To halt the democratic rot, stop the political rorts

When Gladys Berejiklian was accused of pork-barrelling with taxpayers’ funds, she readily agreed. Yes, she had. It was fine because “all governments” did it, shrugged the then NSW premier. “It’s not an illegal practice.”

Indeed, it was so acceptable that even after she’d resigned as premier under the cloud of an ICAC investigation, Scott Morrison urged her to run for federal parliament.

Illustration by John ShakespeareCredit: John Shakespeare

“I think this is a great opportunity, if Gladys wishes to run,” the then prime minister said. She was too damaged to remain premier, but perfectly qualified to join the Morrison government.

This is precisely the problem. Australia’s leaders were rorting the country, misusing public monies, abusing the public trust. And seemed to think the system was working just fine.

Today is a red-letter day in stopping Australia’s rot. The first, national anti-corruption body comes into legal effect. The National Anti-Corruption Commission under former judge Paul Brereton, with an initial staff of 180 expanding to 260, fulfils an election commitment of the Albanese government.

Corruption is a national cancer. The normalisation of corrupt conduct at the federal and state levels was the reason that Australia’s ranking fell so decisively in the global anti-corruption index, from seventh to 18th in a decade on the Transparency International measure.

Former judge Paul Brereton heads up the new National Anti-Corruption Commission.Credit: Edwina Pickles

It’s the reason that the Australian people clamoured for a federal anti-corruption commission, with public support consistently around 80 to 90 per cent for years, as close to unanimity as you’ll get on anything.

And it’s the reason that this week’s finding was essential to halt the rot. The ICAC’s ruling that Berejiklian was guilty of “serious corrupt conduct” is an essential part of the re-education of the political class.

The pork-barrelling that Berejiklian airily explained as perfectly normal? It allocated more than 90 per cent of the money in a $141.8 million round of community grants to seats held by her government, according to Labor and the Greens. This is plainly rotten, yet perfectly acceptable, according to Berejiklian and her defenders.

“I don’t think it would be a surprise to anybody that we throw money at seats to keep them,” breezed Berejiklian in evidence before the ICAC commissioner. “Whether we like it or not, that’s democracy.”

It is not. It is democracy’s death. “Among a people generally corrupt, liberty cannot long exist,” said the great Irish-born conservative philosopher Edmund Burke.

From today, the NACC is charged with rooting out crooked politicians and public servants taking payoffs.

But it also must raise the standard of conduct – including the policing of federal pork-barrelling. “Sometimes you see creeping into the public debate that, if it’s not criminal, it’s alright,” says the Albanese government’s Attorney-General, Mark Dreyfus.

Yes, Gladys, that means you. But it also means every minister, member of parliament and public servant dealing with public funds and the public interest.

The ICAC found that Gladys Berejiklian acted improperly for the benefit of maintaining her close personal relationship with former Wagga Wagga MP Daryl Maguire.

“That’s not the standard we set for proper conduct, the standard in the Australian government has to be much higher,” Dreyfus tells me. “It’s why it’s absolutely necessary that the NACC not be restricted to dealing with criminal conduct.

“It’s really important that people understand that this is an investigative commission”, as is the NSW ICAC and the other state-based, anti-corruption bodies. “These investigative commissions do not make findings of criminal guilt but findings that standards have been breached.”

The anti-corruption commissions can refer matters to the director of public prosecutions to consider launching criminal cases. But anti-corruption commissions are about much more.

As Dreyfus says, they’re about standards of conduct in public office. “It’s incredibly important because it allows us to raise standards. It’s engaging with the corrosive impact of corruption. We know it undermines public trust in government, we know it undermines democracy.”

Raising standards must include elimination of pork-barrelling. It may not be criminal, but it is dead wrong for a government to handle taxpayer funds as if they are a partisan political asset for winning elections. This is exactly the case in the Berejiklian situation.

Dreyfus says: “Its obvious that some grants programs have been rorted in the past.” Morrison’s notorious $100 million “sports rorts” and the $660 million “car pork” come to mind.

The bigger picture was revealed by the Grattan Institute in its Preventing Pork Barrelling report last year: “Of 19,000 grants allocated by the former federal Coalition government under 11 grant programs between 2017 and 2021, $1.9 billion went to Coalition seats but only $530 million to Labor seats.

“Across a sample of programs in the three biggest states, government seats got more than $1 million on average, compared to just over $300,000 on average for opposition seats.”

Dreyfus continues: “It will depend on whether the NACC decides to investigate. If you have a grants program run to perfectly appropriate rules, and if it’s established that those rules have been broken, you are getting into an area of corruption. That’s why on occasion there will be grants the NACC will want to look at. My view is that there’s a lot more to be done in the procurements area.”

He emphasises the educational function, too: “I don’t want to ruin people’s careers or have their lives blighted by findings made against them”, although he acknowledges that this is exactly the impact when it happens. But the risk of an adverse finding is a means to a greater end: “I want standards raised, I want to improve the standards of conduct in Australian public life.”

A key difference between the federal NACC and the NSW ICAC is that the new federal body has learnt a big lesson from the state counterpart.

The ICAC commonly holds public hearings that can destroy the careers of its subjects even though they might later be cleared of any misconduct. The NACC, by contrast, will only use public hearings in exceptional circumstances.

The Berejiklian case is a powerful moment in Australia’s anti-corruption awakening, but it risks being lost in the titillation of her relationship with Daryl Maguire.

The dodgy boyfriend, however unappealing, was not her problem. Her problem was that she was in a conflict of interest that she failed to deal with. The bozo bloke merely represented one of the two interests that were in conflict, the private interest.

Let’s magic the boyfriend out of the picture for a moment. Pork-barrelling itself is corrupt. She handed out government grants “when she was in a position of a conflict of interest between her public duty and her private interest”, said ICAC assistant commissioner Ruth McColl.

The Ministerial Code of Conduct required her to disclose the conflict; she did not. She handed out taxpayer monies to spend in her boyfriend’s electorate at his urging. Instead of spending public money fairly in the public interest.

She didn’t need to dump the boyfriend. Anthony Whealy, a former judge of the NSW Supreme Court and chair of the Centre for Public Integrity, explains: “If she’d just gone to the then-premier [Mike Baird] and said, ‘This is confidential, I’m in a relationship with Daryl Maguire, and I’ll recuse myself from decisions about funds going to his electorate’, there’d be no trouble and this would never have happened.”

But the principle here is that Berejiklian betrayed the public interest. This is the principle that, if enforced, should banish pork-barrelling everywhere in Australia: “It’s coming into focus that pork-barrelling is quite wrong,” says Whealy. “It is serious misconduct, and it could constitute a criminal offence. If politicians realise it can’t be unfettered, then we will improve so far as corruption is concerned.”

Now that it’s operational, the NACC must deliver the same message at the federal level. There are other matters demanding its attention, too.

Whealy nominates the case of Stuart Robert, a cabinet minister in the Morrison government, as a glaringly obvious early target for the NACC given the matters raised in parliament. A whistleblower has accused him of using his official position to help a friend’s company win major federal government contracts. Robert denies any wrongdoing and says that he never benefited from the awarding of government contracts.

“It should be referred to the NACC as one of its early investigations,” says the former judge. “There’s enough material there to pose preliminary questions – that all’s not right.” Robert resigned from parliament; a byelection for his Queensland seat of Fadden is set for July 15. Peter Dutton has said he wouldn’t object to an NACC investigation.

Commissioner Brereton takes up Australia’s anti-corruption cause not a moment too soon. Or, as Whealy puts it, “Just in the NACC of time.”

Peter Hartcher is political editor

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis from Jacqueline Maley. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter here.