And there were new players, both from business and the other side of politics, seemingly determined to prove that they were just as bad in the abuse of politics and government for the purpose of getting an inside run, favours from mates and prostitution of the public interest.

But it proved a bit disappointing after. The High Court, the NSW political and judicial club decided that Act IV had to be shortened and censored so as to reduce the number of dead on the stage at the end of Act V. That allowed a few actors to depart hurriedly, claiming not to have been splattered by the gore.

As some of the usual suspects, Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi, and a few of their old disciples lie yet again bleeding on the stage, the audience must wonder uneasily what happened to the others in the cast whose fates had seemed as preordained.

The chief survivor is Arthur Sinodinos, genial former Treasury officer, chief of staff to John Howard, Treasurer of the NSW Liberal Party, and, perhaps, during his short private sector career, mug.

He got this part after being chosen for his political connections to lobby a particular grubby privatisation deal through state government. It was on a model, devised by others, which might well have been exported to Queensland and other states, perhaps even to the world. Saudi Arabia was, apparently, sniffing around.

Senator Sinodinos presented an unedifying picture of himself before NSW ICAC for day after day. But he gets off scot-free, except for his reputation. The NSW Parliament has decided that ICAC's purview cannot extend into what he and the company he chaired were doing. And even under the old ICAC dispensation no corruption findings had been recommended against him.

ICAC exists to get corrupt public officials, and those directly seeking to bribe, bludgeon or otherwise improperly deflect them from their duty. It has no role in preventing private sector folk from trying to make a quid, perhaps by conning politicians and officials into giving away public goods and resources. Whatever the reformed ICAC thinks of their manners, morals or rapacity, it won't make corruption findings against such folk, merely for wanting politicians to do something against the public interest.

Sinodinos, put in the senate then forced to step down from the front bench during the ICAC hearings, became one of the chief advisers to Malcolm Turnbull in his coup against Tony Abbott, and is now back in a junior ministry. He pretends that the whole affair is behind him, that he has been "cleared" with not a stain on his character. Like Sam Dastyari, a self-disgraced player in the NSW scene, he thinks it is for himself to consider his actions, to judge, to forgive himself and to determine the period of his exile.

All Sinodinos wanted to do was to make a quid. There's no evidence he wanted to corrupt politicians or public servants. But why do ex-players insist on becoming businessmen in a zone dependent on the friendship, favours, and discretions of old colleagues? Particularly when they style themselves as apostles of free enterprise and the market.

The new dogma of selling off government may sometimes benefit the public as much as the players, but there seemed ample evidence that the AWH proposition worked only by screwing the public interest. Every independent and disinterested investigation said so.

I have been spruiking the value of and the need for an ICAC, for both the ACT and for Commonwealth administration, for some time. Usually, I have argued for it on the NSW model – the model with the most expansive definition of corruption, and the body not only most open and successful in finding and exposing corruption, but the one most dedicated to letting the public into the secret.

But even NSW ICAC has its limitations, and they were evident on Thursday with its report on operation Credo, how Australian Water Holdings tried to get a private monopoly (otherwise known as a public private partnership or PPP) over water infrastructure in Sydney.

Had their attempts succeeded, the proponents stood to share in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. This would have been money effectively transferred from ordinary householders into the pockets of a few businessmen, chief among whom, it seems, might have been Eddie Obeid.

Those who stood to benefit argued from ideology that the public would benefit from competition, from the importation of private sector management and the removal of the dead hand of government over the provision of services. Their sums, and their arguments, were repeatedly demolished by honest public servants prepared to consider both the facts and their arguments. But there were insiders among the proponents, and no one seemed to be able to kill off their project.

It helps, it seems, if you make the family interests of Eddie Obeid secret shareholders in the enterprise.

It now seems obvious that Obeid went into politics primarily so as to secure business advantages for his close-knit family, and he had little hesitation in preferring his personal interests to the public interest. Actually, it had always seemed fairly obvious to me, but it took a while for it to sink in with a succession of Labor Premiers, starting with Bob Carr – the first to make Obeid a minister – and a NSW Labor machine whose successive general secretaries sometimes seemed to be completely in his thrall.

Obeid and his chief ally, Tripodi, controlled a faction of the NSW Labor Right generally known as the Terrigals (as opposed to another faction known as the Trogs). Because the Right wing precaucused before Caucus meetings, the Terrigals parlayed a bare majority among the right into the power to bind the entire right, and, thus the whole caucus, since the right always outnumbered the Left.

Most premiers bowed to their numbers, and their preoccupations, and those who didn't were undermined, and, eventually dispatched. The Obeid machine could not have operated without the institutional laxness of organisation operatives, trained in that spirit of "whatever it takes," pioneered by Graham Richardson, regarded by themselves as tactical and strategic geniuses, and accustomed, after a few years at Sussex Street, to a few terms in the Senate before the long term career serving gambling or alcohol interests, often for Kerry Packer.

When pursuing his own interests, Obeid never gave up, never let up, nagged, pushed and gnawed away, minister after minister, premier after premier. Sometimes officials, or ministers, would unite to frustrate some obvious (but undisclosed) exercise of self-interest. But, soon, a new front would develop. Tripodi was often the person pushing his case at the highest levels of government. No so much, it seemed with AWH, so as to make a profit himself, so much as to keep Obeid on board for his own preoccupation --- exercising power.

Obeid was out of political power when the Barry O'Farrell Liberal government was elected in a landslide. But that did not kill the projects, indeed it made them redouble their efforts, if with fresh strategies and faces.

Sinodinos was made a director, then chairman of directors, primarily because he had ready access to ministers in the new government. He was given an absurd salary, promised a five per cent shareholding, and offered a success fee of another 2.5 per cent if the new government came to see things the AWH way.

The ICAC report noted that Sinodinos did not tell NSW Liberal ministers that he stood to make a killing if they did what he was asking. "He told the commission that it never occurred to him that he needed to make such a disclosure because such a disclosure was not relevant to whether the PPP proposal had merit.

"When [speaking to the ministers] Mr Sinodinos was acting in his capacity as chairman of AWH. He was not a public official and was under no legal obligation to disclose to them that he stood to gain financially from a favourable decision."

So strong had been the stench of Labor that it was not obvious to all in the new government that they should be careful about their own smells, least of all in dealings with their old mates. The new premier, O'Farrell, was personally honest and clean, and, of course, not necessarily against public private partnerships. Likewise with many of his colleagues and advisers.

An army of lobbyists, many well connected to the Liberal Party machine descended on the government. In some cases, of course, they were replacing armies of lobbyists with former ALP connections.

Some of these lobbyists continue to exercise power in the parties for which they were once representatives. Particularly in NSW politics, and, these days, particularly in NSW Liberal Party politics. The attraction of hiring such people, with such influence, is obvious. To those they seek to influence, their arguments have a special cogency, even menace.

When Tony Abbott became prime minister, the same armies of locusts descended on Canberra, and Abbott, to give him credit, saw the perceptual problems it caused. He banned lobbyists from holding party positions, telling existing players they could be one or the other, but not both. In NSW, the lobbyists stayed as lobbyists – their richly remunerative day jobs – but, as Abbott loudly complains, continue to exercise their party power through surrogates by night.

And then we have the power and persuasiveness of political donations. Here, sadly, Sinodinos hardly ever knew which hat he was wearing, whether as chairman of a company which made big donations to his party, or as Treasurer of the state branch of the party, or, as such treasurers usually have to be, as bagman collecting donations, reassuring donors and writing receipts.

Sinodinos did himself no favours by marked lapses of memory about the fine details of these roles. It sometimes seemed plausible that he did not know, did not realise or had not seen in spite of the evidence staring him in the face. It may be better to be thought a naif, an innocent, perhaps a fool, but it is hardly an impression likely to inspire confidence when one has returned to politics and is now a minister.

As it happened, and almost by coincidence, NSW ICAC was having spectacular fun with the problems of political donations in a separate inquiry focused at efforts by NSW property developers, and other groups banned from making donations to the state party, were shown to be evading, avoiding or ignoring the intention of the law. Suddenly, a party voted into power on the promise of being clean, looked almost as dirty as the lot it had replaced.

To compound the follies, the biggest casualty of the AWH affair turns out to be O'Farrell, who seems to have genuinely forgotten, as one does, that one of Sinodinos's AWH colleagues, had given him a $3000 bottle of Grange Hermitage a few years before. Over 20 years, the chief political casualties of NSW ICAC have been honest Liberal premiers.

This was at least one occasion where public servants retained a keen eye for the public interest. They argued, often against their political masters, that the best way of preventing rip-offs was in transparency, and the testing of proposals in the market place. NSW guidelines for PPP projects provided that requests to bypass the competitive tendering process should be granted only "where the proponent can show there would be no viable competition for the delivery of the proposal's essential outcomes".

It does appear too that NSW has been somewhat more effective, at the bureaucratic level at least, in separating the assessment of such proposals from the process of drumming up and enthusing oneself about economic developments.

The Obeid-Sinodinos show involves too much foreground. When something like it plays next, perhaps in the ACT, we need also the background in as full view as the Brindabellas.

By all means let us show off greed, cupidity and poor stewardship. But let it be seen surrounded by the clamour of interests, particularly those engaged in property development, land speculation, gambling, drinking and the markets for government favours and discretions.

With a script showing the power of money and donations, particularly in a low-disclosure environment. Players used to power, patronage and rule by whim and anger. Moving in and out of revolving doors between politics, government, lobbying and being in business with government. Mates, cronies, relatives, old colleagues, and powerful party players. An ideal performance might take place in a new stadium.

Jack Waterford is a former Editor of the Canberra Times

jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com