The National Anti-Corruption Commission has recently issued its first substantial, if highly redacted report clearing a former Department of Home Affairs officer of any suspicion of corruption over a million dollars or more of payments from her son, himself a former Home Affairs officer who had obtained, without an open tender, a contract to provide garrison services on Manus Island worth about $600 million.
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Nothing sus, says the NACC. The payments, the NACC has found, were to help her and her boyfriend, another senior Home Affairs officer, purchase a small flat and later a big one.
Most of the relevant investigation took place before the NACC was formally established. Before then potentially corrupt conduct by public servants in Home Affairs was investigated by the Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity. The NACC took over its role and functions, with a much-enhanced jurisdiction in the middle of last year. The NACC did some further process work and submitted the report under Commissioner Paul Brereton's name. The report itself may not be a FAQ sample of the NACC style. Except that we otherwise have, so far, little insight into what that style is, what investigative methods it uses, and what confidence should be reposed in its findings.
We know now that the NACC has the same liking for secrecy as the Public Service Commission (PSC).
What we do see gives very little room for optimism about the commission's work. Or about how Brereton and his fellow commissioners see their obligation to transparency and the public interest. Or whether we should persist with the secrecy model the government adopted (and which the NACC seems to have embraced with relish).
This builds on the doubts about the commission's comprehensive mismanagement of its first important reference, in refusing to investigate matters referred to it by the royal commissioner into the robodebt fiasco. It did not even seem that the commission even read the reference properly, since it seemed to think that the royal commissioner had simply sent over a copy of already published findings, which the NACC saw no need to duplicate. In fact, as even a cursory look would have revealed, she had forwarded a secret chapter containing extra material (some out of her remit) that suggested potential corruption by a score or more of named people, including a minister. None of that material had been in her published report.
It seemed to me robodebt royal commissioner Justice Catherine Holmes was implicitly suggesting criminal charges, not secretive and entirely unaccountable disciplinary proceedings by the Public Service Commission under commissioner Gordon de Brouwer.
To prove its complete independence from anything or anyone, especially the royal commission, the PSC's own secret and unaccountable investigations exonerated some of those accused of corruption offences. But without public reasons or explanations or reference to which individuals were involved, we do not know who, how, why, or what fresh evidence showed Justice Holmes to be wrong. No doubt the Star Chamber contained decent women and men of integrity. But justice of the sort required can be done only in the open.
We do not know how "new" evidence came to be preferred to material on the royal commission record. Commissioner Holmes, that is to say, is another condemned without trial, like the hundreds of thousands of robodebt victims. No one could be confident that the PSC judges were disinterested - as witnessed by the strenuous efforts to put a shroud over everything. The commissioner's explanations for compulsive secrecy already give us an idea about his judgement and priorities.
The PSC Star Chamber named and verbally condemned two departmental secretaries, each now out of the PSC jurisdiction, and thus going without penalty of any sort. It found a very few slightly more junior senior officers guilty of breaches of the code of conduct. Others had now exited the public service and again escaped........