A new round of royal commissions and public inquiries may expose not only corruption and mismanagement, but the deeper erosion of public trust in politics, parties and institutions.

Australia may be moving into chickens-coming-home-to roost time. It is now royal commission and public inquiry season. Those in reasonable prospect involve the influence of money in politics, how cheaply players are bought, who gets what and for what, and what moral and ethical violations the public can expect as players prostitute their power and access, to their own private ends.

Such inquiries always come at inconvenient times, and have unpredictable courses, even for those who have tried to narrow terms of reference, fix the referee and arrange the result. What looms this time is not so much the findings we may expect, which will probably be dire for the parties and individuals involved. It will instead be the impact of such findings on an electorate which has shown itself to be angry, cynical and jaundiced about the political process. Particularly when one side is as bad as the other.

Victoria, under its new premier, is to have a royal commission into its infrastructure programs, and the relationship between Labor politicians and the CFMEU. It may not prove corruption of politicians, but is bound to show incompetence, mismanagement, undue influence and appalling stewardship of public money.  There are only four months before the next election, but one can be pretty sure that voters in Victoria, and for that matter the rest of Australia, will have heard some evidence supporting serious allegations before they go to vote.

NSW is having an ICAC inquiry into efforts by members of a conservative faction of the Liberal Party to take control of the party administration at federal, state and local government level. The allegations are said to involve serious corruption because their efforts were subsidised by unlawful donations from development and building interests, efforts to influence the outcome of development applications, and attempted corruption of several aldermen, this time by Labor operatives.

The Albanese government is awaiting the report of a royal commission into the Bondi massacre. But it is, or ought to be, braced for potential inquiries into other open sores. There is alleged skulduggery, whether by politicians, public servants, or lobbyists and vested interests attempting to improperly influence government decisions.

Calling such inquiries is not entirely a matter of its own judgment, because the so-far-inert National Anti-Corruption Commission may try to prove itself relevant, and some independent watchdogs, such as the Auditor-General and the Ombudsman are capable of making a great fuss, entirely unwanted, perhaps particularly on defence spending.

Once the fire is lit, the interests of government are more likely to be served by open inquiries, rather than by behind closed doors. It’s a matter of trust, and Albanese, for all his majority, does not have a lot of credit in that  bank.

It’s nearly always about money in the end. In the wrong hands or pockets or wrongly spent

Some of the scandals involve the connection between politicians and political donors; others additionally involve the government’s chronic secrecy and evasion, and failures of accountability, transparency and proper process. Others involve the opaque and smelly way by which a group of privileged insiders – many of whom were politicians, and senior bureaucrats – get special access to ministerial ears, and decisions in their favour that mere mortals cannot get.

The getting of access is greased with political donations, and as was seen at the recent Labor conference in Adelaide, the sale by the party organisation of “rights” to lobby ministers, and places at the dinner table. The appearance was of a government – from the prime minister down, appearing to be for rent to the highest bidder.  It’s always an unattractive, and usually fatal impression to be conveying to ordinary voters but is additionally damaging because Albanese in opposition had railed against the rorts and corruption of purpose of the Morrison government and had promised to be better. It is an open question whether he is in fact worse.

It erodes trust and the assumption that things are probably on the level and that our politicians are public-spirited. Over time, the impressions it all creates sink into the unconscious mind of voters, to resurface at the polling booth.

The government is not responsible for the moral and ethical heap in which top accountancy, consultancy and legal firms have fallen, most recently with KPMG. That is part of the environment in which faith in institutions, public and private, is at a low ebb. Dishonour and faithlessness are as much at issue as dishonesty and breach of duty to clients and to the public interest.

The backdrop of criminally misbehaving business professionals hangs over the stewardship of government, and the role, if any, of regulation of the public interest. Our politicians are increasingly enveloped in the sleaze and greed of the scandals, made worse by the deeply inadequate, and possibly compromised stewardship of government departments, particularly by Finance. Maybe they are still, perhaps like the AFP struggling to see what the consultants did wrong. Or maybe they are anxious to preserve old rorts by which many politicians, senior bureaucrats, senior defence officials, and even a few cops, end up in the lobbying and consulting industries.

Does the public care about crooked politicians, or incompetent ones?

In the dying days of the Morrison government, I ran into the late Steve Sedgwick, who had in his time headed the department of finance, later education, and for a while was public service commissioner. After a term on the Asian Development Bank, he was to become an occasional consultant to government, not least in advising what should be done about allegedly serious misbehaviour by senior public servants during the Robodebt scandal.

We chatted about Robodebt, and the scandalous mismanagement of billions by the private sector given truckloads of money, virtually without controls during the Covid crisis. When, oh when, could we expect to see some accounting, and some malignant ministers and public servants jailed, I asked rhetorically. Sedgwick wondered whether it would ever happen. The problem, he said, was that the public did not care. Or did not seem to. Some scandals were too complicated to explain. Some did not have a big public impact, because public expectations about the honesty of politicians and the competence of bureaucrats were so low. Most members of the public were focused on their own jobs, families and economic survival, without the time or the inclination to be calling detailed administration to account. Senior public servants were scared for their jobs and afraid to say “No, minister”. Perhaps the public mood would change, but that was not going to happen simply because journalists, independent professionals and the odd political scientist were screaming blue murder.

I held Sedgwick in high regard, the more so because as an administrator he had at times seemed pedantic about avoiding conflict of interest and the appearance of it, even over relatively unimportant matters such as public service perks. His actual example – sometimes called prissy by colleagues – was probably worth 100 memoranda writing about rather than demonstrating standards in his management style.  I thought him entirely the wrong person to review the Robodebt royal commission report – if probably better nonetheless than the public service commissioner – and suspected that the reason it was never made public was that he had got lost in some thickets, unable to see the wood. For all that he ended his days as a papal knight.

But his opinion that the public never got much exercised by scandals of public administration was widely shared in politics. It might be demonstrated by the traditional wisdom among backbenchers and special minister of state that laying on the perks for parliamentarians caused public grumbling for only a few days, then acceptance.

The public, after all, expected the worst, indeed often thought that the perks were more extensive than they were. Besides it was a bipartisan sport, and opposition point-scoring would be limited. Some senior politicians who argued this pointed out also that the public expense of shutting up critical and grumbling backbenchers was trivial – what was amazing was how cheaply they could be bought. I remember, however, how one party secretary, Bob Hogg, like one Minister for Finance, Peter Walsh, thought the obsession with pay and perks disgusting, and a long-term cancer on the reputation of democracy.

I labour this a little because public reaction to government scandals has its own way of working. So far as the affairs of the Reform mob on the extreme right of the Liberal Party are concerned, I suspect that many will deduce wrongly that it was common or garden branch-stacking and favour-mongering, which, folk would say, accurately enough, everyone did. But assuming the allegations come up to the opening address by counsel assisting ICAC, they might take an entirely different view of taking money from a developer to persuade party colleagues to get rid of a building Commissioner trying (not very effectively) to set building standards. The potential grenade in the billabong was, however, the evidence of how the NSW Catholic authorities had allowed their schools administration to become an arm of a faction of the Liberal Party, with some employees virtually full-time on factional organising.

The buried story may be about Catholic abuse of public money for crude political purposes

Catholic schools, particularly systemic ones, get billions of dollars in public subsidies, and the public (even Catholics) have a right to be sure that it is being well spent. In theory, money allocated to Catholic schools is given according to Gonski principles, with schools from poor areas given more than schools serving the middle classes, Catholic and non-Catholic. But the Catholic system, at state level, negotiated a special, and shameful deal for itself. It would take the money as a lump sum in accordance with the formula. But it secured government approval (from a minister for education by name Bill Shorten) to spend the lump sum as it liked, regardless of the need or the poverty of any particular school. Thus, some well-off schools got more than the Gonski principles would suggest – perhaps because they were seen as some sort of flagship for the quality of a Catholic education – while many chronically poor and ill-equipped schools got far less than their entitlement.

It may suit the institutional interests of the Catholic church but is a deplorable example of the church helping the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer. It is not as Jesus Christ would have arranged it, nor a practical manifestation of love by the church’s stewards, particularly the very bishops whose conduct in avoiding accountability for the child sex assaults is a continuing scandal. The dirty education deal, which is too little discussed, whether in Catholic circles or in the wider community, prevails in the other states and territories too.

It is true that many Australian Catholics have prospered over the past 75 years, and that a good many dropped their traditional allegiance to the Labor Party for conservative parties. This was a process hastened, in many states, by the 1954 Labor Split which accustomed many Catholics to voting Liberal or National. It also changed, to a degree, because of the establishment of state aid to religious schools in the 1960s, when I was at school at a well-heeled Catholic boarding school. In a somewhat similar manner, most white American Catholics, and most white American Catholic bishops, are staunchly republican, and not a little resentful of an (American) Pope who constantly reproves Donald Trump over his deportation policies.

A Catholic private army secretly manipulating politics against “woke” progressive ideas?

I expect that Anthony Fisher, the Sydney Catholic Archbishop would be quietly pleased by the idea that he controls his own private army of Opus Dei-inspired zealots, as well as the ruling faction of the NSW Liberal Party. In public, of course, he would deny it, insisting that the faction was entirely independent of him, even as he shared some of its antipathy to “woke” policies and its adherence to traditional Catholic values on issues such as abortion, same sex marriage and the right to be bigoted about the employment of lesbians in Catholic schools.

ICAC will not, of course, be looking at whether the faction has any of the confessional character that Pope Pius XII rejected in terms of the Catholic Movement in the 1950s, but it seems clear that the organisers of the faction (as well as their de facto patron, Tony Abbott) are motivated by their brand of Catholicism, and see themselves as being on some sort of crusade to turn the clock back to the “values” prevailing 70 years ago.

It is very doubtful if the appearance of this crusade will be seen as a public relations plus for the archbishop, for the church temporal, or for its catholic schools. It is more likely that it will excite a hostile public reaction. This could not merely involve a 1950s style re-embrace of anti-Catholicism and sectarianism, though that is possible, and might damage “social cohesion” whatever that is. It could be equally within the church against the archbishop and his power plays and effective permission to use church money to manipulate the Liberal Party. Modern Bishops have very little influence over their flocks. They once did, but most, including Fisher, have overdrawn on their spiritual accounts in both heaven and earth.

Anthony Albanese and Labor once thought it would be politic to present the party as being guided only by the public interest. Open, accountable and transparent. In office the PM has walked away from his commitments. He nobbled the NACC, so that it is as useless and toothless as the Victorian Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC), the dog that didn’t bark about Victorian trade union corruption. What the NACC and IBAC have in common is that they don’t hold public hearings, have secret and unaccountable proceedings and an aversion to telling the public the truth about those who govern and who spend the public’s money.

Republished from The Canberra Times

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.