When the National Anti-Corruption Commission flung open its doors to the nation’s dirty laundry on July 3, its officials marked the occasion with an opening ceremony at its Canberra HQ.
There, commissioner Paul Brereton told a crowd of dignitaries that the agency was mightily busy; the NACC had already fielded 44 online referrals and received five telephone requests for callbacks. The guy’s hand was sore from all the high-fives he’d been getting that morning.
But that’s not all the NACC’s newly appointed commissioners were frightfully occupied with in the days leading up to the agency’s inauguration. A trove of documents helpfully dumped on the watchdog’s website, unreported until now, tell the story of one unexpectedly urgent matter – the deliberations over the guestlist to this major event.
And by gosh didn’t everyone in the NACC leadership have their hands very much in the weeds on this priority, the emails between them providing their own gruesome peek into the icy hierarchies of Canberra’s networking-and-light-refreshments racket.
Brereton and CEO Philip Reed had the final say-so on who could come, apparently, and somehow Sue Robertson, head of the Australian Public Service’s Integrity Taskforce, didn’t make the original cut of the guestlist. That required some delicate language to massage.
“Can you confirm if that is correct or was it an oversight?” asked Sonja Pase, a NACC official, in an email to Reed and others in the leadership.
The redacted reply, from someone with enough clout to recklessly misspell the CEO’s name, arrived an hour later: “Philp/Sonja,” it said. “The commissioner is happy to include her, if you think she should be on the list.” Hooboy, how’s that for a rider? Amazing what slips past the censor some days.
Scott Bruckard narrowly avoided a snub. The acting Commonwealth Solicitor for Public Prosecutions ended up being saved by some schlepper in the NACC’s legal team. “They’ve raised whether (he) should be invited, particularly given the CDPP received additional funding to deal with NACC matters,” wrote Jaala Hinchcliffe, a NACC executive.
Reed forwarded the email around for consideration, Brereton ultimately deciding that Bruckard was allowed to join.
“I’m happy for Scott to be invited,” he wrote. Peter Johnson, chief commissioner of the NSW Law Enforcement Conduct Commission, also scraped through thanks to Hinchcliffe. She also humbly beseeched on behalf of Australian Public Service Commissioner Gordon de Brouwer.
“I would also suggest that (he) be invited given his role in relation to the integrity in the commonwealth,” she wrote. Sadly Brouwer ended up snubbing them, as did NSW ICAC commissioner John Hatzistergos, acting IBAC commissioner Stephen Farrow, Queensland Crime and Corruption Commission chair Bruce Barbour, and the Northern Territory’s ICAC commissioner Michael Riches. Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Glyn Davis was also a no-show.
Less luck for Tasmanian Integrity Commission CEO Michael Easton, who was listed by mistake and ended up being switched out for the agency’s chief commissioner Greg Melick (who didn’t show either). Hardly fair, this exclusion of CEOs, when ACT Integrity Commission chief Judy Lind was invited.
And as with every party there were those hoping to turn up early for a place in line at the velvet rope. “I have already heard from Deputy Secretary (Simon) Newnham’s EA asking if he will be invited,” read one email.
Again, more changes
Also amusing were the revisions that had to be made to Brereton’s opening speech, his staff emailing him well into the night on the eve of the NACC do with a couple of tweaks.
Seems at times they needed to rein in some of the rhetoric, with early drafts of the speech boasting of a NACC that already had a team of 180 staff growing to 260 personnel over the next 12 months. But, ah, that’s not quite right, boss. “It is over 24 months,” someone wisely counselled.
Attempts to try on a couple more strike-offs weren’t as successful. Brereton’s obviously a dedicated grammar snoot and prescriptivist because he drew the line at dropping the “an” from “an historic”, telling his team: “I’m happy to go with ‘a’ for the press release, but in my speech I’ll stick with ‘an’.”
And when they tried to gently chop out a few instances of “again”, which he likes to use at the start of sentences – “Again, relevant considerations…”; “Again, we may decide to investigate …” – the commissioner went on the defensive. “The repeated use of ‘Again’ highlighted by (name redacted) is intended for rhetorical effect,” he huffed.
Posts go quiet
Some 24 hours since Margin Call reported on the politically charged activism of Sydney Opera House executiveFiona Winning, there’s been an apparent change of heart – the posts in support of Palestinians and a ceasefire in Gaza have disappeared from her Facebook timeline. Or, as Winning tells it, they weren’t deleted at all, she just decided to shield her profile from public view.
Was she told to do it by newly appointed Opera House chair Michael McDaniel? Or perhaps it was CEO Louise Herron, whom she answers to on the SOH executive committee?
As explained on Wednesday, Winning is the director of programming at the Opera House and is essentially the buck-stop for who gets a platform. Hence the upcoming appearances of pro-Palestinian commentators Clementine Ford, Randa Abdel-Fattah and Jan Fran at the All About Women festival scheduled for March during the week of International Women’s Day.
The problem, of course, is the potential for apprehended bias in the selection of speakers at the Opera House, at a time when community perceptions of the venue’s management remain in a state of repair. This especially when the decision to platform Ford, Abdel-Fattah and Fran followed those infamous scenes on October 9 when the Opera House was co-opted by pro-Palestinians for an anti-Semitic rally.
The SOH has studiously avoided Margin Call’s recent inquiries but deigned to answer this one, telling us: “Fiona has decided to make her personal Facebook account private. No posts have been deleted.”
Well, the posts certainly looked like they’d been deleted earlier in the day. The rest of her Facebook profile was available, just the posts about Gaza were missing. Later, the entire profile disappeared.
“Fiona did not delete any posts,” the spokeswoman said. “She made the posts and then her personal account private.”
In any case, still no response from the SOH to our question of whether Winning was told by management to cut it out (or to set her account to private). No matter. In the despicable phrasing of Antonio Guterres, nothing happens in a vacuum.
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