Lawyer X: How law and order in Victoria lost its way

Margaret McMurdo has killed any notion that Victoria Police is the nation’s finest.

The final report exposes not only grave flaws in the past management of Victoria Police but casts further doubt over the state’s broader criminal justice system. It adds further evidence that governments should stay away from law and order and resist the temptation to effectively hijack policing — or the judiciary — for base political reasons.

For the best part of 20 years, Victoria Police, like health, has been a key part of Labor’s strategy to either remain in office or win back power. It was negating the normally conservative voting rank and file, and winning over the police association boardroom, that helped the ALP dominate at a state level from 1999.

It should urgently stop trying to manipulate this vote.

It’s a step too far to say that this political landscape created the Lawyer X scandal but there is no doubt that Labor contributed to a failed modernisation agenda that put commonsense accountability in the parking bay and let police leadership ambition dominate decision-making.

The terrible lapse of judgment across the Victoria Police hierarchy, which could lead to criminal charges, is part of a wider sense of dysfunction in the state’s criminal justice system and highlighted by several full blown scandals.

That 2020 has been such a massive news year shouldn’t understate the gravity of what has occurred in the police and the courts. While not much could ever top Lawyer X, police, prosecutors and the courts are all still reeling from the fallout of the botched George Pell case.

Police have been rightly criticised for the handling of the Bourke St hit and run disaster, and last month the police killer Jason Roberts’ convictions were overturned and a new trial ordered after it emerged that a key piece of evidence used to convict him was fabricated.

Now we have scores and possibly hundreds of convictions that risk being overturned by the police force’s decision to use Nicola Gobbo as a source to rat on her clients. That no one stopped this nonsense is bewildering.

The practical question is whether the current police leadership has the willpower to point the force in the right direction. The incumbent police commissioner, Shane Patton, is a sensible leader. It will be his job to convince an exhausted community that Victoria Police is not the political wing of the Labor Party. This job is made somewhat harder by the role police have played during the pandemic, which required the rank and file to enforce what were sometimes excessive and unrealistic health directives.

Anything Patton does in the context of Lawyer X will be with the proposed special investigator only one step away and the looming threat of a much tougher anti-corruption commission with wider powers.

The key take-out from Lawyer X is that the days of unfettered, cavalier policing has hopefully passed.