Victorian Premier Jacinta Allan’s IBAC reforms have come far too late and will take far too long

It would be nice to say better late than never, but even that isn’t true of Premier Jacinta Allan’s decision to finally concede Victoria’s anti-corruption watchdog needs more powers to tackle graft on the $109 billion Big Build.

The problem with Allan’s Monday afternoon announcement is that Victorians learnt IBAC must wait until the end of 2027 to get powers it desperately needs to identify which bikie gangs and members of Melbourne’s underworld have lined their pockets care of the infrastructure scheme the premier previously oversaw as minister.

Even then, a year after this year’s November election, IBAC may not have the powers it needs to do the job required. The devil will be in the detail and that is yet to be fully worked out.

Every Victorian who has been paying attention knows the time for action by Allan was in mid-2024, when it was first revealed that gangland figures had supercharged their unholy alliance with the Labor-friendly CFMEU to feast on the Big Build.

Here are the facts. Bikie gangs placed their senior members, friends and relatives in cushy Big Build jobs, while the CFMEU directed lucrative Big Build subcontracts to companies in bed with underworld figures such as Mick Gatto.

Two years later, Premier Allan can’t say how much taxpayer money has ended up in the pockets of those who should never have received it care of the Big Build.

Allan is quick to say it’s not $15 billion, the number offered separately by corruption-busting barrister Geoffrey Watson, SC, and by the Fair Work Commission’s Murray Furlong, but the premier can’t offer an alternative figure.

She can’t tell Victorians why a single public servant or politician is yet to be meaningfully held to account for what is the biggest corruption scandal in the state’s recent history. She can’t explain how the state will recover plundered funds. In fact, Allan won’t even concede the fact of corruption on the Big Build.

Instead, she clings to the weasel word “allegations”. As the minister previously responsible for the Big Build, and now the premier, Allan bears ultimate responsibility for an infrastructure scheme whose design and management enabled serious corruption and rorting.

She is yet to acknowledge this simple fact meaningfully with any sort of contrition or admission of error. Perhaps it’s too late for her to credibly do so, but it remains the right thing to do.

It is misleading for the premier to claim (as she has done now for two years) that Victoria Police can investigate Big Build corruption. Much of the grubby conduct, such as rampant bikie gang-linked Big Build nepotism, is corrupt and even unlawful but not necessarily criminal. This means police can’t investigate.

Of the conduct they can probe, much of it involves organised crime and criminal codes of secrecy that police historically have turned to royal commissions or specialist agencies armed with coercive powers to combat. It’s why, in two years and despite the tremendous work of Taskforce Hawk, Victoria Police hasn’t laid a single charge directly involving Big Build corruption.

At any rate, Allan’s concession on Monday that Victoria needs an adequately empowered IBAC to probe the Big Build dirty money trail belies the falsehood that police alone can do the job required.

Two decades ago, I reported extensively on the police drug squad corruption scandal that reached its height with the 2004 double murder of police corruption witness Terry Hodson and his wife, Christine.

Much of what I exposed at the time involved the difficulty faced by honest detectives (in the vast majority) probing their own.

Six months after the Hodson executions, then premier Steve Bracks acted, creating the Office of Police Integrity and giving it royal commission powers. Up until then, Bracks had ceded to the power of the police union and had stubbornly been resisting calls for a powerful police watchdog or royal commission.

The OPI wasn’t perfect (it was ultimately replaced by IBAC), but the Hodson murders were a turning point for the state at which the moral and political cost of inaction became too great. Bracks, as fine a Labor leader as this state has ever had, responded accordingly.

The turning point when it comes to Victoria’s Big Build was in mid-2024, when the Building Bad series broke and the Albanese government moved decisively to place the bikie-ridden CFMEU into administration.

But on Monday, two years after meaningful action was needed from the Victorian government, Allan told the public they will need to wait at least another 18 months to get an IBAC with the power to start making serious inroads into the Big Build corruption mess.

In the same breath, the premier insisted yet again she has zero tolerance for corruption. It sure doesn’t look like it.

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