When it comes to corruption we just don’t get it. We’re good at many things (care spread through community operates at a level unknown in the US), but understanding corruption is not one of them.

The Australian Institute of Administrative Law annual jamboree in July this year produced some pearls of prescience, including the following:

“How people respond to ethical dilemmas is determined more by organisational culture than by policy and protocol. Culture is the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of humans, which is transmitted from one generation to another. It establishes accepted bounds and decision points for behaviour … Culture is what people do, not what formal policies might tell them to do.” 

So it is we have a Prime Minister who when Minister for Transport accepted upgrades from Qantas on private flights, and when challenged, stiffly intoned that all were declared on the Register of pecuniary interests.  

Not a clue that the issue is not whether the upgrades were declared or not, but that he was the minister at the time charged with regulating the industry which Qantas dominated, and still does.

The Opposition set out to make much of this and only revealed its own ineptitude. Leader Dutton tut-tutted over the Albanese upgrades, announcing his own absolution in terms that he never took Qantas upgrades, but he asked for and received a free flight on Gina Rinehart’s private jet. 

Dutto sniffed that this was saving taxpayers from having to cough for his airfares and those of accompanying staff. He obviously thinks, perhaps with reason, that we’re all simpering idiots. 

No Pete, the issue is not saving taxpayers your airfares, the issue is that the ride from La Rinehart is not ultimately free: she expects favours in return, and you as a putative political leader of the country put us all in hock to this ludicrously wealthy iron ore heiress. 

Favours forthcoming 

The shade of the late Paul Finn must be feeling queasy.  It’s now over three decades since Finn with others, including Michael Barker (the two later brothers in arms on the Federal Court) wrote special sections of the WA Inc Royal Commission Report, dealing with relationships between those in government and commerce. 

They examined a “gift” of over $900,000 from John Roberts of Multiplex to the ALP in WA, following which the State Labor government leased the Old Swan Brewery site, worth a motza, to Multiplex on a peppercorn rent – money was never donated to politicians or their parties devoid of strings. 

The donor always expected a quid pro quo, no matter that nothing was said at the point of “donation”.

Needless to say, neither the politicians nor most of the media get the issues at stake. The federal Opposition thought it was on Easy Street when it opened the bowling against Albo for taking upgrades from his mate Joyce, but in a trice the Shadow Transport Minister, the already tarnished Bridget McKenzie, was hobbling to the sidelines to ask three airlines for details of what upgrades she might have received. 

This was the woman who as Minister for Sport sat on a sport grants committee that among other rorts allocated funds to her gun club. At the time she remained “adamant that her intervention meant more communities benefited from funds”. 

McKenzie: guns and money

Conflict? What conflict? In the present imbroglio the fair Bridget snarled at Patricia Karvelas of the ABC that the Dutton’s flight on Air Reinhart contained no demand for favours, as the Coalition loved the resource extraction industry, which funded the ABC. So there!

McKenzie is so obtuse that she can’t see issues beyond “saving taxpayers a bill”, while stockpiling an unknown regulatory debt to Rinehart, yet it defies belief that former sex-cop in the Queensland Police, Peter Dutton, can act the ingenue.  

If there’s one thing we’ve seen in recent years around the resource extraction industry, it’s the importance of getting favourable regulatory decisions from government in environmental and heritage matters. Such decisions spell life or death for resource development. As Alastair McAlpine, treasurer of the British Tory Party expressed it so neatly (Once a Jolly Bagman, 1997 p171):

“… if you did business in … Australia, it was important to know politicians … Entrepreneurs today are well advised to study the character of the politicians and the civil servants in the country where they have interests. Today, so much of industry and finance is controlled by regulations. Politicians can enforce them or relax them, invent new ones or abolish old ones just as they please, without going anywhere near the parliaments to which they have been elected.”

It takes an outsider (de Tocqueville in America) to pick up the essence of a new nation, and McAlpine tuned right into the Ozzie zeitgeist. 

de Tocqueville: picking up the essence

Typically, the very heart of our attempt at national level to deal with corruption, the newly minted National Anti-Corruption Commission, fell at the first hurdle when its esteemed Commissioner, sometime, and well regarded NSW Supremo, Paul Brereton, failed to see that he needed to do more than clear the room for eight minutes while his Commission determined what action, if any, it would take against a leading participant in the Robodebt scandal. 

Brereton candidly announced that he would not make the decision himself, as he had a “close association with” Referred Person 1 (as some reports coyly refer to Kathryn Campbell, the most senior of the six persons referred to the NACC for examination arising from the Robodebt Royal Commission), and she “was well known to me”.

Turns out they played a duet as very modern Major Generals in the Army Reserve. But nothing deterred, Brereton involved himself in the fate of all six of the referrals right down to tailoring the ultimate media statement, allowing for his eight minute abstention in respect of Campbell from the one hour long Commission meeting on October 19, 2023.  

The independent inspector of the NACC, Gail Furness SC, asked retired Federale, Alan Robertson, to report on the apparent conflict of interest. 

Robbo and Furness were less than impressed with Brereton’s continued involvement in the decision making regarding Referred Person 1, with additional chiding for the attempt by the Commissioner to downplay his relationship with the object of calumny (as she is in the public eye) after his intervention came under scrutiny. 

On parade: Brereton and Campbell

It was of course Brereton who delivered the portentous quote at the head of this piece, in July 2024. It’s worth looking hard at that paragraph and asking what is required to shake off the “she’ll be right, mate” approach to public accountability in this country.  

Brereton was dead right to refer to ingrained culture, but his own failings, arising not from mala fides but rather ineptitude, shine a searchlight on this problem. 

I’m reminded of the story from a Law School with which I had an association many years ago, where a professor headed a selection committee. 

His wife ended up on the final list of three candidates. The professor very properly recused himself from the interview with his wife, but then sat on the interviews with the other two candidates.  

The wife got the job. We just don’t get it, and changing a national culture is a very big ask.  Yet, we did get a lot of people off fags with a public campaign – perhaps we can turn the ship around on public accountability and conflicts of interest.