“We were disappointed [by] the first two appointments that have been made by the treasurer. He completely ignored the recruitment process, the merit-based rigorous process that is laid out in the review,” opposition treasury spokesperson Angus Taylor told the ABC this morning, in response to the appointment of former Fair Work Commission president Iain Ross and former AustralianSuper chairwoman Elana Rubin, both of whom have trade union links, to the Reserve Bank board.
He also said the RBA board “plainly” needed “intellectual diversity”.
Taylor — celebrating just over three years clean since his last career-threatening calamity, after developing a crippling addiction to them in 2019 — is shocked, just shocked, to see there may be some ideological leaning in the new government’s appointment process. Man, wait till he hears about what happened to the appointment process while he was in government.
Most notably, over nearly a decade of Coalition rule, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal was the recipient — via a notoriously opaque selection process — of more than 80 appointments that had links to the Liberal Party, a Busby Berkeley kaleidoscope of former politicians, staffers and candidates.
Then there was the Coalition’s commitment to “intellectual diversity”, never more apparent than in its approach to the Fair Work Commission, where somewhere in the region of 30 consecutive appointments had employer-friendly backgrounds (not to mention the former Liberal MPs).
When he was energy minister, Taylor himself approached the make-up of his “Expert Panel Examining Opportunities for Further Abatement” — whose job was to advise him on new opportunities to reduce emissions — by handpicking experts representing a hugely diverse collection of Australia’s biggest emitters. This was only made public thanks to a freedom of information request from RenewEconomy.
Anyway, we look forward to the Coalition bringing the same commitment to impartiality and independence in opposition it showed when it had the reins.
