(Image: Private Media/Mitchell Squire)

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.