Drip, drip, drip . . . the Office of Police Integrity briefs its trusted friends at The Age

OPI Power Point presentation Dealing with the Media in the Anti-Corruption Environment:

FIND champions to your cause; build partnerships and co-production; use several levers at once, commit to the long haul. Engage key journalists and editorial influencers. Maintain dialogue with media leaders.

Chief Commissioner Simon Overland in an affidavit to the OPI in late 2007:

SO we, quite deliberately right throughout this, have just kept feeding [journalists] . . . trying to have them run stories that we were comfortable to have them running rather than . . . be digging through the back door and finding stuff that we didn't. We have tried to cultivate relationships with some of the key journalists. That strategy has worked to a degree . . . we then had some influence. We have been able to persuade them not to do particular things or steer them in the right direction, say . . . "Look, yes, but don't run it now" and buy some time. My experience of these things over the years is that you are just better off to be out there and to at least be giving the media a story, because they are then less likely to try and back-door you.

The writer Niccolo Machiavelli in his best-known book The Prince:

MEN, when they receive good from whence they expect evil, feel the more indebted to their benefactor.

Crikey! Margaret Simons accuses The Australian of standover tactics, April 14, 2010:

[THE Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity] has broken ranks with the OPI and cut a deal with The Australian. ACLEI is released from the action, in return for agreeing not to publish any of the information they have obtained about the newspaper during their investigation. The view from Victoria is that since this battle began, The Australian has used its editorial pages to campaign against the Office of Police Integrity in an unprecedented fashion, with a view to exerting pressure. The ACLEI move is being interpreted as a response to the fear of a similar campaign.

ACLEI report published on Friday:

IT was intended initially that the Director, Police Integrity and I would produce a joint report into the unauthorised disclosure of information. However, following an injunction obtained in the Federal Court of Australia by Nationwide News Pty Ltd (the owner of The Australian newspaper), I decided that the joint reporting arrangement created an ambiguity as to which head of power (the LEIC Act or the Police Integrity Act) was being used as an authority for any particular comment, opinion or finding. Accordingly, on 23 March 2010), I withdrew from the joint investigation with OPI in order to report in my own right.

Crikey! Simons slams the ACLEI report yesterday:

THE report is, overall, a bland effort. It focuses narrowly on its area of jurisdiction -- the conduct of police.

Sign me up! Ross Gittins in The Sydney Morning Herald, August 8, 2009:

STIMULUS spending . . . involves smoothing the nation's income over time by bringing forward some of our future prosperity. The second thing we'll have to show for all the debt is a lot of new public infrastructure, ranging from school buildings, public housing, safer rail crossings and fewer black spots, to hospitals and universities and major road, rail and port projects, not to mention an NBN.

Gittins in the SMH yesterday:

I AM starting to get a really bad feeling about Labor's plan for a National Broadband Network. The more it resists subjecting the plan to scrutiny, the more you suspect it has something to hide. The determination of governments to keep their schemes away from the [productivity] commission is always prima facie evidence they know the scheme's dodgy. The case for a thorough cost-benefit analysis needs no stronger argument than that, at $43 billion, this is the most expensive piece of infrastructure this country has seen.

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