Law & Crime

There’s a new party game in Canberra, sparked by the arrival of the National Anti-Corruption Commission. The game has a simple enough name: Who’s for the NACCery?

The byelection in Stuart Robert’s old seat of Fadden is becoming a proxy battleground for the fortunes not only of Opposition Leader Peter Dutton but also for Prime Minister Anthony Albanese.

In less than two weeks the new National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC) will be officially in operation – the long-awaited answer to a defining issue of the last federal election.

When justice and politics collide, politics usually prevails. So it is in the case of Brittany Higgins versus Bruce Lehrmann.

For the days and weeks leading up to the judgement, the nerves of the parties, their lawyers, the media in general and the court itself were seriously fraying.

The children who live at the Parkville Youth Justice Precinct in Melbourne are in state care. In a way, we are all their parents – we have a duty of care to them. It is our voting power, our voices, our interest and our considerations that determine what happens to them. As it stands, we are failing them.

Even as Stephen Smith paid a concerned visit to Julian Assange in Belmarsh prison this week, the new high commissioner to Britain said firmly that Australia was not ‘lobbying for a particular outcome’. Concerned Australians might ask, ‘Why the hell not?’

The senate review of our corporate watchdog’s handling of white-collar crime is yet to hit its straps, but already the incompetence and lack of professionalism of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission is being laid bare.

Whistleblowers are vital actors in our democracy, upholding our right to know. Without them – and the public interest journalism they make possible – corruption and human rights abuses go unaddressed.

Serving and former bureaucrats are glued to the hearings because the evidence has ranged beyond details of the unlawful debt recovery scheme to the wider culture of the federal public service and how it has interacted with executive government. What’s being exposed reveals how dramatically that relationship has deteriorated.