The tone was set early in the year when the report of Justice Philip Woodward's NSW royal commission into drug trafficking - looking in part at the murder of the Griffith businessman Donald Mackay - was criticised by the colourful former Whitlam minister Al Grassby as ''ethnic slander''.

Meanwhile, the tide came in when Justice Edward Williams's royal commission into drugs identified Sydney as the centre of a $59 million heroin trade.

Frank Nugan, a merchant banker facing stock fraud charges, was found dead in his Mercedes-Benz outside Lithgow in January 1980. His partner, Michael Hand, a former US soldier with links to the CIA, gave evidence that the bank was broke, and left the country.

Finally reports on painters and dockers in The Bulletin in January alleging fraud, standover tactics, violence and intimidation raised cabinet concerns. The Federated Painters and Dockers Union, especially in Victoria, had a mean reputation partly because it was one of the few organisations likely to employ men finishing sentences at Pentridge prison.

The union's nefarious activities fitted happily with the Fraser government's continuing campaign against industrial unrest.

Of course, the union's thuggish hierarchy did little to stop the public from being alarmed. The union secretary, Jack ''Putty Nose'' Nicholls, said: ''We catch and kill our own.''

Within a year he, too, was dead. Nicholls's body was discovered in his car outside Wangaratta after he had fled to Brisbane with the union's membership roll.

Another colourful union member, Billy ''The Texan'' Longley, told the magazine he could name 30 people who had been ''knocked off'' by the painters and dockers.

A memorandum to cabinet on March 18 warned that the union was fleecing both the navy and ANL. One shipping line staffer told the magazine: ''I cannot see any problem employing criminals when we know they are criminals.''

The Victoria Police investigated Longley's claims but got nowhere.

Malcolm Fraser was far less easily deterred. Cabinet decided that only a royal commission could settle the question once and for all of what was happening in the union.

Francis (Frank) Xavier Costigan, QC, was picked to head a joint Federal-Victorian royal commission. He started hearings in Melbourne at Williamstown Court on October 1, 1980, just down the road from the naval dockyard.

The Nugan Hand bank was linked with money laundering and drugs as investigations continued through the year.

Cabinet's interest had been sparked by the findings of the Woodward inquiry in NSW and the discovery in a bush grave near a Victorian surf beach of the bodies of two Sydney operatives of the Mr Asia drug syndicate, Douglas and Isobel Wilson.

The attorney-general, Peter Durack, and administrative services minister, John McLeay, recommended a joint federal-state inquiry to investigate the Mr Asia syndicate and said there was ''great public concern an announcement of the government's intention is urgently required''.

Donald Stewart was appointed commissioner and eventually had his terms of reference extended to take in the Nugan Hand matter.

In the years to come, the various royal commissions exposed a world of corruption few Australians realised was taking place under their noses.

The late magnate Kerry Packer was enmeshed in the painters and dockers inquiry. Another result was the introduction of legislation, the Crimes (Taxation Offences) Act 1980, that put an end to bottom of the harbour tax schemes.