National watchdog defends no robodebt public hearings
Australia’s corruption watchdog is calling for some laxity as it investigates one of the country’s darkest chapters, amid public criticism that it is not holding public hearings or concluding matters quickly enough.
Kylie Kilgour, deputy commissioner of the National Anti-Corruption Commission, said the agency was cautious every time it did something for the first time and “you don’t want to mess it up.”
The NACC may hold legacy public hearings only in exceptional cases where the public interest is at stake.
Critics question why no public hearings have been held during its more than two years of operation, citing this as evidence that the federal government has set the threshold too high.
“We will certainly have a public hearing, we just don’t have the right subject, none of the public hearings we have had as of today meet that objective,” Ms Kilgour told the anti-corruption commission conference in Melbourne on Monday.
“We are prepared to do this…we have trained people, we do a lot of private hearings.”
One of the most controversial issues is the anti-corruption commission’s investigation into six officials referred to it by the robodebt royal commission.
The illegal debt collection scheme used income averaging to create tens of thousands of fraudulent debts and resulted in numerous suicides.
Ms Kilgour is investigating six people named in the royal commission’s final report, which found they were corrupt.
Ms Kilgour said the anti-corruption commission would be as open and transparent as possible once the investigation was completed, including its initial decision not to investigate the referral; but this decision was later overturned.
“I will talk more openly about all of this when I can,” he said.
“It is taken extremely seriously.”
On the same panel as Ms Kilgour, Geoffrey Watson of the Center for Public Integrity called on her to hold public hearings like the royal commission did.
Mr Watson called for the exceptional circumstances test to be reversed and for all hearings to be held in public unless there is a sufficiently good reason to keep them private.
Colleen Lewis of the Accountability Roundtable questioned claims about not conducting a public investigation to protect a person’s reputation, saying the national anti-corruption commission’s extremely high bar was a significant flaw.
“I think the justification given by MPs for removing or erecting high barriers to anti-corruption commissions using public hearings is detrimental to democracy, as secrecy is the enemy of democracy,” he said.
MPs justify this on the grounds that they are protecting innocent people from having their reputations damaged in a public hearing or a trial conducted by an anti-corruption body.
“But aren’t the reputations of such innocent people called into question in courts, royal commissions, the media or through parliamentary privilege?” Dr. Lewis said.
None of these principles of open justice should be curtailed, he said, so why are there strict barriers to anti-corruption commissions holding public hearings?
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