Greens face integrity test
After championing public hearings of the National Anti-corruption Commission with such zest, all eyes are on Greens leader Adam Bandt to see if he seeks the spotlight for himself and his Senator’s love life with an ex-bikie with the same glee.
The Greens campaigned for the NACC to be retrospective to attack the former Coalition government but the first fish they have caught is their own – and it’s a big one, involving some of the highest levels of law enforcement oversight and potentially the highest levels of organised crime.
If we operated the NACC under the Greens’ design, all their phones and computers would have been confiscated and swept using coercive control powers by now. Cyber experts would be reconstructing deleted messages.
Bandt would be on the public stand and asked under oath what he knew and when.
Senator Thorpe and her former staff would be in the witness box, where silence is not an option and forced to eke out intimate details of their relationship, what she told him, what messages she deleted and why.
Her ex-boyfriend would be forced to relay what he had told his Rebels brother and associates. Thorpe herself would be banned from talking to her family about it, or even a psychologist without express permission. Her political career could be over, iced for years as investigators probed the extent of her relationship. Her life would go on hold.
Like former NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian, she would be undressed in the shop window of public consumption.
While it would make lucrative fodder for news organisations – and is what Thorpe campaigned for – the Senator’s dating life is why we should not have 100 per cent public hearings but pursue investigations in private.
If she is found to be in contempt of parliament for disclosing to her former bikie lover any of the proceedings, evidence or documents not specifically authorised by her Law Enforcement Committee, a breach could be pursued as contempt and a statutory offence. She could face fines or six months in jail.
But if she were found to be innocent, as the NACC is currently designed, there would be no report exonerating her.
Mud sticks in perpetuity, as it has on public servants of high calibre before her.
Preserving access to a fair trial for Thorpe should be an absolute priority – even if there is a stark difference between the Greens’ planned legislation and their actions.
The Greens’ bill for a federal ICAC, first introduced in 2013, and restored to the notice paper multiple times over the past decade, defines “corrupt conduct” as including any conduct that “involves a breach of public trust by a public official”, “involves the misuse of information or material by a public official” and “adversely affects the impartial exercise of functions by the Parliament”.
If this is their policy then, under existing instruments, the Greens could call their own Senate inquiry and investigate themselves publicly.
In doing so, they would have to accept a public hearing could out whistleblowers, destroy Thorpe’s access to a fair trial and destroy possible police operations that had been under investigation for some time.
This week’s experienced investigators interviewed by the Greens at the NACC inquiry included Tasmanian Integrity Commission chief commissioner Major General Greg Melick, who told Greens Senator David Shoebridge that private hearings should be the NACC’S default.
He dealt with “nasty” gangs such as the Italian Mafia, Russians, Triads and the Yakuza, while at the
National Crime Authority and noted the number of times “we commenced a hearing, believing they were guilty as sin and by the time it was over, we realised we had the wrong bloke”.
“When you commence an investigation, you don’t know where it goes and when you question a witness, you don’t know what answer you are going to get,” he told Senator Shoebridge.
Those forced to give evidence in public had “mental health deteriorate to the point they are unemployable”. Their “reputations were shredded”, while those questioned privately had no fear of reputational damage.
Perhaps Shoebridge and Bandt’s rhetoric about public hearings to weed out corruption may cool now that they could be first on the stand.
Or do those who called for it with the most zest expect that they be made exempt from its powers?
After all, the ABC, this week asked – with a straight face – that it be carved out of the NACC, while calling for all hearings to be public.
The ABC immediately took on Attorney General Mark Dreyfus after he noted that only five per cent of hearings in the NSW ICAC were public and used the reasoning of national security and privacy to justify his stance. What could be uncovered in a NACC public hearing on Louise Milligan’s defamation bill to Andrew Lamming?
Being directly captured by being a government employees, the ABC wants an “express carve out” for the organisation’s journalists. Obviously they are endowed with such purity that they are quarantined from the frailties and temptations of other government employees and staff.
We should be lucky that people of such virtue live in our midst.
If you want a NACC (which most of us do) and if you want it, to quote Thorpe’s tweet on July 7: “To clean up politics in this country, a federal anti-corruption commission with teeth” and “power to probe people and business outside of government”then that includes everyone in the orbit of public officials – including the ABC and bikie gangs.
Isn’t the foundation for law that all are equal before it?
While the ABC wants the NACC to “specifically exclude the work of ABC journalists”, state commission heads gave evidence they could “not recall a time they approached a journalist for information”, obtaining necessary details through sweeping phones, computers and data, with coercive powers and interviewing witnesses.
There is a need for public hearings sometimes, in the same way there is a need for high-speed police pursuits – but you need to question the motives of those who want those things as a first resort, especially when they wish to be above the law.
Across the hall from the NACC hearings, an inquiry into electoral matters was warned about the influence of billionaires such as Clive Palmer but hit the mute button when they were asked about Simon Holmes a Court.
How the Teals believe they can privatise democracy and organise wealthy benefactors to pay for their staff without being listed on the lobbyist register and falling foul of the NACC is something I fear we will only find out with a public hearing.
Until Thorpe’s discretions are investigated, Greens voters must accept that is what their party represents, so they can spare us all the rhetoric about transparency in government.
The bar is set: For the Greens, anything above undeclared relationships with ex-bikies while involved in a law enforcement committee handling confidential police information is A-OK.