How well can we really control corruption?
With Australia continuing to descend in the corruption perception index and many people thinking things are getting worse, how well can we trust our watchdogs, asks Terry Sweetman.
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Australians can be dismissive of unflattering character readings from outsiders, be they the United Nations, intergalactic busybodies or blow-in B grade celebrities.
However it’s not so easy to gloss over criticisms that come from within and reflect the gut feelings of the country.
So it is with Transparency International’s annual stocktake which ranked Australia only the 13th least corrupt in the world, scoring 77 out of a possible 100 points, just above Hong Kong, Iceland and Austria.
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Embarrassingly, New Zealand was placed second, just behind squeaky clean Denmark in the corruption perception index. I say embarrassingly because, despite all the scandals that have rocked the nation during my lifetime, I fondly thought we had a bedrock of basically
incorruptible institutions.
Maybe we still do but that’s not what we all think.
Transparency marks countries up or down through an average of separate and fairly mysterious indexes and indicators. It also surveys citizens, including nearly 22,000 in 16 countries and regions across the Asia Pacific region, a fairly dodgy league in which we look pretty good stacked up against such champions as China, Indonesia and India.
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Still, a disturbing 34 per cent of us think corruption in Australia is on the way up and 41 per cent think the Government is doing badly in fighting it.
The odd thing is that when it comes to the direct impact of corruption, Australia barely registers when it comes to people paying bribes for, believe it or not, public schools, public hospitals, ID or voter registration, police and courts.
Nobody, it seems, reported paying bribes for utilities which is endemic in many other countries.
Such contradictions demonstrate the importance of the word “perceptions” in the report.
Despite a paucity of evidence or first hand experience, many people remain suspicious of the institutions so crucial to the country.
For example, feedback on council developments invariably includes unfounded rumblings about money changing hands but the Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission’s Operation Belcarra found little overt corruption in local government.
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Despite the alleged activities of one well-publicised mayoral miscreant, CCC chairman Alan MacSporran was more worried by “perceived corruption” than actual corruption.
In the state political and policing sphere we have to go back to the Fitzgerald inquiry and the later Gordon Nuttall brigandry to find proven and big-time corruption.
NSW bears the stain of a whole bunch of grifters caught out or jailed after dissection by its Independent Commission Against Corruption, the mere existence of which is salutary for any prospective lucre looters.
However, I don’t think the well of public confidence has so much been poisoned by real instances of corruption as by politicians and others gaming the system. A seemingly endless series of unsavoury revelations has encouraged the pubic to conflate instances of sharp business dealings, self indulgence, travel and other rorting and the shameless acceptance of gifts and favours as criminal corruption.
Such piracy probably should be classed as criminal but won’t while politicians write the rules and the guidelines.
“Corruption chips away at democracy to produce a vicious cycle where corruption undermines democratic institutions and, in turn, weak institutions are less able to control corruption,’’ warned Transparency’s Patricia Moreira.
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With Australia descending from seventh ranking in 2012, to ninth in 2013 and now stuck on 13th and a significant number of people thinking things are getting worse, it is reasonable to wonder how well we can control corruption.
One measure on which we might pin our hopes is the Government’s belatedly announced Commonwealth Integrity Commission. However, it has already been slammed as variously a “sham” and a “shield for parliamentarian and public servants” by six retired judges and former anticorruption commissioners.
The Government’s model has been criticised for a lack of public hearings, inadequate funding, the selective treatment of politicians, and a high threshold of criminal suspicion required before beginning an investigation.
Significantly, the model CIC would not investigate complaints from members of the public or whistleblowers about ministers, members of parliament or their staff.
Frankly, it is difficult to think of anything less likely to dispel public perceptions of corruption in high places.
The tragedy is that the whole issue has been inescapably and unprofitably politicised by the Government’s original intransigence when it came to an integrity commission and its indecent haste when it was forced to accept the need for one.
If anything cries out for bipartisanship, it is this.
But, as the panel of judges said: “It is better to have no anti-corruption agency than one that is designed to be ineffective.”
Terry Sweetman is a Courier-Mail columnist.
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