The Victorian anti-corruption agencys longest-running investigation has finally ended … with a whimper, not a bang.
To explain – everything in Victoria has a football analogy.
The Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (Ibac) report, code-named “Operation Richmond” and released on Wednesday morning, will have about as much impact on the November Victorian election as the eponymous football team is having on the field.
For readers who care little for AFL, Richmond have won only three games out of 20 and are second bottom on the ladder.
After years of to-ing and fro-ing, multiple supreme court challenges, injunctions, secrecy and delay, those most likely to be disappointed by the long-awaited anti-corruption commission’s report will be the Liberal/National party, One Nation and News Corp editors.
Repetitious reportage from the Herald Sun and The Australian constantly referred to the looming Ibac document as a “bombshell” report, predicting something akin to a nuclear explosion. Instead, it’s more of a penny bunger.
There is no finding of corrupt conduct. No criminal offences were detected. No recommendations for prosecutions have arisen. There are no paper bags stuffed with cash, no free renovations of beach houses. Not even secret recordings used to blackmail the premier, as widely rumoured.
Instead, not for a moment downplaying the significance, Ibac has exposed a corrosive culture of abuse of power, trashing of good governance and the abandonment of proper processes back when Daniel Andrews was running the show.
These are all valuable findings that should caution anyone who wants to run a government.
However, reduced to the bare essentials and at its core, Ibac discovered politicians doing politics, albeit a grubbier version. The old “whatever it takes” school of ALP and union deals.
Contemporary reporting at the time – when the United Firefighters Union and its secretary, Peter Marshall, were doing closed-door deals with the Andrews government – told us as much as the Ibac report has revealed all these years later.
We already knew that the then emergency services minister, the late Jane Garrett, had been shafted by the premier, Dan Andrews, and that the UFU was calling the shots in the restructure of the then Metropolitan fire brigade and the Country Fire Authority.
We already knew that the UFU negotiated a generous EBA and gained considerable say in the day-to-day operations of the fire brigade.
Multiple CEOs and board members of the MFB and CFA resigned over these exact issues, publicly spraying the government and the union on their way out the door.
Ibac interviewed them all and found out what they had already said – that Marshall had too much sway with key players in the government and went straight to the premier if he did not get his way.
All of this was well known at the time. Most of the players were closely interviewed on ABC Radio Melbourne when I was hosting the Morning show.
Even before the release of this Ibac report, the new Victorian premier, Ben Carroll, responding to separate reports of bikie and organised crime infiltration in the CFMEU, had already agreed to improve the flawed Ibac legislation.
Vague definitions, low thresholds and constrained budgets have all hindered Ibac’s capacity to fully investigate matters that are clearly in the public interest.
Would those reforms – if introduced earlier – have made any difference to Operation Richmond? For a start, if there had been public hearings, the hardball industrial tactics involved would have been publicly revealed years ago.
Some of those involved have already said they would have welcomed public hearings, preferring a quick result rather than the delay, protracted litigation and the wild speculation of rampant corruption and blackmail thus triggered.
Would that have resulted in any different outcomes? I doubt it.
Most puzzling about this episode is why so many of the players fought so hard and for so long and at such expense to defer the inevitable release of a report that on any reading is only mildly embarrassing.
Ibac has recommended more ministerial codes and guidelines. It is difficult to understand the point of them when the existing ones were ignored. Those recommendations seem politicly naive on the part of Ibac.
What would better serve the people of Victoria is cultural change within government, to replace an entrenched sense of entitlement with a renewed commitment to serving the public, not any political party.
• Jon Faine is a vice-chancellor’s fellow at the University of Melbourne and presented ABC Radio Melbourne Mornings for more than 20 years. Since leaving the ABC in 2019, he has done freelance work for Ibac and the UFU. None of that work was connected to Operation Richmond
