The recent high court finding against the New South Wales Icac has been seized upon by the Northern Territory attorney general as reason not to create or engage an anti-corruption body to investigate Northern Territory matters.
However, a legal academic has dismissed the assertion and called for interstate bodies to be engaged to investigate Northern Territory corruption allegations as the local watchdog could not afford it.
The territory’s government, opposition and police force have been besieged by scandals in recent months, leading to increasing calls for a NSW-style independent commission against corruption (Icac).
But the attorney general, John Elferink, said on Monday that while there needed to be some consideration of future plans, for now the Northern Territory has “all the checks and balances in place that we need”.
“Things have changed in recent times, and I point to the high court decisions around Margaret Cunneen in NSW where the high court has very seriously clipped the wings of an Icac, and it raises the question of who polices the policemen going forward,” said Elferink.
“Those issues would have to resolved before you went down that path, and those issues remain unresolved down that path.”
Last week the high court of NSW found Icac had acted beyond the scope of its powers when it investigated Cunneen, a NSW crown prosecutor, over allegations she suggested her son’s girlfriend fake chest pains after a car accident to avoid a breathalyser test.
The high court decision centred on the definition of corrupt conduct and if it extended to a private citizen who misleads public officials. Cunneen was not acting in her role of crown prosecutor at the time of the alleged incident, the court found.
As such, the high court finding was “not really relevant” to allegations at the centre of the biggest recent Northern Territory controversies, a legal academic and political commentator, Ken Parish, told Guardian Australia.
“The high court said [in the Cunneen case] ‘How is that corruption?’, and I think that is fair comment. It’s not corruption on the part of a private person to do something that dicks around a public official, and it’s not corruption by the public official, so what business is it of a body like Icac given its extraordinary powers?”
There was, however, still a need for an Icac when one looks at recent cases in the Northern Territory, Parish said.
Earlier this year the police commissioner,John McRoberts resigned in the face of allegations he had sought to influence a criminal case, and another high-ranking police officer was suspended. The police commissioner is being investigated by officers brought in from the Australian federal police.
The former opposition leader, Delia Lawrie, also resigned last week after it was revealed police were investigating her conduct with an inquiry which found she acted with bias when she granted a rent-free lease of the historic Stella Maris site to Unions NT in 2012. A supreme court appeal was dismissed, ruling Lawrie had deliberately sought to undermine the inquiry.
The police are also investigating an alleged CLP slush fund, Foundation 51, for possible breaches of the electoral act, after the case was referred to it by the NT electoral commisison.
“The Stella Maris situation – clearly the allegation is a degree of corruption at least in terms of lying to the court and so on, and certainly the whole McRoberts saga is clearly corruption on any view if it happened,” said Parish.
He also pointed to additional allegations of corruption aired by the chief minister, Adam Giles, that unnamed police and politicians had plotted “in cahoots” to remove him from office.
On Monday, Elferink, a former police officer, rejected the suggestion there were close ties between the CLP government and police, despite Giles’s accusations.
Parish called for the NT government to look at outsourcing complex investigations to NSW or South Australian Icacs, as the current corruption watchdog – the public information disclosure commission (PIDC) – was under-resourced and overstretched.
He said the PIDC’s budget is a little more than $1m and operated at a deficit of more than $150m last year.
“Better funding would be a significant part to a solution, but I doubt a very small place like the Northern Territory could ever afford that,” he told Guardian Australia.
“A fully blown Icac has quite a large staff and a range of expertise on the staff. Financial and accounting staff, policing people, forensic people and so on. You really need to have them in-house working together on a coordinated investigation in anything complex.”
Parish earlier wrote in a letter to the NT News, outlining his calls for the interstate engagement, that he was not suggesting the NT had “epic corruption problems”.
“We have complacent small-town crony capitalism where connected insiders collude to exclude newcomers from the spoils of the government banquet table,” he wrote. “It’s not unusual, but it has long prevented the territory from realising its dynamic potential as Australia’s northern gateway. That requires an open, competitive economy conducted on a level playing field.”
