey had
previously refused to publicly release any correspondence with ETU bosses, who
had pushed Annastacia Palaszczuk to appoint him energy minister, and then
deleted his private email account after his office received an RTI request by
The Australian, sparking a corruption probe.
In September,
the Crime and Corruption Commission cleared him of corruption, but chairman
Alan MacSporran QC said Mr Bailey’s “very foolish” use and deletion of his
private account was a clear breach of the ministerial handbook and a technical
breach of the Public Records Act, which could not be punished because of a gap
in the law.
Mr MacSporran
said the timeline suggested Mr Bailey “either knew or should have known” about
the RTI request before deleting the account.
The probe
found Mr Bailey had deleted more than 600 (unspecified) work-related emails
containing public records without proper legal authority.
The new RTI
application was made following the CCC findings.
In a letter,
the Queensland government’s RTI officer said the new application had elicited
182 relevant pages from the account over the seven-month period. The ETU is
now objecting to the release of the documents.
“On 29
November 2017, I received a response from the ETU advising that they object to
disclosure of all 182 pages of information on the basis that the information is
exempt or its disclosure would, on balance, be contrary to the public
interest,’’ the RTI officer said in the letter.
Energy
Queensland, which operates the state-owned electricity network and employs
thousands of ETU members, has objected to the release of seven pages of the
documents on the grounds that “it comprises information subject to legal
professional privilege’’.
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