How to make a royal commission effective enough to go after the Murdochs

If Scott Morrison to a greater degree than any previous prime minister relied on royal commissions as a political management tool, was that a distortion of their real function?

If so, what is that function in a democracy? Put another way, did Morrison simply reveal what royal commissions are really all about, at least federally?

Take the Aboriginal deaths in custody royal commission established by the Hawke government, considered groundbreaking in addressing a complex and devastating system that killed Indigenous people. Regardless of the debate about how many of its recommendations have since been implemented, it’s tragically clear they have had little effect.

It’s a recurring pattern. In the Northern Territory, reforms introduced after the Four Corners’ revelations about juvenile detention abuses and the Margaret White-Mick Gooda royal commission have since been rolled back.

The Coalition used the pandemic to reverse or refuse to implement many of Kenneth Hayne’s recommendations from the banking royal commission. Many of the aged care royal commission recommendations were simply ignored (or “noted”, to use the official bureaucratic response).

True, implementation of recommendations isn’t the only metric for the success of a royal commission. Whether investigative or policy-focused, commissions give those who have been failed by governments the opportunity to be heard and taken seriously — a crucial benefit of inquiries such as the child sex abuse inquiry and the current veterans’ suicide royal commission. The process of being heard and having pain acknowledged is in itself cathartic, especially for those who have suffered in silence for years, or decades.

And the hearing process can also be effective in prompting action: the reputational damage inflicted by the hearings of the banking royal commission on banks, financial planners and retail super funds helped drive an exodus of banks from wealth products, forced the departure of a number of a senior and mid-level executives and directors, and accelerated a process already under way of chancers and grifters being pushed out of financial advice.

Revelations from the Crown casino royal commission achieved more change than the half-baked recommendations that resulted from them.

Ideally such circumstances create a momentum of reform that governments struggle to resist — as briefly happened in 2019 with banking reforms, before the pandemic reversed the tide.

The core problem for policy-related royal commissions is that the need for them comes about because governments either resist policy reform because it’s inimical to their partisan interests or inconsistent with their ideology, or the area is so costly and complex that reform becomes too big a task. A classic example of the latter is aged care, in which successive governments of both sides have sought to address crises but been reluctant to embrace significant reform that would come with large costs and/or demand politically unpalatable options.

In such cases, royal commissions are unlikely to produce innovative policy solutions that would overcome political resistance — indeed they are likely to simply restate the same conclusions and recommendations that previous inquiries have reached. They merely act to delay the moment of policy reckoning for a government to beyond the next election, at which time the proposed solutions are no more likely to be palatable.

But royal commissions can improve the chances of governments implementing their recommendations. A 2020 study by a Monash university team led by Professor Michael Mintrom looked at the characteristics of successful royal commissions and found some recurring patterns. They suggested successful commissions framed both the problem and the solutions in a compelling way (a key failing of the aged care royal commission), used the submissions and hearings to develop a consensus among stakeholders around solutions, making it more difficult for recalcitrant governments to ignore them, and thought of implementation while preparing recommendations, understanding what is and isn’t politically feasible.

Implementation problems go beyond reluctant politicians. Royal commissions often grapple with cultural and administrative problems in complex institutions and bureaucracies.

Achieving buy-in for reform from institutions such as health departments, a large bureaucracy like defence, police forces or welfare agencies is difficult in itself; retaining that buy-in and preventing a reversion to business-as-usual is even more difficult. For a royal commission such as the ADF member and veteran suicide inquiry, any recommendations will encompass a huge range of stakeholders, including powerful agencies like defence and large organisations like state health providers, and push for long-term reform and change of culture that institutional inertia will counteract.

For that reason, effective royal commissions need a body that will continue after the end of the inquiry to drive change and implementation.

The Victorian family violence and mental health royal commissions both recommended the establishment of independent bodies tasked with, inter alia, monitoring the government’s implementation of recommendations and evaluating subsequent programs, along with parliamentary and cabinet committee structures to provide an architecture to drive action within government.

If a bespoke entity for every royal commission might be too much at the federal level, the need for establishing an institutional framework to hold governments to account post-royal commission is critical to achieving change.

Conceivably, the auditor-general could be tasked with (and funded for) monitoring the implementation of royal commission recommendations — the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) already audits departments to check if they have implemented ANAO and parliamentary committee recommendations. But that won’t provide the ongoing drive necessary to achieve cultural change in complex organisations, only assess what has and hasn’t been done.

Those pressing for a royal commission into News Corp should think about how to ensure its effectiveness based on these lessons. It would require strong, judicial leadership, counsel assisting who can both comprehend media policy issues and score hits on witnesses in hearings and create a clear sense of the problem and need for a solution sufficient to override political reluctance. And its recommendations will have to be drafted to maximise the chances of successful implementation even with political and institutional foot-dragging.

History suggests such a combination is rare, but it’s crucial if royal commissions are to be anything other than political management tools for politicians in a bind.