Tommy Bent must be resting a bit easier in his grave, these days. After all, he’s finally going to shuck the mantle of Victoria’s most corrupt premier. Even Queensland’s Joh Bjelke-Petersen might finally be getting a contender for most corrupt premier in all Australia.
From volunteer firefighters, to police, to the longest lockdowns in the world, the Andrews government’s corruption wand has tainted all it touches. Especially the police. Victoria Police are already stained by scandals like Lawyer X and the brutal crackdowns on freedom protesters. Now, they’re being dragged into Dan Andrew’s “Red Shirts” corruption scandal.
The Victorian Liberal Party is calling for another investigation into Labor’s “red shirts” rort, amid fresh claims senior police officers interfered in a fraud investigation to ensure ALP MPs were not arrested or charged before the 2018 election.
Liberal MP David Davis called for the scheme to be probed again after a police whistleblower’s statement – which said the investigation was “rigged and nobbled” by police command – was dropped under his door on Tuesday night.
The Australian
The Red Shirts scandal involved Victorian Labor paying casual electorate officers to campaign for Labor in marginal seats at the 2014 election (the officers donned red shirts to campaign). But electorate officers are paid for by the taxpayer, and they’re absolutely not allowed to do campaign work. To do so is essentially defrauding the taxpayer.
And responsibility went all the way to the top.
Victoria’s ombudsman has concluded [that] “The evidence showed that Mr Andrews was involved and immersed in the Red Shirts campaign in 2014, as he necessarily would have been as party leader”.
But the corruption didn’t stop with ripping off the taxpayer.
Deborah Glass was also highly critical of a decision by Victoria Police to conduct dawn raids and arrest 17 of the “red shirts” campaigners, concluding it was a “mistake” that raised public debate when Labor MPs were not also arrested.
“It is not clear why MPs were not treated in the same, allegedly heavy-handed, fashion as their staffers,” she found.
The Australian
Well, it’s a bit clearer, now.
The whistleblower reported police command blocked investigators in the fraud squad from obtaining phone records and computer data of 17 Labor MPs allegedly involved in the scheme, which saw staffers paid about $388,000 from the public purse to campaign for the party in 2014.
A detective senior sergeant was told in an email not to arrest or search any of the MPs, despite conducting dawn raids on their staffers, they claimed […]
A decision on whether to charge the MPs was intentionally delayed until after the November 2018 election for “political reasons” that ultimately favoured the Labor Party.
The Australian
This being Dan Andrew’s Victoria, the arse-covering and stone-walling is coming thick and fast. VicPol are referring questions to the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission, but IBAC isn’t commenting, nor is the Ombudsman.
And the Labor government is just breezily asserting that, in their own words, “the investigation is over; there’s nothing more to see here”.
Welcome to Dandrewstan.
