Here’s the funniest headline you’ll read all week: “IBAC delivers blow to Daniel Andrews’ integrity”. The joke, of course, is pretending that Andrews had any integrity in the first place.
The biggest clown in this whole circus is Dictator Dan himself, strutting about and pretending that an “educational report” “made no findings against anyone”.
The Victorian Premier’s defiant stance came as several senior Labor sources – including people who served as advisers, MPs and ministers during the period examined in IBAC’s Operation Daintree – strongly backed former health minister Jenny Mikakos’s testimony to the inquiry that power was centralised in Mr Andrews’ private office, which had “tentacles everywhere”.
In its report tabled in state parliament on Wednesday, the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission found that senior government advisers and public servants were acting in the “perceived interests” of ministers and the Premier in handing a $1.2m contract to the Health Workers Union on the eve of the 2018 Victorian election, without a competitive tender process.
Contrary to Andrews’ audacious claim that it “made no findings against anyone”, the report named plenty of names in Victorian Labor’s inner circle of power, linking straight back to the premier’s office himself.
IBAC found the then Department of Health and Human Services failed to conduct a competitive process before giving the contract to provide occupational violence and aggression training to health workers to the HWU’s newly established “Health Education Federation”.
The watchdog found DHHS public servants had been “improperly influenced” by senior advisers in both the Premier’s and Jill Hennessy’s offices, and that further interference from an adviser to Ms Hennessy’s successor, Ms Mikakos and the Premier’s office “compromised the management” of the contract.
The Australian
It would have been much, much worse, except that the Victorian Labor government have been holding their thumb on the scales of justice in that state for years.
Retired Supreme Court judge Stephen Charles — who sits on the board of the Centre for Public Integrity — said the reason IBAC stopped short of a finding of corruption was because it was limited by Victorian legislation.
“The definition of corruption in the IBAC legislation requires that the conduct in question also constitute a relevant offence, so it has to involve criminal conduct as well as conduct which is objectionable,” he said.
Mr Charles said it was “reasonably clear” from the report that the authors believed “that had there not been that definition in the IBAC legislation, the conduct would have been found to be corrupt”.
ABC Australia
In other words, Victorian Labor have rigged the law to let them get away with blatant corruption. Contrast this with, for example, the NSW anti-corruption watchdog, which has seen premiers resign because of entirely legal acts such as accepting a gift of a bottle of wine, or failing to disclose a personal relationship.
But, then, this is Victoria, a state which is fast making even Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Queensland look squeaky clean.
Andrews’ Victoria is so corrupt that even Labor MPs can’t deny it.
Several senior Labor sources, including people who were working as ministerial staff, MPs or ministers during the period examined by IBAC backed Ms Mikakos’s view of power being centralised in the Premier’s office […]
An Andrews government MP agreed. “In any situation where there’s a difference in view between ministerial offices and the PPO, we know which one’s going to win the argument,” the Labor MP said. “The centralisation of power is clear, to the frustration of many.”
The Australian
Yet, Dictator Dan would have us believe that corrupt conduct by the people in his own office was nothing to do with him.
Victoria would be the laughing stock of Australia if its sick culture of corruption wasn’t costing us all hundreds of billions.
