Victoria Police’s serial failures

The High Court of Australia is not known for extravagant language. But after a four-year legal battle waged by Victoria Police to cover up the secret role played by “Lawyer X” as a police informant, the court did not hold back. In a unanimous verdict a year ago, the judges said Nicola Gobbo’s actions in purporting to act as counsel for criminals while covertly informing against them “were fundamental and appalling breaches of (her) obligations as counsel to her clients and of (her) duties to the court”. It was a stunning indictment of the prominent defence barrister. But there was more to come. “Likewise,” the judges added, “Victoria Police were guilty of reprehensible conduct in knowingly encouraging (her) to do as she did and were involved in sanctioning atrocious breaches of the sworn duty of every police officer to discharge all duties imposed on them faithfully and according to law without favour or affection, malice or ill will.”

Because of this, the High Court foreshadowed judicial Armageddon in Victoria: “The prosecution of each convicted person was corrupted in a manner which debased fundamental premises of the criminal justice system.” In June, the state’s Court of Appeal made the only reasonable decision it could when it quashed the conviction of Melbourne gangland figure Faruk Orman, who spent more than 12 years in jail. The court ruled Ms Gobbo, who acted as a snitch against Mr Orman, had subverted her client’s “right to a fair trial and went to the very foundations of the system of criminal trial”. There was “a substantial miscarriage of justice”. As Ms Gobbo’s information was used in scores of cases, more overturned convictions are expected.

With condemnation ringing loudly, the Andrews government instituted a royal commission into the Lawyer X fiasco, which gives the state a chance to address serial leadership and process failures over several administrations and police chiefs. This week we saw two of those top cops in the witness box. On Tuesday, after teeth pulling by counsel assisting, former police commissioner Simon Overland conceded: “Certainly I agree the ethics were f..ked.” It was that and more. The man who set up the Purana taskforce that investigated the gangland murders and was a key figure in the decision to use Ms Gobbo has done his best to lay the blame for this monumental failure on underlings. He said he wasn’t aware Lawyer X was snitching on her clients. Not only were the ethics execrable, or non-existent, there was an abrogation of leadership. Former deputy commissioner Sir Ken Jones told the inquiry Mr Overland as chief fostered a “toxic” bureaucracy where he could dodge accountability.

On Wednesday, former police chief Christine Nixon, Mr Overland’s boss when he set up Purana, said she had been left in the dark about Ms Gobbo’s activities. What emerges from this whole period is a distant management style, as if running a large bureaucracy rather than a flesh-and-blood police force with endemic problems. Ms Nixon long resisted a royal commission into police corruption. What was needed, and subsequent police chiefs seemed to have embodied, was an old-school approach of command and taking responsibility. Victoria’s current top cop Graham Ashton, who headed a police integrity unit at the height of Ms Gobbo’s scandalous activities, has conceded using her as an informant against her clients carried the risk of perverting the course of justice. No kidding, Sherlock.

For years, this newspaper agitated for a wide-ranging probe into Victoria Police. Royal commissioner Margaret McMurdo has said police probably wasted years of work and millions of dollars by using Ms Gobbo, who is due to testify at the inquiry next month. “The time and effort expended and paid for by the taxpayer may be for nothing,” she said in a report to parliament. If new trials are granted, victims may be forced to endure new proceedings long after the alleged offences occurred. The commissioner added: “Public trust in the criminal justice system is likely to be diminished.” Whatever the outcome, the inquiry will have huge implications for the police force, its past and present leaders, as well as past and present governments. All told, it’s a policing, judicial and budgetary debacle of Shakespearean proportions that will unsettle Victorians for many years.