Peter Dutton is right — a federal ICAC needs a broad remit

In his first media conference as opposition leader this week, Peter Dutton made an interesting and welcome comment that passed unnoticed. He opened the way to a wide remit for a federal ICAC.

And he was right to do so.

Claiming the Coalition supported a federal anti-corruption commission, Dutton said, “The reason I think it’s more important than ever is that under this Labor government, under the Albanese government, we are going to have a continuation of this unholy alliance with the CFMEU, the ETU, the MUA and the Labor Party.”

A federal ICAC should be able to investigate that “unholy alliance”, Dutton believes.

With those words, Dutton was effectively proposing a radical expansion of the remit of what the discredited Liberal/News Corp “integrity commission” model would have been able to look at, if Scott Morrison had had his way.

Under that model, among many restrictions on what the body could do, it would have been only able to investigate criminal conduct. It was a limitation under which no other anti-corruption body in Australia labours, except the now-gutted South Australian ICAC, which was destroyed by South Australian parliamentarians. But all other state bodies operate based on a concept of abuse of public office that spans, but isn’t limited to, criminal conduct, but which includes conduct in breach of professional standards, ethical breaches, codes of conduct, or attempts to improperly influence decision-making.

This broader remit reflects the spectrum of corruption. Everyone understands “hard corruption” — brown paper bags stuffed with cash in exchange for approving a property development or buying early release from prison, etc — but Australia’s big problem is soft corruption: “manipulation of policies, institutions and rules of procedure in the allocation of resources and financing by political decision-makers, who abuse their position to sustain their power, status and wealth”, in the words of Transparency International.

So extensive has soft corruption been through federal politics that state capture is the only accurate description of policymaking.

Even stripped of Dutton’s rhetoric, the “unholy alliance” between unions and the ALP is a classic form of soft corruption: trade unions seek to manipulate Labor policies through methods such as large-scale donations, and the interchange of personnel (another classic mechanism of state capture).

One can argue that unions are at least motivated by the interests of their workers, who are by and large ordinary households. There is often some overlap between the public interest and the trade unions’ interests, but they by no means coincide (relentless feather-bedding of state-owned transport services, or attempts to dictate education policy by teaching unions, are perfect examples of the gap).

The Coalition’s form of soft corruption, in contrast, involves big business manipulating policies, institutions and rules of procedure in the allocation of resources and financing by Coalition governments, in the interests of shareholders and corporate executives. Those interests are frequently diametrically opposed to the public interest: fossil fuel companies driving the climate emergency, big banks gouging customers, gambling companies exploiting addicts, and consulting firms encouraging the degradation of public policymaking.

So when Dutton urges a federal ICAC that can investigate the “unholy alliance” between unions and Labor, he is urging the remit of such a body be expanded to include soft corruption. Dutton wants a federal ICAC to look at how donations (trade unions make massive donations to Labor) buy policy, how a revolving door between government and the private sector controls policy, and how vested interests override the public interest. If there’s an unholy alliance between the unions and Labor, then there’s an equally unholy one between big business and the Coalition — and we’ve just endured nine years of it.

And that expanded Dutton-esque remit would also include pork-barrelling and rorting of taxpayer funding for political purposes. After all, that is the manipulation of resource allocation by political decision-makers abusing their position to sustain their power.

So Peter Dutton is right: bring on a federal ICAC with a remit to investigate soft corruption. Let it examine every unholy alliance, on all sides of politics, every manipulation of public decision-making, every single example whereby the public interest is ignored for vested interests, be they union, business, partisan or personal. It might be the only good thing Dutton ever accomplishes.