Labor’s anti-corruption body fails to nip early enough

Australian defence officials had been warned the JSF/F-35 would struggle to reach a combat radius of 490 nautical miles – well below the 590 minimum. Picture: Scott Barbour/Getty Images

The “corruption” forces that contributed to the visa fraud, the gigantic GST cover-up, the submarine and JSF/F-35 blunders plus many other Canberra mistakes all have their origins in a lack of integrity in the early stages of decision-making and implementation.

That’s why it is so disappointing that the provisions in the ALP’s National Anti-Corruption Commission that are being debated in the federal parliament do not focus nearly enough on uncovering early actions that compromise legislation’s original intention and where early lack of honesty has emerged.

MPs and senators are due to vote on key legislation this week, covering the National Anti-Corruption Commission and the controversial industrial relations changes.

By the time such decisions evolve into the corruption stage it is too late to prevent damage and often, it becomes merely about allocating blame and penalties.

Key Australian electorates voted into office a series of Teal candidates who campaigned on two issues: emissions reduction plus integrity and corruption.

Despite what they say, neither of our political parties really wants their decision-making to be exposed to scrutiny, which is why the Coalition turned its back on an integrity and corruption commission and the current government is concentrating on corruption rather than integrity issues.

Accordingly, I call on the Teals to do the right thing by their voters and press for integrity clauses in the new Act.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has a full list of bills this week. Picture: Twitter/Anthony Albanese/PMO

Examples illustrate the importance of nipping future blunders in the bud via an integrity investigation.

In the visa fraud, the politicians passed legislation that set out the principles required to administer the government’s intentions.

But the politicians allowed the public servants to set out complex regulations and other statements, which created a minefield that made it easy for undetected racketeers to infiltrate the system.

A proper integrity commission would have forced the public servants and politicians to set out the rules with precise language encompassing clear explanations that were then correctly applied.

The early opportunity to prevent corruption was lost.

JobKeeper illustrates the way the visa rules should have been set up. Former Treasurer Josh Frydenberg’s legislation set out clear rules which the Australian Taxation Office skilfully implemented.

With the benefit of hindsight some of those rules should have been different – but because there was clarity, there was limited room for rackets in the implementation of the rules.

In the case of the French submarine contract, the Australian government announced one version of the deal on the same day as the French announced a totally different deal. The French deal turned out to be the one that was implemented.

Australia was defrauded and a properly set-up integrity commission would have saved the country billions by forcing action at a much earlier stage.

Thankfully Coalition defence minister Peter Dutton had the courage to end the fraud.

In the case of the Joint Strike Fighter/F-35 issue, the original joint operational requirements documentation showed that the combat radius of the JSF required an minimum objective level of 690 nautical miles with a threshold or bare minimum acceptable combat range of 590 nautical miles.

Back in 2002 and 2008, Air Power Australia warned Australian defence officials that the JSF/F-35 would struggle to reach a combat radius of 490 nautical miles – well below the 590 minimum.

A proper integrity and corruption commission would have picked up the clear breach of integrity in this contract.

According to the latest JSF/F-35 lightning fleet program status, the current maximum range looks to be less than 410 nautical miles. It seems that to fly the aircraft from Williamtown air base near Newcastle to Tindal in the Northern Territory requires air fuel tankers to refuel the JSF/F-35 on the way.

Regular mid-air refuelling is incredibly dangerous in a battle.

And of course, the infamous failure of the Australian Taxation Office to follow other nations and plug a hole in the gold GST cost the country billions in revenue.

There was no integrity commission to make the ATO confess and correct its mistake (it required my commentary).

The inevitable cover-up saw the ATO destroy most of the gold refining industry, using methods that in many cases the Federal and High Courts declared to be invalid.

There are many other illustrations.

Many problems hark back to decisions in 1999 to change the Public Service Act, so instead of senior public servants being required to provide fearless independent advice, they had to take account of ministers and government policy.

To illustrate what can happen without early action, the state of Victoria has an anti-corruption commission, but it did not act on integrity matters.

So now the corruption has got deep into parts of the legal system and into many vital government services. It’s almost as though corruption has been legislated.

It will take a very strong government to rid the state of such entrenched corruption.

A number of top office-bearers will have to be removed.

It’s not on the horizon because the population appears to accept corruption as inevitable and a previously compliant media has only recently woken up to what has been going on.