Labor facing integrity test

THE revelation that the Corruption and Crime Commission has issued investigation notices to senior Labor Party figures and public officers will prove a real test for the McGowan government.

Not since the unmasking of fake medals MP Barry Urban in 2017 has the party and government had its integrity challenged by such a serious inquiry.

It’s been reported that the CCC probe is asking questions of the Department of Premier and Cabinet, WA Labor’s headquarters in East Perth, and a number of MPs.

The line of inquiry is into possible abuses of taxpayer funding meant to staff and manage electorate offices operating in all Labor-held seats.

Far from rejecting news of the CCC investigation, the Labor Party secretary said they “have no comment to make on those matters”.

Premier Mark McGowan said he’s unaware of an inquiry “as reported today”.

But if the CCC is pursuing a potential scandal like the so-called red shirts affair that undermined the credibility of Daniel Andrews’ Victorian government in 2018, then the public can expect a report sometime next year that will land some blows.

That inquiry by the Victorian ombudsman found 21 MPs had breached parliamentary allowance rules, resulting in the Labor Party paying back more than $400,000 of money it had misspent.

“Nineteen ALP members of the 57th Parliament breached this provision by employing 18 field organisers as casual electorate officers, whose time-sheets indicated they were performing electorate officer duties when they were in fact engaging in political or party activities on those dates,” the ombudsman’s report found.

While that report couldn’t point to corruption, it did conclude that the scheme being used by Labor in Victoria was “an artifice to secure partial payment for the campaign out of parliamentary funds and was wrong”.

The inquiry also made much of a campaign strategy used in Victoria known as the Community Action Network.

WA Labor copied it.

A possible twist in the tale of the CCC’s current inquiry is that when the anti-corruption agency’s commissioner, John McKechnie, exposed Liberal Party electoral allowance rorting in 2020, he was out of a job because a Liberal MP on the reappointment committee vetoed the move.

That abuse of allowances included taxpayers’ money being spent on strippers and a ‘soapland’ massage in Tokyo’s red-light district.

“The permissive parameters of the purpose of the electorate allowance and the lack of oversight of expenditure resulted in some members using the allowance to pay for private lifestyle expenses with marginal benefit to the electorate or none at all,” Mr McKechnie concluded.

The premier and Attorney-General John Quigley said the Liberals couldn’t take the heat from the CCC and used the power of veto to stymie Mr McKechnie’s progress.

With another landslide election win in 2021, Mr McGowan delivered on a promise to reinstate Mr McKechnie.

Now the commissioner appears to have elements of the Labor Party in his sights.

Added into the mix of all this is the fact that a former Labor staffer, Sanja Spasojevic, is pursuing an unfair dismissal claim in the Industrial Relations Commission.

Along the way she has claimed electorate officers do plenty of Labor campaign work on the taxpayers’ coin.

She has refused to go quietly, and it appears other Labor employees have been telling similar stories.

Another interesting factor is that the CCC’s job of cross-referencing the work patterns of electorate office staff has been made easier by an electronic system that formed part of Labor’s reforms following the saga of the Liberal Party MPs.

“In the wake of revelations by the CCC that former Liberal MPs abused taxpayer funds, this government advocated for significant reforms to the electorate allowance system, the state government supported and implemented changes to improve transparency and accountability,” the premier said in response to questions about the CCC inquiry.

“The Salaries and Allowances Tribunal review into MP entitlements saw the implementation of numerous measures to improve accountability, including new principles by which members must abide, and a system to report members’ use of allowances.”

That might be the case, but the CCC is now looking to see if Labor has been practising what it preached.