If counsel assisting the Victorian inquiry into Crown casino, Adrian Finanzio SC, had his way, Crown would lose its Melbourne licence, its chair and its Melbourne CEO. Not, he told the royal commission yesterday, something he recommends lightly.
The list of scandals, failures and regulatory evasions and attempts at intimidation by Crown is long. But the scale of corporate misconduct doesn’t necessarily balance evenly.
The banks, too, engaged in egregious misconduct, enabled money laundering and sexual abuse of children, immiserated their customers, gouged dead people, refused to hand over insurance payouts to the terminally ill, and an array of other abuses. The private aged-care sector, too, has been exposed as abusing, neglecting, harming and killing some of our most vulnerable people.
No corporate capital punishment for them, though — the banks are too big to fail, naturally, and the aged-care sector has its own version of too big to fail: punishing the worst operators would see aged-care services shuttered across Australia, particularly in regional areas where there is little choice for local seniors.
Crown tried to argue that it, too, was too big to fail in a letter to the Victorian gaming minister that was, to put it mildly, taken askance by the royal commissioner, Ray Finkelstein.
Nor is it inapt to invoke the banking and aged care royal commissions in terms of where responsibility really lies when failures are so massive that a royal commission is forced on a reluctant government — be it the Andrews government or the federal Coalition.
In all the commentary about Finanzio’s recommendations — and for that matter most of the commentary on the revelations of the Finkelstein royal commission — the focus has been almost exclusively on Crown and its board, led by Helen Coonan, and its senior staff and their behaviour. Rightly so.
But there’s been too little focus — and what there has been was mostly by way of Steve Cannane’s ABC Four Corners report– on the systems that enabled that behaviour: the close relationships between the Andrews government, and Andrews himself, and Crown; the gutting and undermining of the regulator; the role of political donations in locking Crown into relationships with the major political parties; the role of employment of former staffers and politicians in those relationships.
All these have been traversed in Crikey before, but I mention them again because Finanzio’s recommendations were incomplete — understandably so given Andrews made sure the royal commission couldn’t examine the performance of the regulator. A more comprehensive recommendation would be that not merely is Crown unsuitable to hold a casino licence, but that the political system that enabled it is unfit to wield power — that Crown was merely the symptom of a political system that encourages pervasive soft corruption.
Similarly the Hayne royal commission’s recommendations overlooked what was at the heart of the endless series of financial industry scandals: the capacity of that industry to influence the way it was regulated through donations, employing politically connected people, and gutting the regulator. The aged care royal commission got much closer to the systemic issues affecting the sector, particularly a useless regulator and the constant underinvestment by governments over the past two decades, but also failed to address the philosophy of outsourcing and corporate influence that produced such a disastrous system.
What if we had more royal commissions? Into the administration of Commonwealth grants. Into the awarding of major tenders. Into allocation of visas. Into health services. Police services. Most of all, into the handling of the pandemic.
What royal commissioners have that no one else — not parliamentary committees, nor the media, nor even auditors-general — has is a power of public compulsion, the ability to put politicians, senior bureaucrats and industry figures on the stand and publicly question them, with no capacity for evasion or wriggling, no taking questions on notice, no refusing to accept the premise of the question, no insisting a matter is subject to cabinet or commercial confidentiality, with the threat of being jailed if they lie. All backed by a team of lawyers devoted to making their lives a misery.
What would such an array of inquiries reveal? What scandals would emerge, hitherto unsuspected, previously hidden, across so many industries, among ministers and bureaucrats, across all levels of government?
What if we focused the expensive apparatus of hard accountability on the real problem of soft corruption right through governments? The recommendations from counsel assisting would make for fascinating reading.
Should royal commissions be established to expose all the rorts in politics? Tell us what you think by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say section.
Don’t just pillory Andrews for the cosy relationship between Crown and the Victorian government. The trail starts at the feet of Jeff Kennet and then every single Premier since, regardless of their political stripes, has been in bed with Packer and Crown.
True but let’s not forget that for 22 years of crowns existence, almost 18 of them were under ALP.
Trouble is these dodgy arrangements get baked in through agreements and contracts that have huge penalties if that business/corporation is ever subject to changes against it’s interests. We see it with toll road contracts that prevent public transport being extended without massive compensation to cover any loss of profit.
Govts who do these deals with their mates lay landmines around them that make it very difficult for a new govt to do anything by way of reform.
Excellent article. Yes, the various scandals Keane lists are all symptoms of a deeper, more fundamental, rot. His suggested targets for Royal Commissions are appropriate, though I’d add one I’ve suggested before – an inquiry into the regulatory agencies in general, to examine why they are useless. (Not that hard: it’s because they are set up to be useless and those put in charge of them are told to make sure they stay useless).
But Simon Jenkins in The Guardian not long ago argued that we’ve seen enough of Royal Commissions to know they don’t solve anything. The worst cost a fortune and drag on for years, only producing a report long after it serves any purpose. Even if they are relatively timely they often make findings that merely repeat the findings of earlier commissions. They seldom tell us anything we did not know or recommend anything that we could not have worked out for ourselves in half an hour. Where they find conduct so egregious it deserves a criminal investigation, new investigations are must begin because such matters are outside the competence of Royal Commissions. When their findings are inconvenient to the government nothing happens.
The rot is endemic in our political system. The system is not going to fix itself because it is run by those who gain from the corrupt practices it facilitates. They have spent decades to ensure this. They are very unlikely to set up any Royal Commissions to examine what they do, and if they did they would certainly not act on its findings.
A very good start to fixing the cause of all the rot would be to reform state and federal parliaments so that parties have no role in them. Parties are the origin of most of the problems. They work for themselves and their paymasters and treat voters as an unfortunate distraction. Electing a representative who is a member of a party results in a representative who is hopelessly conflicted and so not able to represent constituents except on trivial matters that don’t get in the way of big interests. The answer is to stop having elections and instead select all members of all legislatures in the same way as juries. Select them at random from the adult population. Pay them enough that they will welcome it and have no excuse for taking bribes. Set their length of service so that that corrupting influences do not have sufficient time to work on them. Seperately, elect someone, or a party, to run the executive government – the country needs some policies and direction – but make sure it has to get its legislation past a parliament that genuinely reflects the public and is not compromised by self-interest.
I’m not sure I like the jury selection idea, but hey agree with everything else! What do you think about a group of independents with a common aim, to band together to force change to the political process itself?
Without random selection where are enough independents going to come from? The current set up fills parliament with members of political parties because parties have all the advantages. The very few independents who still succeed often perform heroically but never come anywhere near the sort of numbers needed to make a substantial difference. Even when they hold the balance of power in both houses, which is seldom, they are easily overwhelmed when the main parties act in concert, as they frequently do. Look how often our pitiful ‘opposition’ solemnly says some government bill is a bad bill in all sorts of ways; goes on like that at some length; but concludes by sorrowfully declaring it will vote with the government anyway.
Elections give an overwhelming advantage to parties. Parties control their candidate selection, provide election services and name recognition no independent can match, and then control their elected candidates by telling them what to do and how to vote. There is no mention of parties in Australia’s constitution but they arise and dominate politics inevitably because of the advantages party candidates have under this system of representation.
There is a contradiction in your suggestion of ‘a group of independents with a common aim, to band together…’. How can they band together and still be independent, rather than one more party? There have always been minor parties keen on some reform. History shows that if they get a sniff of power their principles soon melt away.
Of course I do not imagine a jury-style parliament must be perfect or that it would always make good decisions. All I’m suggesting is that it would be far more representative of the Australian public, and therefore actually democratic, than anything produced by any election.
I agree with all that is said here. However the gambling industry has had known form, forever, in all countries, since it’s inception, as an extension of criminality. So in that sense there’s nothing to see here that wasn’t always 100% known. It’s like duh.
Almost 18 years of Victorian ALP in the last 22 years here in Victoria that has fed the beast lovingly that was originally spawned by the Victorian LNP.
All political side love gambling. It’s perks for pollies on both sides and the tax (in theory) doesn’t hurt either.
The banking and insurance industries have known form – remember HIH and the various forays into America and Europe by our banks. Corruption runs deep and it’s ‘cultural’, it’s masked by many layers but it has always been there and the lure of money enables many things.
But surely gambling is the pinnacle?
Many banks will be corrupt, but perhaps not all.
Whereas, every gambling facility is corrupt.
Trouble is royal commission recommendations are routinely ignored. The banking changes are already being reversed.
Australia has a lot of organised crime – like the UK and USA much of this crime is legalish by design or lives in an area with little enforcement.
No politician wants a proper clean out of corruption – both sides of the house have their crooks and shonks. For every sports rorts there’s a stacked branch or a property deal or a holiday home from nowhere.
Gambling is a curse and most states are addicted to it.
A permanent royal commission called the Commonwealth Integrity Commission is essentially what this proposes. And very clearly we need that although the Coalitions is also clearly terrified of such a sensible requirement.
What is always missed in reporting the outcome of royal commissions that exclusively focuses on the recommendations (that are always diluted for mendacious political reasons) is that factual historical importance of the EVIDENCE. No politician, however corrupt and self-interested, can ever erase the evidence.