National anti-corruption plan prepared by Attorney-General's Department did not include independent watchdog

Updated

A national anti-corruption plan prepared by the Attorney-General's Department before the 2013 federal election fell dramatically short of calling for an independent graft watchdog.

Instead, the plan developed under the former Labor government recommended mandatory reporting and new departmental committees as a federal safeguard against the threat of bribery.

Critically, the new federal regime envisaged no oversight of federal politicians.

A copy of the plan, obtained by ABC television's Four Corners, said Commonwealth agencies reported almost 2,000 cases of corruption between 2008 and 2011.

It also said 12 per cent of federal bureaucrats had witnessed serious breaches of protocol, including fraud and theft, according to a 2012 survey.

Yet at present, the only agency with the powers to investigate and root out corruption in the federal sphere – the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity – has no jurisdiction over the majority of the Commonwealth public service.

The revelations come as the recently retired head of the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), David Ipp QC, called for the establishment of a federal anti-graft agency with the powers of a standing royal commission, lamenting a grave "breakdown of trust" in the political process.

The ICAC is currently investigating the Liberal Party's alleged laundering of illicit campaign finance and has heard evidence of the involvement of people and institutions outside its jurisdiction.

"It is so screamingly obvious that there is a breakdown in trust at the moment," Mr Ipp told Four Corners.

"The only way of maintaining trust or recovering the trust is to demonstrate that there are adequate means of discovering corruption so that the public can be confident that what the Government is doing is not tainted by dishonest behaviour."

Ex-ICAC chief says national watchdog unlikely

Australia is co-chair, with Italy, of the G20's Anti-Corruption Working Group whose reports will be considered by senior G20 officials today and tomorrow, but the Government has yet to announce any federal mechanism by which corruption might be investigated and exposed.

Emily Broadbent, a spokeswoman for Justice Minister Michael Keenan, said the national anti-corruption plan was never finished by the former government.

"The Government is developing new anti-corruption measures," she said, but did not elaborate on what they might constitute or when they might be announced.

The 2013 plan said: "Corrupt practices have the potential to undermine Australia's reputation for high standards of governance, robust law and justice institutions, equitable delivery of services, democratic and electoral accountability, and transparent and fair markets."

Mr Ipp said the establishment of a federal anti-graft commission was "very important".

"There is no reason to believe that the persons who occupy seats in the Federal Parliament are inherently better than those who occupy seats in the NSW Parliament," he said.

"Corruption is endemic to the human being. That is, when the opportunities are there, when there is no policing, there are some people who will get involved in that."

But Mr Ipp acknowledged the establishment of such an agency was unlikely.

"Most politicians ... do not like to be subject to a body such as ICAC, and you can see that in all the new similar bodies that have been created in South Australia, Victoria and Tasmania," he said.

"They really do not have the [same] powers of investigation as ICAC and that is because politicians don't want that."

Mr Ipp said these other anti-corruption agencies would never have been able to uncover the Eddie Obeid plot that delivered his family $30 million from a rigged coal allocation tender in 2008.

"It would have been difficult for them, not because they don't have the ability but because the lengths to which the corrupt conduct in Jasper was concealed was so extreme, it really did take the kind of powers that ICAC has to realise and prove the kind of corruption," he said.

"ICAC is able to uncover corruption which other bodies with similar names in other parts of Australia cannot uncover. Now the fact that they can't uncover it doesn't allow a person honestly to say there's no corruption here.

"No-one has picked up the rock [elsewhere] to see what worms are crawling around underneath it."

Preselecting 'cleanskins' is the key, says Bill Heffernan

Liberal senator Bill Heffernan told Four Corners he believed the most important thing in politics was to ensure that "cleanskins" were preselected as candidates.

But asked about whether he would support a federal anti-corruption commission, he said: "In one way or the other I don't see the harm in it.

"If you're driving along the highway and there's a sign that says 'speed camera ahead', unless you're stupid, you at least think 'how fast am I going?' or look at the speedo. Well, that's the effect of a body like ICAC, whether it's federal or state."

Labor senator John Faulkner said both sides of politics needed to do more to restore public trust in government.

"Any suggestion that wrongdoing or malfeasance or corruption happens to stop at a state or territory border is a very courageous claim to make," he said.

Any suggestion that wrongdoing or malfeasance or [that] corruption happens to stop at a state or territory border is a very courageous claim to make. Labor Senator John Faulkner

"I think that a person who's done the right thing has nothing to fear from the work of a corruption commission."

Mr Ipp has also raised questions about the model used by ACLEI, which operates almost entirely in secret and which has stated that it sometimes works in partnership with the agencies over which it has purview.

"I don't agree with that at all," Mr Ipp said. "I do not think I would ever act in partnership with another agency who we're investigating. I think that compromises the independence of ICAC [or an equivalent agency]."

He also said public hearings were vital for both deterrence of graft and the restoration of public trust.

"Members of the public can see for themselves the strength or weakness of the evidence," he said.

"That's how corruption is exposed. The exposure is the deterrence because ... very often prosecutions either don't take place or don't succeed, so it's the publicity that is the sanction."

The 2013 national anti-corruption plan, which had been prepared for announcement by former attorney-general Mark Dreyfus, flagged the introduction of a new mandatory regime whereby civil servants would be required to report any suspected corruption.

The plan also included the creation of a new anti-corruption committee chaired by the secretary of the Attorney-General's Department, a fraud and anti-corruption centre within the AFP and an integrity education and training group.

But witnesses to corruption would still be reporting their evidence to heads of departments or the Commonwealth Ombudsman – none of whom have the powers of ICAC to gather evidence and expose corruption.

The secretaries of Australia's Commonwealth public service have long argued there is no need for an ICAC-style body in Canberra.

ACLEI's jurisdiction includes Customs, the AFP, the Australian Crime Commission, AUSTRAC and sections of the Department of Agriculture.

Watch the Four Corners report Democracy For Sale at 8:30 tonight on ABC1

Topics: corruption, law-crime-and-justice, laws, states-and-territories, federal-parliament, federal-government, australia, nsw

First posted