Andrew Bolt: If you want justice, vote out these Labor bums

After the latest IBAC report how can we trust any member of the Andrews government to do the right thing with the power and the money we put into their hands?

What a disgusting day for Australia.

In two states on Wednesday came more evidence of politicians ripping us off while other gutless MPs keep shtum.

In Victoria, we got the report of the IBAC anti-corruption investigation – dubbed Operation Watts – into this sinister and secretive Labor government.

We already know Labor stole $388,000 before the 2014 election by getting 25 Labor MPs to falsely claim their taxpayer-funded staff were doing parliamentary work, when they were in fact campaigning for Labor in their red shirts.

Not one person was charged.

Now comes this IBAC report, flaying Labor’s sick culture, where faction bosses handed out taxpayer-funded jobs to absolute hacks with the connivance of taxpayer-funded “community organisations”.

Daniel Andrews has apologised after ‘absolutely disgraceful behaviour’ within the Labor Party was exposed in a scathing IBAC report. Picture: David Crosling

Here’s just one passage from it: “[There was] rampant nepotism, forging signatures, and attempts to interfere with government grants to favour factionally-aligned community organisations, which, in some cases, failed to use the funds as intended.”

That’s your money, folks.

Here’s another passage listing just some of the signs of a corrupt culture which no Labor MP, it seems, had the moral courage to call out: “That staff in the ALP head office turned a blind eye to evidence of branch stacking …; that staff and MPs were aware of practices such as the forgery of signatures and yet took little or no action to address the practice; that staff, with the knowledge of MPs, let other staff use their identity and password to log into ALP databases containing sensitive electorate office data on electors and misused that data”.

This is the shocking thing. Where in this government that preaches so loudly about social justice was the honest man or woman who said no to this rorting and damned it publicly?

This government was so harsh on citizens who wouldn’t follow its insane pandemic rules that it shot some with rubber bullets, and arrested even grandmothers sitting in the open air. But meanwhile its MPs closed their eyes to the ripoffs done by their own under their noses.

Worse, Ombudsman Deborah Glass and Victorian Anti-Corruption Commissioner Robert Redlich, in releasing the IBAC report, made excuses for people so morally weak that they shut their eyes or went along with what they should have resisted.

IBAC Commissioner Robert Redlich, in releasing the IBAC report, made excuses for people.

Most staff in this “unethical culture” knew what they were doing was wrong, they said, but felt “powerless to resist” because there was “nowhere to complain”.

Some MPs were “perpetrators”, Redlich added, but others presented themselves as “passive victims of that culture”.

Seriously? All these “victims” of a culture that thrived precisely because MPs and staff didn’t have the conscience and courage to shout “no”.

They aren’t “victims”. They are enablers – or worse. How can we trust any of them to do the right thing with the power and the money we put into their hands?

This stinking fish rotted from the head.

Sure, Premier Daniel Andrews told the inquiry he had no “personal knowledge or involvement in such practices”, and didn’t even realise the red-shirts rip-off was improper.

Really? But this control freak fought all the way to the High Court to stop Glass from investigating that scandal, and this IBAC report notes he even now “was not able to provide a reason” why he did not subsequently ban his MPs from making staff work on party-political activities.

Yet after all this moral corruption, Glass and Redlich decided there was not enough evidence to recommend criminal prosecution of anyone.

So it’s up to voters: if you want justice, vote out these bums.

NSW’s former Deputy Premier John Barilaro. Picture: Gaye Gerard.

In NSW, it’s the same sick story.

Gladys Berejiklian was last October forced to resign as premier after somehow – apparently – not realising her then boyfriend, Liberal MP Daryl Maguire, was selling his services to developers for cash.

But on Wednesday, more reason for disgust – evidence suggesting Berejiklian’s deputy premier, John Barilaro, feathered his own nest, too.

Barilaro’s former chief of staff, Mark Connell, told of an astonishing conversation with his boss in 2019, just a month after Barilaro became industry minister.

“He said: ‘I’ve just come back from a meeting with Dom (then treasurer Dominic Perrottet) and Stuart (then-investment minister Stuart Ayres) regarding trade and we’re going to bring back the agent general in London as well as a bunch of other postings around the world.’

“He then stated: ‘This is it; this is the job for when I get the f--- out of this place … I don’t want to go to London, f--- that, I’m off to New York.”

Pardon? This sounds like a government minister, helped by political cronies, creating a $500,000 taxpayer-funded trade job in fun-fun New York just for himself.

Barilaro has denounced Connell’s claims as totally false.

Yet whaddaya know? Interviews with other candidates were held as if there was really a scrupulous selection process, but then, surprise!, the government intervened and gave it to … Barilaro.

Barilaro has since been shamed out of the job, but what of the government that gave it to him?

Vote them out.

What a shameful day for Australia. At least make sure the guilty don’t go unpunished.