NACCered from the start. What will Brereton’s departure change?

Commissioner Paul Brereton’s departure from the National Anti-Corruption Commission has been met with widespread relief, but will it change the way the NACC operates? Paul Begley he asks.

Ever since Paul Brereton handed his resignation letter to the Governor-General last month, there has been a case for him to leave to move on with his life. However, his resignation was accompanied by assurances that everything was fine at the National Anti-Corruption Commission and that he had nothing to answer for.

This impression needs to be challenged.

When Senate Estimates time arrived late in the afternoon of May 26, 2026, questions from a dozen or so senators were about to be directed to the long assembled table of two NACC deputy commissioners, a department secretary, the NACC executive director, and the NACC commissioner. Also sitting with the group was Attorney General Michelle Rowland’s parliamentary deputy, Senator Nita Green.

Wanting to know why the NACC had such a bad reputation, One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts posed an early question to Paul Brereton. The best answer Brereton could come up with was to find himself in a

defenseless victim of misinformation spread by social media campaigners.

NACC president Paul Brereton finally got the message and resigned

He said that what was important for him was that the Chief Prosecutor verbally expressed his full confidence in him. While this was true, it was meant to belittle the fact that the same Attorney General had advised him in writing to manage or avoid any conflicts of interest altogether.

Architect of disrepute

By August 2026 Brereton will be a 69-year-old former commissioner of the integrity body he chaired for three years and doggedly discredited for much of that time. As a senior barrister and former judge of the Supreme Court of NSW, it seems reasonable to expect that, among the glittering qualities a person of Brereton’s professional reputation might possess, naivety would not be one of them.

It is safe to say that when a minister of the Crown speaks about the head of an institution reporting to the minister, there will be predictably full confidence unless the head of the institution is removed from office.

A mixture of customary etiquette and political thought dictates that the certainty expressed under these circumstances should not be moderate. If there is any doubt about the degree of faith the ministry has in the officeholder, it will be found more in private communications rather than public statements that could lead to speculation in the media.

That bell may have rung for Brereton, but as predicted last Tuesday, it did not, when Michelle Rowland’s running mate, Senator Green, made a brief speech praising the commissioner for her lifetime in public service generally and her leadership at the NACC specifically.

His respectful speech was in stark contrast to the tone and content of the brutally harsh questioning of the panel of senators, but still

Brereton seemed to hear only Green’s words of praise, and he believed it and responded in kind.

The NACC Commissioner’s self-confidence that the negative fallout on his performance is coming from unprincipled goon types on social media is an example of believing his own propaganda at best. Some of the most telling assessments of his performance came from sources among legal academics as well as colleagues on the bench and at the bar.

Brereton critics

As a former judge of the NSW Court of Appeal and chief justice of the Supreme Court Center for Public IntegrityMr Anthony Whealy KC said it was ‘I was quite surprised’ To find out that Brereton saw no conflict of interest in handling the Robodebt referral.

Former Victorian Supreme Court judge Stephen Charles KC described the NACC’s performance under Brereton as follows: ‘a bad failure’. Geraldine Allan, writing in Australia, noted “former Queensland Court of Appeal judge Margaret White was appalled, arguing that Mr Brereton’s error of judgment was wrong.

It is much more fundamental than an appellate court reversing a trial judge.

Anyone familiar with the work of Griffith University’s Professor AJ Brown, the distinguished Australian international expert on public integrity, knows that he is characteristically inclined towards the use of diplomatic language.

Still a speech articleThe professor found himself describing the NACC’s decision on the Robodebt referral as ‘tainted’, while also implying that the decision was one in which the integrity body’s claim to transparency was ‘noble’.

To the extent that the NACC was noble about transparency, Brereton’s failure in leadership would also play a part. As Geoffrey Watson observed during a meeting, the legalistic culture that the Commissioner instilled from above ABC interviewwas one in

NACC staff lived in fear of making a small mistake rather than seeking to expose corruption.

especially if it means exposing the rich and powerful, those in high places who are corrupt or criminal.

A low bar for success

The NACC successes Brereton listed in his resignation letter mostly consisted of cases against lower-level public servants, many of which were inherited from the NACC’s predecessor, the Australian Commission on Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI).

The NACC’s reluctance to take any action after the Robodebt Royal Commissioner referred six men for “civil action or criminal prosecution” led to a series of complaints being lodged with the NACC Inspector, who reversed the decision in 2024. A re-inquiry is planned for 2025, led by Deputy Commissioner Kylie Kilgour.

As the Royal Commission’s hearings were heard publicly and streamed live on YouTube, verbatim accounts of the evidence were heard from senior public officials and ministers; Many of them knowingly carried out or enabled the illegal scheme, which caused great trauma to the lives of approximately 470,000 vulnerable Australians, an unknown number of whom took their own lives.

under robodebt

Rather than conducting a robust investigation into the “massive failure of public administration” that is Robodebt, the NACC appeared more concerned with ensuring that the ‘Robodebt Six’ were not subjected to ‘pressure’. Many Robodebt victims received notices in the mail of significant debts they did not owe.

The burden of proof had been illegally reversed, so that they had to prove they were not in debt without any legal or ministerial assistance, while debt collectors were knocking on their doors and government ministers such as Alan Tudge were intimidating them with threats of being caught and jailed.

In contrast, former Senator Rex Patrick discovered via FOI that Scott Morrison, one of the Robodebt Six, was granted $461,445 in legal aid in October 2022 to defend himself on Robodebt matters.

And the biggest compensation paid to Robodebt victims is… Scott Morrison!

Although it has been argued that the NACC under Brereton’s leadership was dysfunctional on key performance indicators, it can also be argued that the Albanian Government has been robbing the NACC from the very beginning.

According to AJ Brown, the decision in 2022 to add an “exceptional circumstances” test to the NACC’s power to hold public hearings was a late intervention and a decision. Added by Albanese himself He rejected Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, who proposed the public interest test as the threshold.

Professor Brown observed about this late addition:

The problem will continue to haunt the NACC until the unnecessary threshold is removed.

The Prime Minister’s intervention caused uneasiness among grassroots advocates and community advocates, who saw it as a betrayal of the institution they had fought to establish.

As it turned out, the test was the perfect provision to complement an NACC run by a commissioner unwilling to go after rich and powerful criminals; This was a trait he had already demonstrated when he opposed the pursuit of responsible senior officials in Defense following the Brereton Report into Afghanistan war crimes.

Defenders of the anti-corruption body have called for a geared NACC, but

There is no point in having teeth if there is no desire to use them.

Deputy Commissioner Kylie Kilgour’s report into her re-inquiry into the Robodebt Six in March revealed the tolerant culture Brereton bequeathed to the NACC in his dealings with high office holders. Their naive twists on motive and self-serving indifference in the evaluation of evidence secretly given by Scott Morrison and Kathryn Campbell worked decisively in their favor and let them both off the hook.

DPP is being intervened. Has NACC redefined its role?