The ACT's long-promised corruption commission is almost operational but looks set for a slow start. Its chief executive, John Hoitink, a man who appears to have all the right credentials, is still its lone employee, despite the commission being open for business in just over two weeks' time.
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Showing a bracing and welcome early willingness to speak out, Mr Hoitink has already warned the ACT government that a commission without resources is no commission at all.
"We have to be an organisation which has a critical mass, which has genuine teeth and can actually go and do the job we are supposed to be doing," he told Canberra Times reporter Dan Jervis-Bardy this week.
"To not have that, [the commission] just becomes a complaint processing organisation."
The commission has a budget of about $2.5 million a year for the next three years. The salaries of the commissioner and chief executive will swallow a third of that alone. It is not easy to see, back of the envelope, how the proposed 10 staff along with the cost of office space and the cost of investigations, complete with hearings, can be comfortably accommodated in the money that's left.
We have to be an organisation which has genuine teeth and can actually go and do the job
- John Hoitink
To put the budget in perspective, the NSW corruption commission has a budget of about $27 million a year, 13 times the budget allocated in the ACT.
The Tasmanian commission, on which the ACT government said it modelled its budget, cost $2.5 million last year, employing 14 staff.
The adequacy of the money will depend, of course, on the number and complexity of complaints - and to an extent on how many public hearings the commission chooses to hold - and it is to be hoped, in the interests of transparency and trust in the process, that as many as possible are held in a way that allows public scrutiny. A commission that simply says "trust us" is only marginally better than a government that does the same.
The need for an integrity commission in Canberra is clear. The litany of questionable land deals, cosy relationships between government and the private sector, and poorly handled conflicts of interest has eroded public trust in the ACT government and its bureaucracy.
When the Greens' Shane Rattenbury attempted to explain away some of the interconnections between politicians, bureaucrats, consultants and developers all focused in a thoroughly incestuous fashion on the same development projects as a function of being a small city, he did himself a disservice.
Perhaps, however, he did the public a service by inadvertently highlighting precisely why the dangers might be heightened in Canberra and the need for a watchdog with teeth all the more pressing.
The troubling relationships are not Rattenbury's - and Rattenbury himself can be credited with the fact that Canberra now has a corruption commission after he and the Liberals forced it on to the agenda in the last election campaign. But his "small town" explanation is symptomatic of the lack of perspective that has infected the territory's political class, and which for Labor manifests in sloppiness and complacency.
Andrew Barr's suggestion that the corruption commission should not investigate past events was a dangerous nonsense which was rightly knocked on the head.
As a result, the ACT corruption commission might yet have a website and might be yet to announce the mechanism for people to make complaints, but a simple review of the ACT auditor-general's reports of the past five years would provide sufficient fertile ground to occupy its investigative team well for some considerable time.