Let’s hear it for public hearings

former Victorian Court of Appeal judge Stephen Charles.

The Centre for Public Integrity has been shrill in its campaign for a national integrity commission, and of greatest importance has been that it hold its hearings in the public domain.

The reasoning is simple enough: public hearings are a “crucial element of corruption investigations” and hold the “key to the success” for any future commission. It’s what the CPI’s Geoffrey Watson proclaimed earlier this year, and the centre has released briefing papers, research and press releases attesting to the same ever since.

A famed corruption inquisitor, Watson sits on the CPI board alongside former Victorian Court of Appeal judge Stephen Charles and former NSW Supreme Court judge Anthony Whealy, the centre’s chairman.

The Centre for Public Integrity’s Geoffrey Watson.

It was Whealy, echoing Watson, who claimed a month ago that “public hearings lead to corruption findings” and criticised the test of “exceptional circumstance” that’s been layered onto the commission’s impending legislation by the Albanese government.

That test has become something of a bane for the CPI. Used solely in Victoria, it’s effectively turned the air fetid with unexposed corruption and stifled numerous inquiries. By comparison, the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption has no such test and is thus free to cut the toes off almost anyone it pleases.

As the CPI said in a briefing paper released last month: “Australia’s strongest anti-corruptions commissions are subject to no such ‘exceptional circumstances’ requirement, and only the Victorian Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission must meet this threshold before proceeding to a public hearing.”

Short of deploying a skywriting plane, the CPI’s position on exceptional circumstances and public hearings cannot be made much clearer.

So why has the centre performed such an incredible about-face on this very matter in relation to the recently unearthed IBAC investigation of Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews?

The CPI has even gone so far as to applaud the IBAC’s efforts to seek a Supreme Court injunction against publication of any case details, and described this decision as justified in the circumstances.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews. Picture: David Crosling

“What we’re dealing with here is competing values and therefore, competing priorities,” said Colleen Lewis, an associate of the CPI and no less a member of its National Integrity Committee. Her comments, given to ABC Radio, were also tweeted by the CPI’s official account.

She continued: “The right to be afforded natural justice in any IBAC inquiry versus the media’s right to report on a matter of public interest, especially one that is directly relevant to the forthcoming state election. Which one here has the top priority? I’ve really come to the conclusion that IBAC did the right thing by going to the Supreme Court to seek that injunction. The right to be afforded natural justice is absolutely essential, even if it comes at the temporary cost of the freedom of the press.”

It’s difficult to reconcile such a jarring position with the CPI’s cask-strength commitment to transparency. Perhaps Lewis is missing a crucial point, too. The IBAC’s decision poses not only a temporary cost to the freedom of the press, as she put it, but to the Victorian public preparing to vote in an election later this month.

They’re the ones being deprived of relevant, factual information.

The CPI was contacted for comment.

 

Future tense

A rare insight out of federal parliament, with Australia’s sovereign wealth fund – the Future Fund – forced to oblige Greens Senator Barbara Pocock with a list of its investments in, ah, questionable activities.

Pocock’s request for a list of the Fund’s investments yielded many that were hitherto unknown to the Australian public outside of its quarterly update, which provides details in aggregate terms only.

Thus we learned the fund is up to its knees splashing around in oil and remains a committed investor in some of the country’s biggest carbon emitters. These include $1.5bn invested in BHP, $548m in Woodside, $329m in Rio Tinto, $190m in Santos, and $82m in Whitehaven Coal, with the numbers current as of October 31.

Further afield are investments of $245m in ExxonMobil, $102m in Petroleo Brasileiro, $70m in BP, $54m in Chevron Corp, $30m in Anglo American, $25m in crude oil producer ConocoPhillips and $11.7m in Repsol SA.

Not that any of these investments are necessarily bad, or unethical; taken together they amount to a total of $3bn, a drop in the ocean of the Fund’s $241bn under management. It also hasn’t done too badly, with its decline of 0.6 per cent in the most recent quarter substantially better than the 5.2 per cent experienced across listed markets.

Greens Senator Barbara Pocock. Picture: Emma Brasier

But they do arguably jar with the fund’s own ESG commitments, which lists climate change and sustainability as central considerations in the management team’s decision-making. Anything that might “materially impact” the fund’s reputation, or involve “corruption and bribery” are similarly factored into their thinking.

We were therefore surprised to learn of similar investments in gambling organisations, including $203m invested in Aristocrat Leisure, $70m in The Lottery Corp, $15m in Tabcorp and $14.8m in Star Entertainment Group, which has experienced substantial headaches with state-based regulators of late.

Money laundering is not exactly corruption, or bribery, but it’s not all that much better really!

It seems the only people the Peter Costello-chaired Fund won’t do business with are tobacco companies and a handful of arms dealers. A spokesman for the Future Fund said it had exposure to index positions in “Australian and global markets in much the same way as other large investors and Australian superannuation funds”.