On 11 February 2013, David Edwards, then the most senior civil servant in Queensland’s Department of State Development, Infrastructure and Planning, used $500 of taxpayer money to buy a “framed and personally signed tennis racquet” for a rich Indian industrialist.



The lucky recipient was Gunupati Venkata Krishna Reddy, whose company, GVK Hancock, is one of those looking to tap the huge coal reserves of Queensland’s Galilee Basin. Multi-millionaire GVK is also a bit of a tennis fan.

In the department’s gifts register, Edwards declared the purchase of the tennis racquet was “of benefit to the Queensland community” because it was “developing and maintaining working relationships between GVK and the Queensland government”.

There’s no detail as to who, exactly, provided the signature. While the gift was curious, it is entirely allowable and was properly declared.

But the tennis racquet might be seen as a totem to the kind of relationships and access that the fossil fuel industry has managed to engineer in Queensland.

A new report published by the Australia Institute – Too close for comfort: How the coal and gas industry get their way in Queensland – details the complex interactions between the coal and gas industries in Queensland and the state’s previous governments.

The report, researched and written by me and paid for by the institute, provides some flesh to hang on the bones of perceptions long-held by many in Queensland that the government and the mining industry are often indistinguishable from each other.



When a government awards a licence to exploit fossil fuels under the ground, those decisions represent the transfer of assets from public to private hands worth billions of dollars to the companies who win the day.

With that in mind, I think Queenslanders should expect the highest levels of accountability and transparency. But in the report, I argue that this does not exist. Not by a long chalk.

To compile the report, I went through documents released under Right to Information laws (Queensland’s version of freedom of information), expenses claims, ministerial diary entries, news reports, lobby register entries, documents tabled in parliament and political funding disclosures.

The report explores liaisons at sports events and restaurants, including the five times that Edwards met over food and wine with bosses of another Galilee coal aspirant, Adani.

But the issue isn’t the taxpayers money spent on meals or tennis racquets for mining bosses (even though some in the community may find it outrageous).

The issue is the level of access companies appear to have at the highest levels and the inescapable impression that the relationships are cosy.

In Queensland, like other states in Australia, the process of lobbying and access is opaque.

The official lobby registers are tokenistic because they manage to exclude any lobbying carried out by companies themselves or the major industry groups, such as the Queensland Resources Council.

Detailed in the report are examples of the revolving lobby door, where personnel move from jobs in government or political offices straight into service for the fossil fuel industry.

But why should the public be concerned about this revolving door? A 2010 report from the New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption spelled it out.

The corruption risk is that those who are powerful or wealthy enough to understand how government works or to engage the services of someone who can navigate the decision-making maze on their behalf will exploit their position to their advantage and to the detriment of the public interest.

The state’s burgeoning multibillion-dollar coal seam gas industry is also examined in the report – an area where the lobby door seems to spin particularly fast.

Then there are the political parties themselves, who have set up forums that allow executives to pay for access to ministers.

Former Queensland integrity commissioner Gary Crooke QC has described these arrangements as “bipartisan ethical bankruptcy”, noting that:

Not only is this behaviour wrong from the point of view of perceived and actual fairness, it is deeply flawed because it wilfully and arrogantly disregards a fundamental principle of our democracy: that those elected to govern must use the power entrusted to them for the benefit of the community. Simply put, the attributes of government have been temporarily reposed in those elected. These attributes are not their property and are not for sale to augment the coffers of sectional interest in the form of a political party.

The Australia Institute’s principal advisor Mark Ogge and research director Rod Campbell say in a foreword to the report:

This report is, as far as we know, the first to look deeply at a single jurisdiction, in this case Queensland, and attempt to rigorously compile a profile of the relationship between fossil fuel companies and governments and political parties, their interactions and their influence. The results are startling. Compiled together in this manner, individual incidents that might otherwise appear minor, become part of a systemic web of access and influence for fossil fuel companies. The larger view revealed is that of special advantages and pervasive pressure which casts long shadows across our democracy.

As I suggest in the report’s conclusion, improvements to accountability and transparency in the state can only take you so far.

Does simply declaring a gift or political donation make it an acceptable transaction?

Can a lobby register really be effective when it excludes most of the lobbying that actually goes on?

Can concerns about a lack of action on climate change and fossil fuel emissions ever be addressed in the public interest when you have an environment where governments, public officials and political staff have such close and secretive relationships with coal and gas industries?

In February, the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, wrote to independent MP Peter Wellington, now the speaker, promising an inquiry, to be carried out by the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission (QCCC), to investigate “links, if any, between donations to political parties and the awarding of tenders, contracts and approvals.”

Reacting to the publication of my report, campaign group Lock the Gate’s spokesperson Drew Hutton said:

I think many Queenslanders and the broader Australian community would be shocked at the revelations in the Australia Institute report on the unhealthy closeness of the relationship between the mining industry and the government.

Hutton suggested the terms of reference for a QCCC inquiry should be broadened to investigate “the influence of the mining industry and urgent changes to place better controls on lobbyists and constrain the ‘revolving door’ between mining and government”.

I agree with that.