After one year of operation, the National Anti-Corruption Commission has spent $65 million on organising itself, pretty presentations, and rejecting submissions of obvious corruption. What’s the scam?
The scam is how the Labor Government colluded with the opposition to set up an anti-corruption body to honour Labor’s election promise, but designed it to avoid investigating each other’s rorts. Party politics at its very worst.
The point was not to bust corruption but to give the appearance of busting corruption. The government is the government. They can bust corruption if they want. Remember the Angus water imbroglio, in which $80m of water was sold to a company in the Cayman Islands set up by Angus?
A Member’s Interests: Angus Taylor’s other Cayman Islands company is wound up
As Michael Pascoe rightly lamented this week, NACC won’t investigate the billions of rorts the Coalition committed while in power—from sports rorts to car-park rorts, billions of our money spent on political targets to bribe the electorate. Nothing to see here, they say.
If you thought deciding not to investigate Robodebt was, um, “disappointing”, the NACC walking away from the Coalition’s blatant corruption of massive grant schemes is another whole level of failure.https://t.co/60iUi892bb
— Michael Pascoe (@MichaelPascoe01) July 16, 2024
They have already walked away from Robodebt, which led to the death of many Australians by their own hand. Illegal, they knew it was illegal, they covered it up. They have prosecuted our most vulnerable, as Ronni Salt pointed out:
NACC’s only visible activity besides having meetings and giving 124 presentations about corruption is to have gone after a shonky airport worker in Western Sydney.
That’s what a budget of $65m a year buys you – a political protection racket whose major accomplishment has been getting a lot of referrals. People often tell me, “I’ve gone to the NACC, and they are looking at it,” or “Don’t worry, we are referring it to the NAC.”
We don’t want to break their heart, but it’s a great big placebo. You can’t get your corruption hang-up off your chest by writing a NACC filing.
SNACC or NACC? What will be made public by the new anti-corruption commission?
This post was originally published on Michael West.