The warning signs of the Australian National Anti-Corruption Commission’s ineffectiveness were there from the start. The enacting legislation that brought it into existence, for instance, limit public hearings to “exceptional circumstances”, a reminder that the authorities are not exactly happy to let that large expanse of riffraff known as the public know how power functions in Australia.

Then came its first major decision on June 6. Pundits were on tenterhooks. What would this body, charged with enhancing the “integrity in the Commonwealth public sector by deterring, detecting and preventing corrupt conduct involving Commonwealth public officials” do about referrals concerning six public officials from the Royal Commission into the Robodebt Scheme? The spiritually crushing automated debt assessment and recovery program, had, after all, been responsible for using, in the words of Commission report, “patently unreliable methodology as income averaging, without other evidence, to determine entitlement to benefit.” From its inception as a pilot program in 2015 till its conclusion in May 2020, a reign of bureaucratic terror was inflicted on vulnerable Australians.

The answer from Australia’s newly minted body was one of stern indifference. While the NACC was aware of the impact of the scheme “on individuals and the public, the seniority of the officials involved, and the need to ensure that any corruption issue is fully investigated” the commission felt that “the conduct of the six public officials in connection with the Robodebt Scheme has already been fully explored by the Robodebt Royal Commission and extensively discussed in its final report.”

In other words, there would be no consequences for the individuals in question, no public exposure of their misdeeds, no sense of satisfaction for victims of the scheme that their harms had been truly redressed. In refusing to act on the referrals, the NACC had, in the words of former NSW Supreme Court Judge Anthony Whealy KC, now chair for the Centre for Public........

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