Robert Redlich slams Daniel Andrews, parliamentary committee

Of the ‘educational’ report Daniel Andrews says made ‘no findings’, Robert Redlich says: ‘The whole report is about findings of misconduct, and all of those findings go to a lack of integrity.’

Former IBAC commissioner Robert Redlich. Picture: AAP

Former IBAC commissioner Robert Redlich has called for an overhaul of the legislation underpinning Victoria’s corruption watchdog and excoriated the parliamentary committee that oversees it as politically motivated and lacking integrity.

Mr Redlich also rubbished Premier Daniel Andrews’ claim that IBAC’s Operation Daintree made “no findings” against his government.

During a tense and robust hearing of the Victorian parliamentary integrity and oversight committee’s inquiry into the performance of the state’s integrity agencies in 2021-22, Labor MPs also sought to discredit the man the Premier described on his appointment in 2017 as “one of Victoria’s most eminent and well-respected jurists”.

In his opening address on Monday, Mr Redlich said he had a list of “70 or 80” amendments he believes are required to reform the IBAC Act – chief among them reforming legislation preventing the watchdog investigating unless it believes a crime has been committed.

“That is far too onerous an obligation,” he told the committee, citing IBAC’s Operation Daintree investigation, made public in April, which examined the Andrews government’s granting of a contract to the Health Workers Union ahead of the 2018 state election.

Following the release of Operation Daintree, Mr Andrews described the report as “educational” and claimed it had made ”no findings” against his government.

“Daintree is a stark example of it, because no crime was committed in Daintree, which found that none of the misconduct – and there was a lot of it – none of the misconduct met the definition of a crime,” Mr Redlich said.

Daniel Andrews responds to the findings of IBAC’s Operation Sandon. Picture: Jason Edwards

“No doubt for good forensic reasons, the Premier made much of the fact, in his long media address … that there was no crime committed.

“But regrettably, quite incorrectly, he repeatedly said there were no findings made. The whole report is about findings of misconduct, and all of those findings go to a lack of integrity in the way in which the decisions that pertained to the union were made. They all bear upon the integrity of the decision-making process.”

Asked by Greens MP and committee chair Tim Read whether he was saying the legislation not only constrained IBAC’s ability to make findings, but its very ability to investigate, Mr Redlich agreed.

“It will do that. Where on its face one can say ‘no crime’s been committed but there seems to be a litany of misconduct of a lesser order’, if that is the view formed at the outset, IBAC will not be able to investigate,” he said.

“Daintree’s a good example again. The ombudsman reached a prima facie conclusion that there was a reasonable suspicion that a crime had been committed, and referred Daintree to IBAC. We investigated, came to the conclusion on all of the facts that emerged that it didn’t constitute criminal conduct but there was a range of very serious misconduct. Had we been in that position at the outset, we wouldn’t have been able to investigate.”

Mr Redlich also defended a scathing letter he wrote to the Victorian parliament’s presiding officers in December, in which he accused the government of allowing “partisan politics” to intrude into the workings of the parliamentary committee that oversees the watchdog. The former commissioner said he had written the letter on behalf of the entire IBAC executive out of “immense frustration with the way this committee operated last year”.

Victorian Equality Minister Harriet Shing. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Valeriu Campan

In May last year, then committee chair Harriet Shing, now a senior government minister, ordered parliamentary employees to “cut the feed please”, gagging a live-streamed hearing in which Mr Redlich was being questioned about two secret IBAC appearances by Mr Andrews.

“If this committee is stymied at the outset because political considerations override an objective determination of things that are wrong, I think it’s a very sad day,” Mr Redlich said on Monday.

“If you can’t say that the integrity committee of Victorian parliament is acting with integrity, then you have a very, very serious problem. I don’t need to remind you all that I think something unprecedented occurred last year. When the minority report of this committee went into those matters, it actually asserted that the committee had acted without integrity.”

Government MPs, who make up half the committee, used their allotted question time to quiz Mr Redlich over information security practices, bullying allegations, termination benefits paid to staff and witness welfare, in what appeared to be a concerted campaign to discredit him.