The Centre for Public Integrity has urged Victorian MPs to implement sweeping integrity reforms before November’s state election following a damning investigation into branch stacking and the misuse of taxpayer funds.
On Wednesday the Victorian premier, Daniel Andrews, said he took full responsibility for the “disgraceful” conduct uncovered in a damning report on Labor branch stacking, as he apologised to the public and vowed to implement reform.
Andrews said the government had accepted all 21 recommendations in the report and would “go further” by introducing legislation to restrict political parties in the state from receiving public funding unless they meet a set of criteria designed to stamp out corrupt behaviour.
The criteria would include requiring party memberships to be paid by traceable means, implementing mandatory identification checks for new members joining a political party and measures to ensure compliance in the use of the electoral roll.
The Centre for Public Integrity’s research director, Dr Catherine Williams, said if no elements of the reform were enacted before parliament rises in September – two months out of the November election – it would be a “terrible shame” and a “lost opportunity”.
“These are issues that should have been addressed a long time ago,” Williams told Guardian Australia.
“The ombudsman raised concerns about these issues, as we know, in the ‘red shirts’ report back in 2018 and very little has changed since that time.”
The ombudsman’s report into the red shirts affair found taxpayer funds were used to pay electorate officers campaigning for Labor during the 2014 election. A year after the report was handed down, police dropped their investigation into the matter.
Williams comments came after Andrews said the Victorian Labor party has made “massive changes to our rules” in the two years since the allegations that led to the integrity investigation were first aired.
Released on Wednesday, the report of Operation Watts – a joint investigation between the state’s ombudsman and the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (Ibac) uncovered widespread misuse of taxpayer resources for political purposes and a “catalogue” of unethical behaviour in the Victorian branch of the Labor party including nepotism, the hiring of unqualified people for public roles and using those roles for political party work.
Responding to the report, Andrews said the behaviour uncovered did not meet his expectations or those held by Victorians.
“As leader of the parliamentary Labor party and the premier of our state, I take full responsibility for all of that conduct,” he said. “That’s what the top job is all about and I apologise for it.”
The state’s attorney general, Jaclyn Symes, claimed the proposed reform agenda would be the largest overhaul of a parliament’s integrity structures in the nation, after the report concluded Victoria had become a “laggard rather than a leader in parliamentary integrity”.
Williams said the reforms proposed by the Andrews government were “really significant”.
While the report focused on the Victorian branch of the Labor party, Williams said it should galvanise the entire parliament to enact integrity changes to stamp out integrity risks.
“This report is a real opportunity to introduce substantial reform and we would not want to see that opportunity lost,” she said.
Among the report’s recommendations is the establishment of an independent parliamentary integrity commissioner that could order sanctions, a ban on MPs being able to employ family members in their electorate office, and the creation of a new offence that would make it unlawful for ministers to allow a person to perform party political work while employed in a publicly funded role.
The government said it would aim to create the new integrity framework by June 2024, in line with the report’s recommendations.
The acting leader of the Victorian Greens, Tim Read, said reforms “may be necessary” to clean up the wide-scale branch stacking within the Labor party. But he said it did not mean it was necessary for other political parties that could “manage their internal affairs appropriately”.
The opposition leader, Matthew Guy, claimed the Andrews government was “mired in corruption, cover-ups, and political games at the expense of Victorians” and unfit to govern the state.
The report said Andrews, who was questioned in private, had agreed branch stacking was a serious problem and “could amount to a corruption risk” as it could lead to the misuse of taxpayer funds for political purposes.
The report found two former Andrews government ministers – the moderate faction leader Adem Somyurek and Marlene Kairouz – breached parliamentary codes of conduct when they misused public funds to fuel a vast branch-stacking operation. Despite describing their conduct as egregious, it concluded there was not enough proof they had committed criminal offences to recommend prosecution.
The report found while branch stacking – the practice of large-scale recruitment of non-genuine members to influence the outcome of votes within Labor branches – was a common and longstanding practice it found no evidence of potential misuse of public funds within other factions.
Kairouz stood down as a minister after an investigation by the Age and 60 Minutes into branch stacking was published in June 2020, while Somyurek was dumped from the ministry.
Somyurek said on Wednesday he was “liberated” after the investigation stopped short of concluding he had committed criminal offences.
“On the one level, I’m happy. I’m relieved. I feel exonerated. I feel some good emotions on the one side because I’m finally getting my life back,” he said. “But on the other side, I’m very angry.”
Somyurek said he had “done absolutely nothing wrong” and claimed while branch stacking was common place in the Labor party he had only engaged in it for one-and-a-half months.
But the obudsman, Deborah Glass, rejected Somyurek’s assertion that he had been “exonerated” and said there was “no shadow of doubt” the conduct of the two former ministers was “egregious”.
