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Here then, is a tale of two cities.
To the north, home of the Rum Corps - latterly, apparently, the Penfold Grange Corps - liars, fools, the corrupt, the corrupters and the villainous, right up to premiers, ministers and colourful identities of invisible commerce, line up to be flagellated in public, the goggle-eyed elbowing for the most prized view of the flogging triangle.
To the south, paper is shuffled around slumbering CBD offices, investigators mumble about the bar being too high before, you’d assume, repairing to a bar of suitable dimensions (The Sherlock Holmes of Collins St comes to mind) to discuss such misadventures as Operation Plyers and the great scandal of the grave-plot bribes. Meanwhile, all is blessedly undisturbed at Spring Street and the Melbourne Club.
Sydney has its ICAC, an acronym that strikes fear into the merest miscreant on a public payroll or a nice little earner of the brown paper bag kind.
Melbourne has its IBAC, which sounds about right, nice and soft, assuming you’ve ever heard of it. In a year, the $170 million Independent Broadbased Anti-Corruption Commission has completed 10 investigations, from which precisely one charge has been laid, itself so earth-shattering it somehow missed the front pages.
Could it be possible Melbourne has an inferior breed of corruption than flash Sydney?
More likely, Victoria has craftier legislators.
Who would want inquisitive paper-trail hounds snuffling around dodgy multimillion-dollar land and planning deals, investigating government types who enjoy quiet little chats in the front seat of Jags in dark car parks, or heaven forbid, ministers of the Crown given to bouts of crippling amnesia?
Why, you’d never know where it might stop.
Much better to hogtie nice-sounding IBAC with rules that place politicians all but out of bounds and require the investigators to limit themselves to establishing facts that, if proved, would constitute corruption serious enough to constitute an indictable offence.
A ball and chain, in short, leaving investigations open to legal challenge in the Supreme Court ... and the inhabitants of Spring Street and the Club breathing a lot easier than their opposite numbers in Sydney’s Macquarie Street and the private rooms of establishments that bear no name above their doors.
Victoria’s political leaders need no further evidence of their prudence than the latest cataclysmic occurrence in Sydney’s ICAC.
Until recently, there was much satisfaction among Liberal leaders everywhere as ICAC peeled away the layers that protected the cheery relationship between NSW Labor and shonks like the Obeids, revealing putrefaction within.
But then, mercy, the nation’s assistant treasurer Arthur Sinodinos, a Liberal fellow, found himself gulping gallons of water and suffering shocking amnesia, the interrogation lamp of ICAC burning a hole in his credibility.
And now, Great Gods, NSW Liberal Premier - whoops, former premier - Barry O’Farrell has gone and crucified himself, lying under ICAC’s oath or, at the very least, suffering the worst blackout in drinking history. Who forgets getting a $3000 bottle of Grange laid down since the year of their birth?
What were the NSW rule-makers thinking when they gave rein to a mob as effective as ICAC? Things are clearly out of control when BOTH major parties are getting a flogging.
Far better, obviously, for Victoria’s legislators to hobble their IBAC and point it at bent coppers and hairy bikies. Or even better, sool it at the case of allegedly racist stubby holders at a police social club, which has apparently taken up a handy slice of IBAC’s investigating time.
Stubby holders are somehow more comfortingly Victorian than a flash, dangerous bottle of Grange in a premier’s cellar.
