Peta Credlin: Royal commission needed to clean up Victoria
A fearless investigator with wide powers is needed to clean up Victoria’s police and judiciary in the same way the Fitzgerald Inquiry did in Queensland in the 1980s, writes Peta Credlin.
Opinion
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Back in Queensland in the late-1980s, there was a royal commission into the Queensland Police – the Fitzgerald Inquiry – that examined allegations of crooked cops in forensic detail.
Ultimately, it cost a premier his job, saw the jailing of three former ministers and a police commissioner, and ended the National Party’s 32-year reign over the sunshine state.
What Tony Fitzgerald QC exposed had long been rumoured, and occasionally even surfaced in the media; but it was only when armed with the powers of a royal commission that investigators were able to break open the rottenness at the heart of the police and power structures in Queensland.
Even now, the term “Fitzgerald Inquiry” is code for removing the muck and returning trust and integrity to policing and government.
Likewise, in Victoria today, a fearless investigator with wide powers is needed to clean up the state’s police and judiciary, following the latest damning revelations that senior police deliberately shut down arrests and prosecutions of government MPs arising from the red shirts scandal — the use of taxpayer-funded electoral staff as campaigners — that, in part, helped to elect Daniel Andrews as Premier back in 2014.
Former minister Adem Somyurek MP, told the Independent Broad‑based Anti‑corruption Commission (IBAC) that when he raised concerns about the scandal with Andrews, he responded: “Do you want to win an election or not?”
According to explosive media reports, detectives in Victoria Police’s fraud squad put forward a plan to arrest up to 16 Andrews government MPs over the “red shirts” affair, according to highly sensitive internal police briefings, but their recommendations were knocked back by senior officers. This was all contained in highly-confidential police files, and confirmed by whistleblowers, with the clear instructions that the direction from senior police was to remain a secret. Andrews was not one of the 16 listed MPs, according to the report.
These bombshell claims coincide with further claims at IBAC by Somyurek that “there are no good guys in the Labor Party”; that “all MPs are factional and hire towards their factional interests”; and that “party leaders (need) to come out and tell their own stories” if Labor is ever to reform. This followed earlier claims to the anti-corruption watchdog that the “left invented branch-stacking” and that the Premier was complicit from his time as the Victorian Labor left’s main organiser.
It’s an abhorrent notion that senior police could nobble their own inquiry in order to protect powerful politicians in a newly-elected Labor government.
The police inquiry only came about after the government had spent a million dollars appealing all the way to the High Court in an attempt to suppress an ombudsman’s report into this misuse of public money; it’s only because the suppression bid failed that we even know about the “red shirts” scandal at all. These secret police files, plus the Somyurek claims, are just the tip of an iceberg.
In the Lawyer X scandal, Victoria Police recruited a defence barrister as an informant, violating the fundamental principle that an accused is entitled to a fair trial, therefore putting in jeopardy dozens of convictions, including some of Victoria’s most high-profile gangland criminals.
A royal commission there recommended that a special investigator be appointed to pursue potential criminal prosecutions into individual members of Victoria Police. The Andrews government has only just announced the name of the special investigator, almost a year after the royal commission’s report was released, and the bill to formally set this process in motion still hasn’t passed the Victorian parliament.
Then there’s the involvement of Victoria Police in the hounding of Cardinal George Pell, resulting in an innocent man being jailed, and only freed after an appeal to the High Court found in Pell’s favour seven to nil.
Add in the Coate Inquiry that failed to find who was responsible for the decision that led to 800 deaths from bungled hotel quarantine; the subsequent WorkSafe Victoria prosecution of a whole department rather than named individuals in what, were the private sector responsible, would most likely have been industrial manslaughter; plus the $1.3 billion spent on 4000 extra ICU beds that have never materialised and it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there’s something fundamentally rotten south of the Murray.
Even decent Labor voters now understand that they cannot keep making excuses for a government that feels more like a South American-style dictatorship than the once-proud Australian state that always liked to think it had cleaner cops and institutions than in NSW and Queensland.
But not any more. It’s time for a Fitzgerald Inquiry to give Victorians their state back, and to show decent police that integrity matters.
Watch Peta on Credlin on Sky News, weeknights at 6pm
Originally published as Peta Credlin: Royal commission needed to clean up Victoria
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