Politicss
Sack the NACC
A long-serving liberal politician puts the case for a proper Commonwealth anti-corruption commission.
If you are caught on camera meeting with a minister to hand over a stash of cash, following which you get a favourable deal from the government, it is possible that your behaviour will come to the attention of the National Anti-Corruption Commission. But don’t worry; you will be saved the embarrassment of publicity, unless the Commission considers the conditions to be “exceptional” – but because there is nothing exceptional about greasing the occasional political palm you probably won’t be singled out.
Not systemic
The Commonwealth NACC is a weak institution. In fact it was established, in a “bipartisan” deal between the Labor government and the Coalition opposition, as a weak institution. That deal shut out independent members of Parliament, such as Helen Haines, who had been (and still is) calling for a strong NACC. The government’s feeble excuse for dealing with the Coalition rather than the independents was that they wanted the NACC to be established as a part of the institutional firmament, not subject to the whims of a changing government – as if the mob on the opposition benches had any possibility of ever winning an election.
John Hewson has added his voice to the call for the NACC to be overhauled, or replaced by a proper anti-corruption commission. He has appeared on a Late Night Live program explaining his dissatisfaction with the NACC: John Hewson says we should sack the NACC. (24 minutes) As David Marr explains in the introduction to the session, “the NACC was designed not to bring sunlight and fresh air to the inner workings of Canberra: except in undefined ‘exceptional circumstances’, it would operate in secret”.
Hewson goes on to explain the NACC’s considerable shortcomings. It has taken a narrow interpretation of “corruption”, focussing on what lawyers call “brown paper bag” corruption involving individual benefits resulting from specific actions, rather than systemic corruption. That’s the form of corruption infecting whole organizations, which becomes part of the organization’s culture, as we have often seen in state and territory police forces.
Hewson sees NACC’s feeble response to Robodebt – one of the country’s worst cases of systemic corruption – as a demonstration of the Commission’s weaknesses.
On the prospects for reform he is no optimist. The Coalition has never been enthusiastic about public exposure of its doings, an understandable stance in view of the stench of corruption that emanated from the Morrison government. Nor has it ever welcomed scrutiny of its claim to economic competence, he adds.
As the Centre for Public Integrity notes, the Albanese government is even more inclined to secrecy than the Morrison government was. In its second term it probably believes it can pay even less attention to independents than it did in its first term. And arithmetic is against reform, because the more Members of Parliament a party has, the greater is the chance that one of them will do something that would come to the attention of a properly-established NACC.
Hewson’s LNL interview follows his Saturday Paper article Sack the NACC, covering most of the same ground.
The last word on national security, however, goes to Pauline Hanson, who warns that if children are taught to acknowledge the original owners of the land, no one will want to defend Australia.
Accounting for espionage
We’ve made it easy for spies to steal commercial and military intelligence.
Look both ways for spies
Accounting and espionage must surely belong at opposite ends of the scale of public interest titillation, but the Australian Institute of Criminology brings them together in its report The cost of espionage. Collecting the data wasn’t easy – spies aren’t in the habit of opening up their accounts to auditors – but even with this limitation the Institute conservatively estimates that espionage is costing Australia about $13 billion a year. That includes the cost of stolen intellectual property and the cost incurred in the public and private sectors in dealing with the threat of espionage.
This research was commissioned by ASIO, explains ASIO Director-General Mike Burgess in the annual Hawke Lecture at the University of South Australia’s Bob Hawke Centre. He brackets his address with reference to the Combe-Ivanov affair which greeted the Hawke government on its election in 1983, but his main message is about current-day espionage in Australia. He gives the usual assurances that ASIO has a specific mission, spelled out on the government’s transparency portal. Regardless of what its real or perceived mission may have been fifty years ago, its task is about “obtaining, correlating, evaluating and communicating intelligence relevant to security”. It is not a Cold War extension of the Liberal Party.
It's important for our intelligence and enforcement agencies to reinforce that message about that specific task at a time when lobbies for Israel’s government are trying to equate opposition to its brutal policies with support for terrorism.
Burgess’s address is essentially an update of the old “loose lips sink ships” message, as applied not only to military security – particularly relevant when we have battalions of desk-bound public servants working on AUKUS – but also to commercial intellectual property. The venue and audience (a university) are relevant, because many university staff and postgraduate students are working on matters with military applications.
There is nothing in his address to which liberals or even libertarians could take exception. But one might have expected that in talking to such an audience he would have discussed the difficult distinction between research which may be considered as a global public good, and research which can give other nations a military or commercial advantage. People would hope that those engaged in basic science, or in applied research on public health, aviation safety and climate change, are collaborating with their colleagues in other countries, even if countries can use such knowledge as a means to gain a competitive advantage – as does the Australian government in its plan to use our transition to net zero.
That distinction between open and classified research has become more difficult as our cash-strapped universities have turned to government security agencies and private companies for research funding.
Anyone who has watched the movie Oppenheimer will have realized that in developing nuclear weapons academics were recruited to work on Project Manhattan, but they were taken out of their academic environment. That separation is passe, however, and it is not uncommon in universities to come across research centres with all the security one would expect to find in an arms-manufacturing company.
Burgess, understandably, wants Australians to take espionage seriously. He mentions cases where companies, in their carelessness, have let foreign agencies steal their intellectual property. Such negligence can cost businesses millions of dollars.
But is the problem about specific security measures – protection of passwords, vetting of employees, and so on – or is it about our business and political culture?
The story of how we gave away our early lead in solar technology to China exemplifies the cultural and political problem. The Chinese didn’t need to send spies to Australia when they could rely on an indolent and economically incompetent government that lacked the faith to help Australians make the transition from research to commercialization. There is still the attitude, promoted by the fossil fuel lobby and mining oligarchs, that Australia should rely on simple commodity exports, and leave matters such as complex manufacturing and emerging technologies to cleverer people in other lands.
Burgess is also rightly perturbed that many public servants don’t take security seriously, but he must be aware of the absurd amount of over-classification of government documents and the abuse of classification. Much material that public servants see is security classified, not to protect the national interest but to shield corrupt politicians from exposure. In some agencies security classifications have more to do with hierarchical pecking orders rather than any “need to know” criteria. And even worse, small cabals of senior public servants can use security classifications as means to cobble together policy proposals that bypass the analytical scrutiny that more specialized staff, or staff in other agencies, can provide.