JILL BOTTRALL: When I worked as a political staffer, Kevin Foley would often appear in my office, walk back and forth and say: “What’s going on? Tell me something I don’t know.”

Foley was a Minister with shark-like habits. He was always on the move and hungry for new information. In politics, information is power. It’s a form of currency that’s valuable and tradable. The more that’s learned, gleaned, exchanged and banked, the better equipped an MP is to do their job. Knowledge greases the wheels of politics.

Foley had an acute paranoia about not knowing stuff. As a former chief-of-staff to Minister and then Premier Lynn Arnold, he watched the State Bank Royal Commission lance a boil that poisoned 10 years of good, stable, dependable government. From tip to toe, the State Bank disaster was all about a Government’s failure to ask questions.

Ministerial staffers trade in information, all day every day, on behalf of their bosses. This is partly because under our Westminster system, Ministers are just as culpable for what they don’t know as for what they do. Fair or unfair, the buck stops at the top. That’s why it’s important Ministers and their staff keep asking questions, gathering information and prioritising and organising facts, statistics and data.

The continuing pressure now being borne by two of the Premier’s staff over the school sexual assault issue is entirely understandable and the concerns raised by school parents and the Opposition are justifiable.

Both staffers are good people. They’re professional, smart, dedicated and absolutely loyal to the Premier. But as staffers those attributes counted for little when they did not identify and then take an active interest in a serious issue that concerned their Minister and the Government. Jay Weatherill has admitted he was let down by them when, as Education Minister, they failed to pass on information to him about a serious child sexual assault in a western suburbs school.

In this case, their behavior went beyond issues of negligence. Their real failure was in demonstrating a lack of interest in the subject.

The nub of this issue has rested on the fact that the two Ministerial staff members were assured in an email that parents at a school were being informed of the arrest of a man for the sexual assault of “children” at a school. The email was incorrect. The school’s parents were not being informed, and the arrest related to an assault on a single child. Nonetheless the subsequent Debelle inquiry found that the two staffers were entitled to assume that the matter was being handled properly by the department.

Debelle’s finding on this issue misses the point of the staffer’s role and the action they should have taken from the time the email arrived in their inbox.

Failing to inform the Minister was bad enough, but worse was their apparent lack of curiosity and concern for the “children” and their parents. They just didn’t ask. Anything.

It could be said that common decency alone should have prompted them to inquire after the children. They should have asked questions about their mental and physical state, about whether they were receiving appropriate counselling, who was providing it, was the department funding it and if not, why not; whether the parents had been offered help and support. These should have been the very first queries fired off upon receipt of the initial email. That neither staff member, according to the public record at least, appears to have followed up in terms of a basic display of compassion and empathy for the victims and their families seems incomprehensible.

The information in that email should have been ringing alarm bells from the minute it was opened. The lack of action ultimately contributed to the establishment of a Royal Commission which highlighted failures that effectively poisoned a decade of hard work to make child protection a central issue of importance to the Rann/Weatherill Government. It started with the Robyn Layton inquiry in early 2002 and continued on with the creation of the Mullighan Royal Commission, the Office of Children’s Guardian and millions of dollars invested in child protection programs.

Last week, Opposition Leader Steven Marshall summed it up on radio with these words: “…this is just a catalogue of incompetence and ignorance and a really casual attitude for child protection …. they’ve been in office for 11 years, they’re asleep on this issue, now all of a sudden they’ve woken up from their slumber and they want to take action on child protection.”

And there it was.

Eleven years in the assiduous pursuit of reforming, improving and strengthening child protection policies – largely undermined by a failure to identify a problem in a single email and ask the right questions.

There are still plenty of questions being asked about the school sex assault issue. The problem for Jay Weatherill is that it’s not him and his staff doing the asking – and it never was. So, tell me something I didn’t know.

Jill Bottrall is a communications consultant. She was an adviser to former Premier Mike Rann. A version of this article was first published on her website.