IBAC probe uncovers a troubling picture

Victoria’s outgoing IBAC commissioner Robert Redlich is not going quietly. As his five-year term draws to a close, he has repeatedly, publicly warned about the decline of integrity in public administration and the sinister creep of what he calls “grey corruption”, a low-level malfeasance which is not quite criminal but poisons good government just the same.

Redlich last month delivered the John Barry Memorial Lecture at Melbourne University. Titled simply “Governing with Integrity”, the lecture provides a disturbing summary of what Redlich has observed from his vantage point atop Victoria’s peak anti-corruption agency. He laments the way power is concentrated in the premier’s office in Victoria and other jurisdictions and how the unregulated influence of political advisers is circumventing important safeguards.

These are not arcane concerns about bureaucratic conventions. They go to the heart of whether the Andrews government – or indeed any government – is there to serve us or themselves. As the eminent jurist told The Age earlier this year, once governments start bypassing processes that are intended to protect the public interest, once political expediency becomes the driver of government decisions, “we’re on a slippery slope” to the latter.

If you want to know what this looks like, Operation Daintree paints a troubling picture. The headline grabber from this long-running IBAC probe is that Premier Daniel Andrews was secretly interrogated, along with former health minister Jill Hennessy, over suspicions of corrupt conduct relating to the awarding of $3.4 million in grants to the Health Services Union.

Former health minister Jill Hennessy with Premier Daniel Andrews in 2018.Credit: Scott McNaughton

It hasn’t been suggested to The Age that anyone in government or the HSU lined their pockets or materially benefited from the grants. Daintree, from what we know, is not a story about public figures with their snouts in the trough. It is about something more commonplace and arguably, more insidious; a willingness to subvert proper process and - potentially - misuse public funds to achieve a political outcome.

The agreement with the HSU, publicly announced by Andrews and Hennessy just before their government headed into the caretaker period for the 2018 election, was for the union to design and deliver a training program to help its members deal with a growing problem: violence in hospital and other healthcare settings.

The training program was the brainchild of Diana Asmar, the HSU state secretary. Her plan was to manage the program through a union-controlled, not-for-profit entity known as the Health Education Federation.

Had such a program been properly assessed and developed with the input of relevant experts from the government’s Health Department, it might have helped protect hospital workers against the violent outbursts by patients and family members which peaked during the COVID crisis. Instead, IBAC is investigating the circumstances which led to the program being approved against the advice of the department and abandoned due to COVID restrictions after only a handful of workers were trained.

How did this happen? The full story will not be clear until IBAC tables its final report but so far, this is what The Age has been able to establish from people with knowledge of the matter.

The Age has been told that after Asmar pitched her idea to government in the lead-up to the 2018 election, her proposal was placed in the hands of two political advisers, rather than bureaucrats with specialist knowledge of health programs.

A Labor source described one of the advisers, who worked for Hennessy and has since left government, as a proactive, smart and impeccably connected political operative who got things done. In this instance, she lived up to her reputation. The problem is that health department bureaucrats appear to have been bypassed along the way.

This is symptomatic of how the Andrews government works. Nearly every significant decision taken by the government and every public communication issued originates from within the Premier’s Private Office. When Ted Baillieu was premier, 20 people worked in PPO. It now employs 90 staff and a further 287 ministerial advisers.

Redlich in his lecture described a “symbiotic relationship” between the premier’s personal staff and ministerial staff. In Victoria, there is constant movement and communication between the two and their demarcations and professional and political allegiances are blurred. The effect is that senior public servants and even Cabinet ministers can be frozen out of government decisions.

Sources familiar with awarding of the HSU contract say it is unclear how much Hennessy knew about it. Was the political adviser taking directions from her nominal boss or the premier’s office? Either way, Hennessy and Andrews are likely to have plausible deniability. It is an affront to traditional notions of ministerial accountability, but chances are we will never know for certain.

Where bureaucrats tend to keep copious notes, political advisers prefer not to put things in writing. Advisers can be questioned by IBAC but they can’t be called before parliamentary inquiries and are difficult to capture through Freedom of Information requests. None of this is an accident. It allows some of the most powerful people in government to operate beyond the normal accountability and scrutiny of government.

Yee-Fui Ng, a former adviser to the Victorian Department of Premier and Cabinet and the Australian Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet who now lectures at Monash University, has written extensively about how the influence of advisers is reshaping Australian politics and other Westminster systems around the world.

“We have got a new class of very powerful advisers that were not envisaged by the legal or constitutional system or the political system,” she says. “They can be used as scapegoats and blamed for anything that goes wrong but they can also act as a filter between a minister and the public service and block advice from the public service.

“It increases the risk of corruption in government decision-making if ministers are able to evade accountability. It means that government decisions may not be made on merit, but pushed into more partisan or political considerations. It means the public service is not able to give frank and fearless advice, which means we are not having good quality decision-making on the whole.”

She says Victoria and other jurisdictions need a code of conduct for political advisers, overseen by an independent commissioner, as happens in Canada and Britain. The review into the Australian Public Service chaired by David Thodey adopted this as one of its recommendations.

Centralisation of political power is not limited to Victoria but Australian National University honorary professor Colleen Lewis, an associate of the Centre for Public Integrity, has particular concerns about the scale of what is happening here. “I can’t understand how a state premier’s office needs 80 advisers,” she says. “It is out of all proportion.

“I go back to the mindset that got us into the red shirts affair (directing electorate officers to do campaign work). It seems to me that the Labor Party spends a lot of time trying to work out and scheme ways in which it can use the public purse for its own party political matters.”

What was the party political matter the Andrews government needed to address by approving the HSU training scheme? Diana Asmar.

Asmar is a vocal, highly influential figure in the Victorian Labor Party, to which her union pays $80,000 a year in affiliation fees. Like the United Firefighters’ Union boss Peter Marshall, she is also difficult to keep happy. When Andrews called a press conference in October 2018 to announce the HSU training program, he had a strong interest in placating Asmar.

In the lead-up to the 2018 election, Adem Somyurek was cementing his factional control over the Victorian ALP. Somyurek, through a combination of industrial-scale branch stacking, deft political manoeuvres and sheer force of will, had managed to unite right factions of the party with elements of the industrial left to create a dominant voting block. Asmar’s HSU was one of the last significant hold-outs from this grand factional bargain. Andrews, like Somyurek, was keen for her to join.

Andrews’ principal concern was the looming election. He needed Asmar onside for the campaign. He also needed a stable factional base from which to launch it. Having previously demoted Somyurek from the ministry to the back bench because of bullying allegations against him, he was now intent on appeasing him. He had already decided that, if his government was re-elected, he would welcome Somyurek back to Cabinet.

A senior Labor figure explained that the training contract may have encouraged the HSU into Somyurek’s fold.

It was only after the election that senior government figures intervened, expressing their concerns about the roll-out of the training scheme. It was quietly scrapped in the early months of the pandemic and until this week, most people in government had forgotten it ever existed. They may now wish it never had.

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