Integrity was in tatters after the Morrison era. But is Labor doing enough to fix it?

On Tuesday evening, 215 days into the term of the 47th Parliament of Australia, Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus said something that was both blindingly remarkable and unremarkable at the same time.

“The former government left Australia’s privacy laws out-of-date and not fit-for-purpose,” the attorney-general tweeted. “I’ve now received the review of the Privacy Act by my department, which I will carefully consider as I prepare to overhaul the act next year.”

The familiarity of the announcement stems from the reality it is but the latest addition to the symphony of significant law reform pledges Dreyfus has announced since the election — some of which are complete, the rest underway.

And it’s precisely this which lends it an air of singularity.

“The dramatic changes made by the new government — the effect of which spans integrity, transparency and accountability — just makes your head spin,” said Centre for Public Integrity director Geoffrey Watson SC. “I can’t believe how much Australia has changed for the better in such a short period of time — and I’m not some kind of mad, partisan Labor supporter, I’m not.”

Buttressing his view, Watson pointed to the landmark national anti-corruption commission legislation, the robodebt royal commission — “a fantastic example of an examination in transparency”– the “shallow dive” into the secret Scott Morrison ministries affair and the historic censure of Morrison, as well as the promised abolition and replacement of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal — which he said had become a “standing joke” through an “appalling abuse of power”.

To these examples can be added the review into secrecy offences across every Commonwealth portfolio, reforms to protect against further politicisation of the Australian Human Rights Commission and other once-independent institutions, the new ministerial code of conduct, a review into political donations and the flagged federal judicial commission to address judicial conduct. The list goes on.

None of this, from today’s vantage point, is a return to Australian politics as it used to be. It’s rather the reckoning of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison era, the legacy of which is marked by the rank predictability of scandal, lies, institution-trashing and addiction to secrecy that was the modus operandi of the former government.

Watson said that on no view could the Morrison government be described as conservative, precisely because it “went out of its way” to privilege secrecy and undermine the independence of a range of public institutions through cronyism — including, in some instances, the courts.

“They smashed and killed transparency on Friday 8 November 2013 — the day they said ‘That’s an on-water matter,’ ” he said, referring to the controversial Operation Sovereign Borders.

“Morrison took that up as mantra and it philosophically became the position of federal government across all areas. It was just shocking.”

Tellingly, the only time Morrison departed from his “on-water” mantra, at least in relation to asylum seekers, was on election day this year, when he instructed the Department of Home Affairs to publicise the interception of an asylum seeker boat. His power to do so, it later emerged, probably owed to his having secretly sworn himself in as minister for home affairs, as well as four other ministries.

And yet the fact his election day scare campaign elicited neither surprise nor shock, as distinct from outrage, says everything.

“The Morrison government will be remembered for its unnecessary secrecy, the hollowing out of the public service and the failure to deliver the integrity commission it promised,” said Bill Browne, director of the Australia Institute’s democracy and accountability program.

“That the 2022 election was fought in large part on integrity was, in part, a reaction to the Morrison government’s failures in this area — there was a real sense that the public was hungering for a change in politics.”

To Browne’s mind, Dreyfus’ record on this score was, so far, generally impressive: “The Albanese government has pursued some real and important [integrity] reforms,” he said, citing the NACC, the censoring of Morrison and the abolition of the AAT.

Taking the latter as an example, Browne said “political appointments to the [tribunal] grew from about 5% during the Howard government to 40% under Morrison”, fundamentally undermining the real and perceived independence of the body.

Its abolition was therefore both welcome and necessary, he said.

But Browne added it was nonetheless important to guard against complacency on this front, noting reforms would ultimately prove inadequate if the government confined its scope to establishing a merit-based appointment system.

Limitations on party-affiliated appointees were equally important, he said, as was the need to “lock in” an arm’s-length appointment process: after all, “trust, once lost, is hard to recover.”

Professor of public policy and law and board member of Transparency International Australia AJ Brown was of a similar view, pointing out that Dreyfus’ achievements on integrity reform heralded a critical shift in our governance but one which nonetheless risked a “piecemeal legacy”.

“This is a key moment for the government to consider whether it’s going to take a holistic approach to a whole range of integrity issues or just pick off a few of them and do them in a half-baked fashion,” he said.

“Unless they come up with a coordinated approach for how they’re going to implement those reforms,” he said, referencing the various policy areas Dreyfus had flagged for change, “then you wonder how the government will ever get to any of them.”

Brown added that Dreyfus’ legacy on integrity would also suffer the vice of incompleteness if the attorney-general failed to address long-standing, thorny issues around freedom of information, money laundering, foreign bribery, secret company ownership and corporate capture.

“We need to see a material cultural shift in governance and that requires putting in place a proper system of corruption control that has enforcement mechanisms,” he said. Anything less would run contrary to meaningful reform.

It’s a view echoed by Kieran Pender, a senior lawyer at the Human Rights Law Centre, who said the efficacy of the NACC — quite aside from some of its limitations around public hearings — would be materially blunted unless it was supplemented by the kind of measures cited by Brown.

In this respect, Pender singled out whistleblowing laws as an area in which reform was long overdue.

“The first tranche of reforms to whistleblowing laws has been introduced to Parliament, but it’s only a very minor, technical first step,” he said. “In 2023, we’ll really need to see a significant overhaul of these laws, which are highly complex and not fit for purpose.”

He added that Dreyfus had a “mixed record in this area”, given his decision to drop the prosecution against Bernard Colleary but not that of war crimes whistleblower David McBride and Tax Office whistleblower Richard Boyle.

“Those prosecutions are clearly not in the public interest and they demonstrate the failings of our whistleblowing laws,” he said.

Independent MP for Indi Helen Haines shared Pender’s concerns, and said she “was very much committed to holding” the government to more broad-sweeping anti-corruption and integrity reform.

“Labor is to be congratulated for honouring their election promise to deliver a national anti-corruption commission,” she said. “But we’ll never have a highly functioning [anti-corruption] system unless whistleblowers are protected.

“The work of integrity [reform] is never really finished.”

In other words, it’s a tick for the government on the seven-month anniversary of the election, but one followed by a series of question marks.

The Albanese government has moved, and moved swiftly, on integrity reform. But whether it has the political and moral fortitude to fashion itself as the perpetual un-Morrison and reverse the dark chapters of that era to effect enduring change remains to be seen.

Can Labor keep up the pace? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.