Did Simon Overland misuse his powers?

FOUR years ago when the facts in the case of an innocent doctor, Mohamed Haneef, became known, many Australians were understandably angry. A serious injustice occurred through a misuse by police and politicians of wide-reaching and extraordinary powers. A mild-mannered general practitioner from India was disgracefully portrayed as a terrorist on the basis of ridiculously flimsy evidence.

Haneef was charged, imprisoned, and paraded in court like a criminal. The initial prejudice against him was fuelled by high-level leaks of false information. There was a virtual pipeline from the Australian Federal Police to an unquestioning media.

Despite the early advice of ASIO, which had concluded that the so-called evidence was silly and that Haneef was a harmless doctor doing his best with cancer patients at a Gold Coast hospital, police and the Howard government immigration minister, Kevin Andrews, pressed on.

A public frenzy was fanned with more fiction, including that Haneef was planning to blow up a Gold Coast high-rise building. In this campaign the credentials of the police and the government to fight terrorism (a federal election loomed) were emphasised.

If it were not for Haneef's lawyers and their unorthodox strategy, his reputation would have been shredded by more powerful forces. This episode preceded an inglorious end to a career in public service by the AFP's commissioner, Mick Keelty.

A reprise of that case is interesting because of the similarities between the AFP's conduct in the Haneef case and the conduct at the highest levels of Victoria Police in recent years.

Simon Overland, chief commissioner of Victoria Police, is an exceptionally ambitious and ruthlessly efficient leader. He has been known to inspire confidence in backers, from victims of crime to ministerial headkickers.

He has been enterprising at shaping his public image. His media strategy, as he described it in an affidavit, is to cultivate relationships with key journalists by "feeding them, trying to find different angles, trying to give them stories, trying to have them run stories that we were comfortable to have them running".

He has mettle and stamina. He has stared down a suspicious Baillieu government since November, effectively daring it to fire him, an appointee of the previous Labor government.

He is not a quitter. Although the gloss has come off and the overwhelming majority of Victorian police, according to a poll, no longer have confidence in him and want him gone, Overland appears unperturbed.

ABC Radio's Jon Faine asked him on Thursday: "Are you a dead man walking? That's the description used by the Police Association secretary Greg Davies to describe you this week. He says there is a crisis of confidence, the rank and file don't trust you any more and nor do many in the cabinet. He says, and he points to the fact that there are now several inquiries into your personal conduct under way and several clouds on the horizon about your tenure in the job."

Overland dismissed the dead man walking label and said: "I'm just doing what I'm paid to do, which is to get on with the job of policing Victoria. I'm sure there are some people who don't like me, that's pretty clear. The main point is not to become distracted by all that sort of nonsense."

As he braces for the findings from an ombudsman's inquiry into the alleged fudging of crime statistics and with his leadership still to come under formal review by Jack Rush, QC (who pulled no punches in his royal commission demolition of former top cop Christine Nixon for being missing in action at a restaurant while Victorians burned in bushfires), Overland is not blinking. It is a gutsy performance.

But the concern is not whether crime statistics have been fudged. It is not whether he is a poor administrator. Much more worrying is the proposition that extraordinary powers at his disposal were misused and that innocent people, who may not be popular but who are not criminals, were destroyed along the way. Widespread telephone tapping, including of journalists (as the Herald Sun has found) is one part of this puzzle.

Traits such as towering ambition and ego, relentless pursuit of enemies and a renowned difficulty admitting mistakes, no matter how cogent or compelling the evidence, make for a dangerous combination in a police chief. This is why several of Overland's actions, and at least one major operation, require rigorous scrutiny.

Federal Court justice James Allsop, who observed one of his traits during a prolonged court case, wrote critically in 2001 of Overland's "steadfast refusal to concede anything harmful to him ... I am reluctant to characterise it [as a lie]. I think it reflects a determination not to make concessions where the resistance to making them can somehow, possibly, be justified from the material."

He may always be reluctant to concede anything harmful to him. But it should be of intense public curiosity that one of the most expensive and intrusive investigations in Victoria's history, Operation Briars, tells us more about the judgment of its architect, Overland, than any of its targets.

It should be of public concern that this operation, in which some 55 private telephones were tapped over more than six months, did not produce a single conviction, yet led to the destruction of the careers and reputations of those pursued by Overland and the Office of Police Integrity, including Noel Ashby, Paul Mullett and Peter Lalor.

It might be relevant that Ashby was an ambitious assistant commissioner at the time, too, and highly critical of the force's hierarchy including Nixon and her then deputy, Overland. And that Mullett was in charge of the police union then (and had fallen a long way out of favour with Nixon, Overland, the OPI and the then Labor government). And that the like-minded Lalor was one of Mullett's friends and loyal delegates and cheerfully prepared to poke fun at Overland in public.

It should be of enormous public interest that Operation Briars, which was meant to find evidence that Lalor had instigated a murder, was founded on the word of a notorious liar and convicted killer whose own lawyer, Bernie Balmer, had warned police that a central part of his client's story was an utter fabrication.

Consider those highly unusual circumstances: the so-called supergrass, the man whom we know as Jack Price, and whose lying under oath has been well documented over many years, cut a remarkable deal and became the trigger for Operation Briars after his lawyer, directly and emphatically, told Overland and the taskforce: "I know my client is lying."

Balmer has told The Weekend Australian of Price: "It is sad where we have reached a period of time where prosecuting persons believe what people are saying - which affects good people's lives - when they are saying it to obtain an advantage. He is a very charismatic fellow, he has the ability to get people loyal to him."

An independent commission against corruption should look back to test allegations that extraordinary powers have been misused. Claims that Victoria's criminal justice system, including the OPI, have been abused to pursue people on flimsy evidence, rumour and innuendo need to be investigated.

Before the usual suspects come out to accuse The Weekend Australian of waging a campaign against Overland, they should reflect on how The Age's senior crime writer, John Silvester, summed up the situation last week. Silvester reported that Overland's deputy, the highly regarded Ken Jones, was "at one time seen as a perfect candidate for the role of director of the soon-to-be-formed independent broad-based anti-corruption commission".

However, according to Silvester, Overland put in a formal complaint to the OPI against Jones and "now that he is under investigation by the OPI, he cannot be considered for the body that will ultimately replace it".

Silvester concludes: "If Jones had won the job he may have launched an inquiry to uncover the evidence the OPI possessed that justified tapping the phones of assistant commissioner Noel Ashby and Police Association secretary Paul 'Fish' Mullett in an investigation that shredded reputations without convicting anyone. But he can't now, can he?"