Last week, Australia’s powerful federal corruption watchdog released a report clearing a controversial federal government offshore processing contractor of wrongdoing.

But like many things in the secretive and shadowy world of corruption probes, the National Anti-Corruption Commission report into Paladin didn’t tell the whole story.

Paladin founding director and major shareholder Craig Thrupp.

It invited questions about whether the NACC is performing to the expectations of the voters and politicians that championed its creation by the Albanese government.

The first thing to know about the NACC inquiry that cleared Home Affairs contractor Paladin over dealings between its founder Craig Thrupp and his mother, a Home Affairs official, is that it is not truly a NACC inquiry.

The probe was inherited from a predecessor, the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity, which was absorbed by the NACC upon its formation in 2023.

It brought with it a dismal history of mostly inconsequential inquiries (the agency did expose a significant customs corruption scandal with federal police help) and a backlog of investigations into matters that, as it turned out, didn’t involve much, if any, corruption.

The scandal of ACLEI is not that it took on flaky probes, it is that it was hamstrung by jurisdictional constraints (it couldn’t investigate politicians or government contractors........

© Brisbane Times