Can the corruption watchdog restore trust in politics?

Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. We now have a national anti-corruption watchdog. But will it mean we’ll be able to trust politicians more than we currently do? And who will it go after first? Today, AJ Brown from Transparency International Australia on how the body will work and whether there are enough protections in place for those who expose wrongdoing. AJ there has been a fair bit going on in politics in the last few weeks that’s been sort of questionable. We’ve had the PwC scandal.

News report: Embattled consulting firm PwC has named and fired eight senior figures linked to its tax leak scandal.

Sam Hawley: And the dealings of the former minister during the Morrison years’ Stuart Robert in the headlines.

News report: Nine newspapers alleging Mr. Robert had secretly provided advice to Canberra lobbying firm Synergy 360 to help win lucrative government contracts.

Sam Hawley: You know, the public doesn’t like this sort of stuff, do they?

AJ Brown: Well, no, I think most citizens know that there could be corruption in government, and that’s one of the reasons why they support having strong institutions to combat that. So I don’t think it necessarily surprises people a lot of people when they do hear about these allegations. But what becomes critical is what’s the response?

Sam Hawley: Stuart Robert, he’s denied helping the company Synergy 360 and its clients win government work and he’s denied there was any conflict of interest.

Stuart Robert: I reject outright the accusations and the innuendo…

Sam Hawley: So this week the Albanese Government it honoured its election pledge when the National Anti-Corruption Commission was launched. It’s been headed by Paul Brereton and he’s really busy already, isn’t he?

AJ Brown: He certainly is.

News report: Australia’s long awaited National Anti-Corruption Commission, or NACC, began its work on the weekend and it’s already received more than 40 referrals for investigation.

AJ Brown: I think it’s a good sign that, you know, this this National Anti-Corruption Commission has been a long time coming. It’s been 18 years since Transparency International Australia first called for it. And for better or for worse, it became a very high profile political issue, a controversy at the last election over the Morrison government’s inability to, to put it kindly, I guess, to get an integrity or anti-corruption commission model into the Parliament.

Scott Morrison: They don’t want a Commonwealth Integrity Commission. They want a Commonwealth kangaroo court that can go and try and pursue political vendettas, Mr. Speaker.

AJ Brown: And I guess that public attention on the issue has helped make sure that the commencement of the National Anti-Corruption Commission is not going unnoticed.

Sam Hawley: Yeah. Day 1, 44 referrals, probably many more by now, I suppose.

AJ Brown: I suspect that there could be some more coming in. And crucially, the Commission is able to simply assess information that it becomes aware of from any source, including what’s in the public domain or what’s in the newspapers. So that’s a very good place to start.

Sam Hawley: Yeah. Okay. So Paul Brereton says it’s going to be a fearless but fair body.

Paul Brereton: First and foremost, the people of the Commonwealth are no longer prepared to tolerate practices which might once have been the subject of, if not acceptance, at least acquiescence…

Sam Hawley: What’s his priority going to be, AJ? How is he going to choose what the commission investigates first? There might be just a few nervous people out there, I would think.

AJ Brown: Well, I mean, possibly. And even if people aren’t nervous around government, both in politics, but even more importantly, right across the public sector, in the bowels of the bureaucracy, are just simply aware they’re thinking about, okay, what are our standards? Are we meeting them? What are what are our corruption risks? Have we got them covered?

Sam Hawley: How far back can Paul Brereton go? Can he look at historic cases?

AJ Brown: Yeah, he certainly can. If it’s a serious matter and it’s in the public interest to look at it, then he can look at it irrespective of when it occurred. If there are matters that are serious enough that he uncovers that are quite old, the assessment would be, well, does this continue to have current implications? I think there’ll be enough that is pretty contemporary and pretty current that means that the Commission does not have to get sidetracked by looking forensically for wrongdoing decades ago, that is not really going to change anything today.

Sam Hawley: Okay, let’s now look at this new body and how it’s going to work, because we’ve had a major case before ICAC, the New South Wales anti-corruption body, the former premier Gladys Berejiklian. She was found to have engaged in serious corruption.

News report: She was arguably one of the more popular premiers New South Wales has had. But history will now say that Gladys Berejiklian was found to be seriously corrupt by the ICAC.

Sam Hawley: That was a very public investigation, wasn’t it?

AJ Brown: It was and controversially so I think.

Gladys Berejiklian: I’m a very private person and I didn’t feel the relationship had sufficient substance for it to be made public.

Counsel Assisting the NSW ICAC: What did you mean by him always being your numero uno?

Gladys Berejiklian: I think, I think what I would have meant that there is, that in my personal life I placed importance on on how I felt about him.

AJ Brown: Not so much that a public inquiry and public hearings were held because I think people now accept that provided there are safeguards in place to make sure that public hearings are not overused or not used in the wrong way, because this is not a court, it’s like a royal commission hearing. But the bottom line is that it’s a very good test because on one hand, although the media and lots of people might be interested in other people’s personal relationships, it’s not actually the personal nature of the relationship which is the issue. It’s the relationship. And it might have been another relationship. It might have been a business relationship. It might have been a different family member. It might have been a political donor. It’s the fact that there was a conflict of interest, which was actually, I think, properly and necessarily the focus of the New South Wales Commission’s public inquiry.

Sam Hawley: Yeah, it does make for interesting viewing, that’s for sure. Sort of like a soap opera. But this national body, it will be much more private. But that’s been controversial too, hasn’t it? Because the Greens, the crossbench, they think these things need to be public. It’s in the public interest for them to be public.

AJ Brown: Whether the new national commission operates fundamentally differently remains to be seen because on one hand its legislation has an additional test of exceptional circumstances, but that’s a test for the Commission to decide. And so far the indications, the initial indications from the commission are that it’s going to take a fairly broad approach to that which is positive.

Paul Brereton: We will conduct public hearings in accordance with the legislation when the circumstances and the public interest justify an exception to the general rule that they be held in private…

AJ Brown: It’s something that people will need to watch. Are there cases going on where really things should be, as in the Berejiklian matter and other similar matters, that the public is only likely to really have confidence if this evidence is heard in public, so that there’s no question that things are being swept under the carpet or that senior politicians are getting some kind of special treatment. If there’s that suspicion, then there’ll be another debate about whether, in fact the commission’s powers are flexible enough to allow it to hold public hearings when it really needs to.

Sam Hawley: Anyone can really refer matters to the commission AJ, but there is concern, isn’t there, for whistleblowers. How will they be protected? Because whistleblowers are key for bodies like this?

AJ Brown: Absolutely. And we know that from history and we know that from recent history. It’s a big conundrum. The government has made some initial improvements to whistleblower protections for public servants, for federal public servants to help accompany getting the NACC in place. And the NACC legislation itself is quite strong, at least in terms of criminalising reprisals against any person who provides information to it, whether they’re a whistleblower from inside the system or any member of the public. What is really missing is that none of the whistleblower protections really have an effective enforcement framework behind them at the moment, and the NACC can’t be expected to do that, which is why there’s a debate about and a strong argument and hopefully a strong commitment from the Government to look at establishing a whistleblower protection authority. But employees from the private sector or the not for profit sector who might well need to blow the whistle, if they’re blowing the whistle on a company other than themselves, for example, a competitor, which is very often the best way that information comes forward. It’s a very big grey area, whether they would get full whistleblower protections at the moment.

Sam Hawley: And I guess there’s a question over whether this body could become, you know, a ground for political witch hunts.

Barnaby Joyce: The Greens have already started politicising it. I think you’ve got to be really careful before elections weaponising things, and especially if later on it doesn’t quite stack up the way you thought.

Sam Hawley: How do we know that this won’t just get bogged down in politically motivated referrals?

AJ Brown: Well, the commission itself, Commissioner Brereton, has fired a big warning shot on that, which is great, to the public and to politicians to say that it’s up to the commission to decide what it will investigate and how in the end and any attempts to weaponise complaints for political gain will have to pass quite a few tests before the Commission gets drawn into that.

Paul Brereton: We will assess every matter that is referred to us to see whether it is within our jurisdiction to see whether the conduct alleged could amount to corrupt conduct. And to decide whether it should be investigated.

AJ Brown: I think the key thing is that we’ve already seen that the government is very hesitant to make referrals of its own, and that’s really appropriate. It’s less of a problem if opposition or minor parties make referrals because part of their job is actually to hold government to account. The biggest problem becomes the use of the fact that somebody has made a complaint and then sailing into the public domain saying they’ve made a complaint is what does the damage. Anybody can actually do that.

Sam Hawley: AJ In the end, this is about improving trust in government. Do you think this body will do that? Will it make us, you know, trust politicians more as voters?

AJ Brown: Well, I think it should and it can. I think, you know, many people are worried that, okay, it’s going to find corruption and that evidence of corruption is going to make people think that everybody is corrupt. But I think the average citizen is a bit more savvy than that. I think the average citizen knows that there could be corruption at any time, and they should be reassured that there’s a very strong, well-resourced, capable agency that is now on patrol and can resolve allegations one way or another much more satisfactorily than what we had before, and that people should be able to sleep at night a little bit better knowing that there is a properly equipped body to actually do that job on behalf of them as citizens to to maintain that vigilance.

Sam Hawley: AJ Brown is a professor of public policy and law at Griffith University and a board member of Transparency International Australia. The Greens have already outlined they have a top ten list of matters they’ll refer to the watchdog over coming weeks, including the former minister Stuart Robert. The commission says it’s now being contacted hundreds of times online and by phone. This episode was produced by Veronica Apap, Flint Duxfield, and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is David Coady. Over the weekend, catch This Week with Sarah Dingle, she’ll be looking at Vietnam’s ban on the new Barbie movie. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again on Monday with Mel Clarke joining you for the week while I take a break. Thanks for listening.