Long-Running Drama in Theatre of Public Shame
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____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Long-running drama in theatre of public shame MP Daryl Maguire and NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian in Wagga in 2017. Tom Dusevic OCTOBER 16, 2020 The British have epic soap Coronation Street. Latin Americans crave their telenovelas. The people of NSW must settle for the Independent Commission Against Corruption and its popular offshoot, Keeping Up with the Spivs. The current season is one of the most absorbing: bush huckster Daz Kickback ensnares Gladys Prim in his scams. At week’s end, our heroine is tied to railroad tracks as a steaming locomotive rounds the bend. Stay tuned. In recent years the public has heard allegations of Aldi bags stuffed with cash and delivered to NSW Labor’s Sussex Street HQ by Chinese property developer Huang Xiangmo. In 2013 corruption findings were made against former Labor ministers Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald. The following year, Liberal premier Barry O’Farrell resigned after ICAC obtained a handwritten note that contradicted his claims he did not receive a $3000 bottle of Grange from the head of Australian Water Holdings, a company linked to the Obeids. The same year ICAC’s Operation Spicer investigated allegations NSW Liberals used associated entities to disguise donations from donors banned in the state, such as property developers. Ten MPs either went to the crossbench or quit politics. ICAC later found nine Liberal MPs acted with the intention of evading electoral funding laws, with larceny charges recommended against one. Years earlier there was the sex-for- development scandal, set around the “Table of Knowledge” at a kebab shop where developers met officials from Wollongong council. 2 ICAC was set up in 1988. Famously, one of its early scalps was its champion Liberal Nick Greiner, the state leader who presented as a cleanskin technocrat. Greiner was forced out of office after ICAC found he acted corruptly in a political fix to shore up numbers for his minority government; the Supreme Court later ruled ICAC had gone beyond its powers. Across three decades citizens have watched with disbelief and anger this theatre of public shame, with obliging media packs adding to street walk improvs for the nightly news. ICAC is not without its flaws. Reputations have been trashed, evidentiary standards are quite different to the courts and prosecutions fall over. But it has been a force for good, serving as a bulwark against corruption and other behaviours. What is it about the Premier State that keeps taking on the sly? The “convict stain” is the place to start. “An unexplored continent would become a jail,” Robert Hughes wrote in The Fatal Shore, one of the largest forced exiles in modern history. British authorities hoped this scheme of “social goodness” eventually would swallow a whole class, “the criminal class”, he wrote, “whose existence was one of the prime sociological beliefs” of the age. To get ahead in this frontier society, amid its simmering colonial stew of jailers, convicts, emancipists, free settlers and local-born currency lads and lasses, corners were cut. There were grey zones. “You had to be street smart to survive let alone prosper,” says David Clune, for many years manager of the NSW Parliament’s research service and the parliament’s historian. “A good example is WC Wentworth’s father, D’Arcy. He was a highwayman in England who was very lucky to escape conviction. His aristocratic connections got rid of him to NSW where he prospered in dubious and not so dubious ways.” There was shame around that convict past, a raw wound that would last a very long time, as historian John Hirst observed of the world’s bad opinion of us. We were “morally suspect”, even though Australia had disowned that past with the anti- transportation movement in the 1840s. As a British verse of the time had it: “There vice is virtue, virtue vice / And all that’s vile is voted nice.” In a 2006 essay, Hirst noted how parliaments in the Australian colonies were “rough- houses” compared with Westminster, “and of all the Australian parliaments that of NSW had the lowest reputation”. A lot of disreputable men had gained seats, while proceedings in the Legislative Assembly, which become known as the “Bear Pit”, were a blood sport. Havelock Ellis, described as a priggish young Englishman, wrote in a 1875 diary entry how there were no orators in the NSW assembly, a “body of businessmen, merchants, shopkeepers and the like, met together to transact business”. Hirst noted the 1880s were the heyday of drunks and demagogues in the NSW lower house. In a Bulletin cartoon from the time, Hirst recounts, a man in a bowler hat approaches a man sitting on a park bench who is dressed in top hat and tails. “Excuse 3 me,” says the first man. “Are you a member of parliament?” “Certainly not,” replies the man in the top hat. “I am a gentleman.” In the years before World War I, Sydney became more upright, on the surface at least. In his introduction to the Oxford Anthology of Sydney, Richard Hall writes politics had a lot to do with the rise of suburban respectability. “The non-Labor parties merged in response to the rising threat of the ALP and formed an alliance with the wowser Protestant churches, whose price was social control through a raft of anti-liquor, anti- gambling, and Sunday observance laws,” Hall writes. “These laws were unenforceable and turned many of the population, mostly working class, into offenders. From then on the laws fed and entrenched police corruption and created widespread public acceptance of corruption underneath the facade.” Clune, who is now an honorary associate at the University of Sydney, tells Inquirer that because the Irish were excluded from mainstream society, they created their own alternative channels, similar to Tammany in the US. “So getting round the system by ‘rorts’ was an established part of the culture and was imported into the ALP, especially after the conscription split during the first world war when the English MPs left and the ‘Murphia’ took control,” he says. “Sydney, in US parlance, has always been a wide open town, like Kansas City, with plenty of opportunity to make money with few questions asked. NSW police have always been a law unto themselves. Politicians are afraid of them and seek to keep them on side. There has been traditionally little accountability and a culture of cover-up.” As well, Clune says the inflexibility of the public service for a long time created a culture of fixers who could get things done for a price — appealing to those fed up with bureaucracy. It still persists, with endless opportunities for graft at pressure points of a Byzantine system of development approvals in a state that has been pushing public works projects at a record rate. Criminals were often dealt with brutally by police or granted the “green light” to do as they pleased. Corruption was endemic, reaching high into the NSW police and politics. Robert Askin, Liberal premier from 1965 to 1975, presided over a vast network of corruption and bribery, meticulously detailed after his death. Askin was in criminal cahoots with Abe Saffron, Sydney’s “Mr Sin”, who provided kickbacks to his protectors. Saffron’s son would allege his father was the bagman for an underworld of illegal grog, prostitution and casinos, with bribes and payments trousered by Askin and police commissioner Norman “The Foreman” Allan. 4 Abe Saffron in the 1950s By the 1980s it seemed the whole country was in the grip of the NSW disease. The Fitzgerald inquiry uncovered decades of systematic graft in Queensland. WA Inc was in full swing. In A Concise History of Australia Stuart Macintyre noted a “discernible loss of public confidence in government”. Neville Wran’s corrective services minister Rex Jackson served time for selling early release to prisoners, while the state’s chief magistrate Murray Farquhar was jailed for conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. “In NSW special deals for mates were a way of life and even embroiled a High Court judge,” Macintyre wrote of Lionel Murphy’s ordeal. “By the end of the decade a flurry of royal commissions sent some of the culprits to trial. Police commissioners, cabinet members and a premier all served prison sentences.” Out of this cesspit came the idealism, or was it sheer desperation, of ICAC and the establishment in 1994 of the Royal Commission into the NSW Police Service conducted by James Wood. One of Wood’s legacies was a police integrity commission. At the time, a new Public Interest Disclosures Act made it easier for whistleblowers to come forward. Last year, NSW Ombudsman Michael Barnes reported a 30 per cent rise in public interest disclosures made, with corrupt conduct the most serious allegation made in 83 per cent of cases. Is that evidence of more corruption or vigilance? NSW officials have a duty to report serious wrongdoing. ICAC itself has been through waves of change following reviews, moving to a three- commissioner model in August 2017. A sore point for many remains the trashing of reputations in hearings and limited avenues for exoneration. A consequence may be, as ICAC’s inspector Bruce McClintock told a NSW parliamentary inquiry last year, “people with the appropriate skills and abilities will be discouraged from coming into parliament and engaging in politics, if they feel they could be dealt with in this way”. When Greiner introduced the ICAC Act he told parliament “the commission will be required to make definite findings about persons directly and substantially involved”. “The commission will not be able to simply allow such persons’ reputations to be impugned publicly by allegations without coming to some definite conclusion,” he 5 vowed.