OPI watchdog's powers are 'limited'

THE watchdog charged with keeping tabs on Victoria's Office of Police Integrity has admitted its oversight powers are limited

THE watchdog charged with keeping tabs on Victoria's Office of Police Integrity has admitted its oversight powers are limited

But the Office of the Special Investigations Monitor finally acknowledged problems with the OPI's widely criticised public hearings.

Three years after the reputations of former police assistant commissioner Noel Ashby and former police union boss Paul Mullett were trashed by OPI's public hearings, the Office of the Special Investigations Monitor said there was no sound reason why examinations of witnesses should not be done in private.

New SIM director Leslie Ross has written in his first, and possibly last, annual report -- given that the body will be replaced by the state's new anti-corruption model -- that public hearings could not only harm witnesses' reputations but also jeopardise their safety.

"Coercive examinations conducted by the Director of Police Integrity, or his delegate, are essentially investigative procedures. No final determination is made at the hearing," he wrote.

"There appears to the SIM to be no sound reason why witnesses summonsed to a coercive examination by the director ought not to receive the same protection as witnesses summonsed . . . to inquiries in private."

Mr Ross said he supported the proposal by bureaucrat Elizabeth Proust's review into the state's anti-corruption bodies "with respect to the privacy of coercive examinations".

Ms Proust criticised the OPI's ability to hold hearings in public and proposed they be dumped under the new Victorian Integrity and Anti-Corruption Commission. She also expressed concern at the lack of powers given to SIM, saying the "tiny body" of just six people needed to be strengthened.

"It's one of the issues where there has been a gap and where there has (been) less effective oversight than there might have been," she said in June.