Yahoo News The case for an Australian federal anti-corruption watchdog is more compelling after a troubling week
In the opening stages of the pandemic, before the second wave, when it looked like we’d flattened the curve of infections and the worst could be avoided, Australians seemed to harbour a quiet pride about our exceptionalism.
While the coronavirus response wasn’t perfect, by working to save lives and cushion people from the economic shock triggered by the pandemic, governments reminded citizens that politicians could do something other than plot mercilessly against one another, and fit up their opponents for everything that wasn’t right about the country. The officials and experts sitting behind governments also became more visible during the crisis, reinforcing the sense of an apparatus working for the common good.
This tableau of institutional competence is looking a bit more battered as the punishing months of 2020 grind on, and as politics-as-usual reasserts itself. As I write on Friday afternoon, Daniel Andrews is giving evidence to an inquiry examining what went wrong in hotel quarantine in Victoria, a managerial failure that seems to have sparked the second wave.
But despite the challenges, and missteps, Australia is still faring better at managing the calamities of the year than many other places, and polls suggest citizens retain a solid degree of confidence in the performance of our governments.
But before we dare to hope, before we succumb to the temptation of thinking Australian officialdom is more competent and public spirited than elsewhere, it pays to broaden our field of vision, because if we do that, the picture becomes more troubling.
Let’s start our Saturday stocktake with a land sale for an airport. The Australian National Audit Office this week trained a spotlight on a decision in 2018 by federal officials to purchase a 12.26 hectare triangle of land for just under $30m. The area known as the “Leppington triangle” is adjacent to the site for the western Sydney airport.
The ANAO decided to prod and poke this particular transaction because a year after buying the land, the department of infrastructure valued the land purchase at just $3m. Strange, right, that precipitous plunge in value? Enough to make an auditor curious.
The poking around resulted in the ANAO reconstructing a deliberative process where meetings were held in coffee shops without proper records, where conflict of interest procedures weren’t properly followed, where decision-makers weren’t appropriately advised, and where unorthodox valuation processes were adopted.
Unsurprisingly, the ANAO let rip. The whole case study “fell short of ethical standards”.
An unnamed official in the department, in fact, predicted this excoriation would happen. Making a record of approval to proceed with a valuation for the Leppington site in March 2017, the official noted in Sir Humphrey Appleby tones if the valuation activities, including the instructions provided and the land value advised, were ever disclosed publicly, this may “invite scrutiny over the department’s activities”. The commonwealth “may be criticised for its approach”.
The sorry story can be summarised this way. The government wanted to buy land owned by the Leppington Pastoral Company for the second Sydney airport. LPC was a reluctant seller. The parcel of land wasn’t needed, according to the ANAO, for another 32 years. But officials pushed through anyway. In the process they “overstated the identified benefits” (and, astonishingly) “did not quantify costs, and did not address risks” – which was a departure from the approved strategy.
For the record, the Leppington Pastoral Company is operated by billionaire brothers Tony and Ron Perich and the company has donated a total of $176,600 to the Liberals since 2002, including $58,800 in 2018-19.
The officials knew they were trying to buy land from “a sophisticated and well-resourced entity” with “access to substantial resources including legal and property advisors”. But in one of the more sharp asides in the ANAO report, the auditor notes there shouldn’t be special procedures for the powerful. It is not appropriate, the ANAO says, for the Australian government to offer “sophisticated and well-resourced” entities greater inducements to sell than it offers those without “access to substantial resources”.
The audit raises many intriguing questions. Why did officials behave this way? Were they just cowboys, extemporising in coffee shops at taxpayer expense? Were they under pressure to deliver a result for a government that wanted to present progress on a signature infrastructure project in western Sydney? In any case, one of the portfolio ministers at the time, Paul Fletcher, has made it clear this week he doesn’t accept responsibility, because he didn’t know what was going on.
A bit like Bridget McKenzie, the former sports minister, who gave out $100m in sports grants even though it wasn’t ever clear that the minister had the legal authority to be the decision-maker. Her officials at Sport Australia clearly knew that because in early June 2018, they recorded that their own legislation required the agency to approve the grants, not the minister.
The health department also had concerns about the legalities. In June 2018, a health department official warned a superior that McKenzie might need to formally order Sport Australia to designate her the decision-maker for grants programs. But the necessary legal guidance doesn’t seem to have been sought to clarify what needed to happen, and McKenzie said later officials should have raised any questions around legalities with her.
A bit like the robodebt debacle. The government has maintained that it believed its controversial welfare debt recovery scheme was legal until it received advice to the contrary in late 2019 after a challenge from Victoria Legal Aid. But new court documents suggest the government was, in essence, warned 76 times by a tribunal that Centrelink robodebts were not legally enforceable. A statement of claim associated with the class action contends that Alan Tudge, the human services minister, knew there were errors in the program in January 2017.
Speaking of Tudge, did he know that he had “engaged in conduct which can only be described as criminal” (to quote federal court justice Geoffrey Flick) when he failed to explain unlawfully depriving a 34-year-old Afghan asylum seeker of his liberty, leaving the man in detention for five days because he thought the tribunal that ordered his release got the law wrong? What an extraordinary judgment that was. The attorney general has defended Tudge and the commonwealth is mulling an appeal.
The point of raising these examples is not to make us all depressed, or to embark on a gratuitous Saturday morning walk of shame. If you are an optimist, you’d be tempted to conclude that there are problems in Australian governance, but our institutions are robust enough to ensure that failure, incompetence or malfeasance doesn’t remain hidden.
Andrews was before an inquiry on Friday afternoon because the evidence suggested the government had a case to answer, and the premier is prepared to have his decisions subjected to scrutiny – even if we remain none the wiser about who took the decision to use private security.
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The ANAO exposed shoddy process with Leppington and questionable process with sports grants. Tribunals and lawyers and community advocates persisted with whistleblowing on robodebt until the problems could not be ignored by the government any longer. The federal court called out a minister of the crown, reminding him that he “cannot place himself above the law”.
While there is reassurance in all of those things, we’d be mugs to think that our systems don’t need buttressing.
I said this back in March – which honestly feels like a century ago. I used to think we didn’t need a federal anti-corruption body because I was confident the institution I work in, the media, had the resources to keep powerful people in check. That’s no longer the case. We do our best, we work harder than we have ever worked, but we don’t have the resources we had during the golden age of journalism.
What needs fixing in our institutions is more complicated than having an anti-corruption watchdog active on the beat. I’m worried, for example, that public servants are too timid to be truthful with political masters making unreasonable demands, because the appetite isn’t there for frank and fearless advice. I’m worried that politicians are getting bolder with every passing year, and it is becoming harder to subject them to gravitational forces.
I’m worried about all kinds of complex problems, and how they might get fixed. But we can keep this much simple: the case for an anti-corruption watchdog is now more than obvious.
