Australia’s news media has settled into a firmly held, but largely unproven, view that the cautiously (but significantly) reformist NSW Labor government of Neville Wran in the 1980s was at best lax and at worst “riddled” with corruption.
For a state premier who’s been gone from public life for nearly 40 years, it seems there’s still a lot of media attention to be gained off his name. He popped up most recently in the context of the 2021 Berejeklian resignation (itself back in the news after the NSW Court of Appeals rejected her appeal against a finding of “corrupt conduct”) and in the ABC’s 2021 three-part documentary on Luna Park’s ghost train fire.
That same year, both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian front-paged “new” evidence about Wran’s alleged interference from the memoir of former chief magistrate Clarrie Briese, melodramatically titled Corruption in High Places.
Now, there’s pushback on the corruption claims, with a detailed look at both reported and gossiped allegations about Wran from his biographer Milton Cockburn in The Assassination of Neville Wran (excerpted in the AFR) following on from the assessment by Rodney Tiffen in Inside Story.
Tiffen’s piece bounces off the report he prepared for the ABC with investigative journalist Chris Masters into the ghost train fire program, which found it “misled its audience by suggesting a link between the notorious Sydney crime figure Abe Saffron and … Wran”.
The continued fascination derives from that moment when the Wran government — along with Queensland’s Bjelke-Petersen crew — had the misfortune of finding itself as ground zero of the big mid-eighties lurch in how journalism thought of itself, transitioning from the cautious reporting of the record to hungry journalism of accountability.
It was a period in which Australian journalism reimagined the job it was doing. On the record “news” was becoming more managed and more ubiquitous. “Accountability” delivered the two trends that divide media today: expensive investigative muckraking (Crikey itself launched in 2000 in conscious alignment with this tradition) and the increasingly dominant bluster of cheap punditry.
The accountability shift came over a heady four years, bracketed by episodes of Four Corners, each presented by Masters: The Big League in April 1983 on NSW, and The Moonlight State in May 1987, punctuated by the 1984 publication of The Age “tapes”, a riveting read of the sheer ordinariness of leaked NSW police phone intercept transcripts.
The deep investigations that reshaped journalism were driven out of small corners of the media — Four Corners at the ABC (still structurally and culturally separate from ABC News), The National Times, the investigations team at The Age, and a handful of reporters from the pre-Murdoch Courier-Mail.
But as these investigative reporters moved out of their corners (and particularly into the SMH with the closure of The National Times in 1988) journalists like David Marr and Marian Wilkinson became the leading figures of the craft, reshaping the culture of the organisations around them.
The moment also changed the political order, as the investigative focus on reports (or rumours) of corruption at the state level helped drive the late 20th century power shift in the Australian federation, where states morphed from agenda-setting policy makers into slightly dull administrative moderators of decisions from Canberra (although the COVID-19 pandemic provided an opening for premiers like Victoria’s Dan Andrews or Western Australia’s Mark McGowan to make lemonade out of that lemon with a news messaging anti-charisma).
For such a significant cultural and political moment, it would be good, Cockburn notes, if there were a bit more substance, or even validation, of corruption claims, particularly once Wran was cleared of allegations by a royal commission.
Cockburn works through the accusations specifically directed at Wran and his senior ministers to conclude (as Tiffen did) that: “Despite some gossip, neither during nor since Wran’s years as premier has any evidence emerged that he received bribes or sought other forms of personal enrichment.”
It’s an analysis that should force a caution over the credibility of many of the “police” or other self-interested confidential sources in the corruption claims of the 1980s.
Cockburn also pushes back against what might be considered the lesser charge, carefully worded by Wran’s successor Bob Carr, of the “allegations that [Wran’s] administration was tainted by a laxness towards corruption”. He points to steps like closing Sydney’s illegal casinos, repealing the Summary Offences Act and setting up police oversight through an independent board.
However, even at the time (and particularly after the murder of anti-drugs campaigner Donald MacKay in Griffith in 1977), it was clear that the Wran-era reforms were insufficient to deal with an organised crime network that was exploding off the drug trade and had (we now know courtesy of the Carr government’s royal commission a decade later) penetrated deep into the NSW Police.
For Labor, the Wran government was the bridge between the social democracy of Whitlam and the reformist economic rationalism of Hawke in that distant time when state governments could still set the national agenda. Was its caution about battling the police the toll it had to pay for crossing that bridge?
