Corruption busters to root out evil in Victoria

Liberal Ted Baillieu. Photo / Getty Images

An anti-corruption commission with sweeping powers to uncover and entrap bent police, judges, politicians and public servants will be launched by Victoria's new conservative Government within months.

The Independent Broad-Based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) will replace an existing organisations whose credibility wilted under a series of scandals.

The new commission will also be given wider powers and functions than those proposed last year by former Labor Premier John Brumby after public anger ahead of a state election that swept him from office.

A powerful new corruption-busting body had been a key policy for the Coalition led by Liberal Ted Baillieu, whose first moves after winning victory last November included handing responsibility for the creation of IBAC to Crime Prevention Minister Andrew McIntosh.

Although its final shape has yet to be announced, the new commission is expected to be given powers to enable undercover agents to break laws to root out corruption and to entice corrupt public servants into lawbreaking.

Scheduled to begin operating in July, IBAC follows years of government refusal to create the kind of anti-corruption body which exists in every state, except Victoria and South Australia.

Until he caved in to public pressure close to the election, Brumby had described them as "lawyers' picnics", and had been reluctant to accept the recommendations of an inquiry led by special commissioner Elizabeth Proust, one of the state's most senior public servants.

Her report urged a new body to oversee public integrity and fight corruption, combining the functions and powers of other bodies including the Office of Police Integrity and the Ombudsman's Office.

It said falling public confidence had been identified in a survey commissioned by the inquiry, which found that almost 40 per cent of respondents believed the Government to be ineffective in dealing with corruption, even when it had been publicly identified.

Examples included corruption in intellectual disability services in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and at Victoria University in the late 1990s.

Police corruption included major cases involving drug detectives and underworld crime figures later caught in the crossfire of Melbourne's bloody gang wars. The inquiry said it had been presented with a "steady stream" of integrity and anti-corruption issues, and had heard credible allegations about existing, serious, misconduct and corruption.

Among these were allegations of political party branch stacking, the conduct of a ministerial adviser in relation to a planning consultation and breaches of salary cap rules by the Melbourne Storm rugby league club.

Like New South Wales' Independent Commission Against Corruption, the new body will have the wide powers of a royal commission, but will go further, extending into investigations of police, state government ministers, MPs and their staffs, public servants and local government.

It will be headed by a commissioner drawn from the judiciary, and will be overseen by a parliamentary joint committee and a special inspector.

In a report based on an interview with McIntosh, Melbourne's Herald Sun said yesterday that IBAC was expected to use secret integrity tests to tempt suspect public sector workers into committing crimes.

It would also have the power to create, assume and use false identities in controlled operations, which would allow investigators to break the law to obtain evidence against suspects.

McIntosh told the Herald Sun that IBAC would have retrospective powers to enable it to investigate prior corruption, likely to involve Labor-controlled councils whose publicly exposed wrongdoing was "just the tip of the iceberg".

IBAC would have the power to decide its own investigations and to refuse requests by the government of the day to probe specific matters. McIntosh said the new body needed to be able to investigate corruption across the public sector.

"Corruption doesn't begin and end with Victoria Police and, indeed, experience interstate would suggest quite the contrary, and I don't think Victoria is any different. You only have to look at the experience in other states."

GOING STRAIGHT

* Victoria gets a new corruption-buster after:
* Years of publicly exposed corruption by police and public servants.
* Repeated refusals to follow the rest of Australia with a powerful new agency.
* A belated promise to act by former Labor Premier John Brumby just before he was swept from power last November.
* The victorious Coalition Government's plans for a tough new body from July.