Rollercoaster election campaign has highlighted importance of integrity

The Victorian election campaign has provided a compelling illustration of how the state’s anti-corruption and donation laws interact with our political leaders, serving to highlight the integrity framework’s strengths and deficiencies.

There have been donation scandals, a court injunction (against this newspaper), calls for tough new laws that could see journalists jailed for reporting on secret corruption investigations, questions about cash for political allies and unprecedented accusations of political interference in the electoral process. And all of that in space of a few weeks.

Both the Labor Party and the Liberals have become embroiled in integrity issues during the campaign.Credit: Luis Enrique Ascui; Scott McNaughton

When The Age surveyed its readers about what topics were important to them, 48 per cent said “integrity in politics and governance” would affect their voting choice. This was a higher proportion than any other category.

Neither side of politics came to the campaign with clean hands. The so-called red shirts scandal – which raised questions about the misuse of public money for party political purposes – has dogged Labor since it won the 2014 election.

The government has been involved in three separate long-running corruption commission probes: one examining industrial-scale branch stacking, another into dealings with the firefighters union during a pay deal and another examining allegedly corrupt suburban land deals.

Opposition Leader Matthew Guy has faced difficult questions of his own dating back to his time as planning minister when the Coalition was last in power.

But it wasn’t until both sides began to limber up for the campaign that the spotlight was thrown dramatically on integrity as a core issue.

In early August The Age revealed Guy’s former chief of staff, Mitch Catlin, had sent him an email that included a draft contract to top up his taxpayer-funded salary using more than $100,000 in payments from a wealthy Liberal donor to his private marketing business.

Even though the plan was never carried out, the revelations led to Catlin’s immediate resignation. The report also prompted the Victorian Electoral Commission to launch an investigation into whether the state’s political fundraising laws – requiring the disclosure of all donations above $1080 and capping donations at $4320 – had been breached.

Guy might have thought the issue was behind him. But in the second last week of the campaign it was thrust into the spotlight once again, halting the opposition’s momentum.

Matthew Guy’s former chief of staff Mitch Catlin.Credit: Jesse Marlow

After examining the issue for several months, a frustrated VEC conceded it would not be able to finalise its investigation until after the election.

Days later it referred the Coalition to the anti-corruption commission, suggesting it had been less than co-operative with its orders to hand over evidence.

In an unprecedented, and perhaps even dangerous, counterclaim, the Liberal Party’s state director Sam McQuestin accused the VEC of “serious, deliberate and unprecedented interference” in the election, demanding it “cease and desist” from any further public commentary.

New revelations about alleged corruption also threw Labor off balance. Earlier this month The Age revealed Andrews had been interviewed in private as part of a secret anti-corruption commission probe – known as “Operation Daintree” – over the nature of his role in the awarding of promises to a Labor-linked union on the eve of the 2018 election. IBAC commissioner Robert Redlich said Daintree should have been held in public rather than behind closed doors.

That also set off an extraordinary chain of events. After initially putting questions about the investigation to several interested parties’ offices, including the premier’s, IBAC was successful in securing an injunction in the Supreme Court that prevented this newspaper from publishing details from a draft version of the investigation report (a story was eventually published based on sources outside the report).

The following day, IBAC released a statement revealing it had asked the government for “urgent” legislation that would make it an offence for journalists to report on the contents of draft IBAC reports.

After initially suggesting he wasn’t ruling out adopting the proposed changes, Andrews quickly clarified that he didn’t support any changes that could see journalists jailed.

It was also reported by The Age that the Liberal Party’s lucrative “Ditch Dan” fundraising push, which raised well over $500,000, was being investigated for failing to comply with the state’s political fundraising disclosure rules requiring the disclosure of any donations above $1080 within 21 days.

The advertising campaign ran on August 25.

Once again, the electoral commission was forced to concede it would not be finalising the investigation until after the election, with suggestions the Liberal Party had been hampering investigations by asking for reviews of written orders.

The timing of the VEC probes, as well as IBAC’s Operation Daintree, means voters will not be informed about allegations about both Guy and Andrews before the election.

On Tuesday, just days out from the election on Saturday, Redlich, Ombudsman Deborah Glass and Auditor-General Andrews Greaves – the state’s most important watchdogs – spoke at a webinar. The timing raised eyebrows within the government, which has clashed with the trio at various times over recent years.

Glass painted a dispiriting picture when asked whether she felt optimistic about the trajectory of transparency and integrity in governance.

“I was thinking, what was I optimistic about? And I really struggled with it, I will confess, to this small audience,” Glass said.

Redlich has twice this month made public comments about the statutory limitation on his agency investigating non-criminal corruption. Think pork barrelling and undisclosed conflicts of interest.

Some people who work in politics believe IBAC should only be probing criminal allegations. But Redlich argues that is, primarily, the police’s job.

“You don’t need to have an elaborate integrity agency to investigate and prosecute criminal activity,” he said on Tuesday.

“What would I change if I could change one thing? I would remove the requirement, not only in Victoria, but interstate, that provides too much focus on criminal offences,” Redlich said.

“My hope is that over time, particularly with the advent of the federal commission which is not going to be restricted to the pursuit of criminal conduct, that we will see around Australia much broader focus on soft corruption issues.”

Greaves said there is a big gap between acting with integrity and acting corruptly. Not acting corruptly does not necessarily mean acting with full integrity, he claims.

“That’s not sufficient to simply say – we didn’t do the wrong thing. You actually need to be able to say we did the right thing,” he said.

If the campaign has highlighted anything, it is that Victoria’s integrity and transparency rules are still a work in progress. The Centre for Public Integrity’s pre-election road map details a long list of holes in the state’s anti-corruption and political transparency provisions.

It has, for example, joined IBAC in arguing that the diaries of ministers and their staff should be made public to shine a light on any vested interests gaining access to the state’s lawmakers.

It argues the parliament “must be restored to its rightful place as Victoria’s supreme integrity institution”, and, alone with the state’s various integrity bodies, be funded by an independent tribunal.

The centre has also backed IBAC’s calls to give the anti-corruption agency sharper teeth to hold public hearings when it’s deemed to be in the public interest, and to allow it to investigate non-criminal corrupt conduct.

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