Keeping government accountable is the problem of our time. The people do not trust politicians or parliament; police have too often been caught out lying and stealing; judges have lost their mystique. If the institutions of a modern representative democracy can’t be trusted, what then? We create statutory watchdogs.
But in February, two of them were taken to the pound.
The NSW Police Integrity Commission (PIC) failed, after its three-year, $8 million ‘Operation Malta’ inquiry, to find any bottoms to boot or recommendations to make. This, despite 51 witnesses giving evidence about certain officers who were opposed to the reform of the state’s police force. The Police Minister announced a ‘review’ while denying this would see the PIC put down.
In Western Australia the Police Minister, Attorney-General and Premier jointly released the interim recommendation of the Royal Commission into Police Corruption and announced the abolition of WA’s Anti-Corruption Commission. Their announcement followed remarkably frank revelations from a ‘rollover’ detective, known as ‘L5’, who named some 40 corrupt officers at the Commission. The Commission was the West’s third official inquiry into police-related misconduct since the 1970s. None of them found anything. The government will set up a new Corruption and Crime Commission, virtually a standing royal commission, by the end of August, when the Royal Commission ends.
The WA Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) was doomed from its birth in 1996. It never had the powers it needed—and repeatedly asked for—to be effective. It couldn’t hold public hearings, grant indemnities to witnesses, make findings or initiate prosecutions—it could only ‘refer’ to other authorities. It couldn’t even bark. Its stringent ‘confidentiality’ provisions were thought by its chairman, Terry O’Connor qc, to prevent the ACC from making any public comment on its work, despite a ‘public education’ duty in its governing Act. So when the ACC was hounded not only by WA’s powerful Police Union (which accuses ACC investigators of zealotry, bias and incompetence), but also by local media—especially the monopoly daily tabloid, the West Australian, and a local commercial radio station whose morning talkback host is a former editor of the West Australian—it couldn’t fight back. As well, most MPs, ministers, shadow ministers and members of the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee (the ‘watchdog on the watchdog’) thought the ACC was not only unaccountable but arrogant and ineffective.
Little wonder: the ACC never had the operational information it needed because of ‘confidentiality’.
Yet virtually all of the Royal Commission’s