Last Thursday was a sad day in ACT politics, with the local Integrity Commission making a finding of serious corrupt conduct against two public officials in relation to the Campbell Primary School refurbishment - the Kingfisher report. ACT voters are entitled to be angry.
But they can also take a small measure of comfort, even - dare I say - express some pride in their local democratic system with this development. The reason is that the ACT polity is a very, very late arrival in the world of corrupt government.
The ACT Integrity Commission was the last appointed of the corruption watchdogs at the state and territory level. The long delay in setting it up - a full 30 years after the NSW Independent Commission against Corruption - was caused not by government resistance to the idea, so much as by the widespread perception that corruption was simply not a serious problem in the ACT.
Contrast this scenario with the cesspool which was state politics over the last 40 years. The Fitzgerald Inquiry in Queensland turned out to be the tip of an iceberg across the states, with ministers of the Crown jailed in most jurisdictions for graft or abuse of office. Backhanders, money for favours and influence peddling infected politicians, developers and police forces across the country.
Since its establishment in 2019, the ACT commission has also made findings of corrupt conduct, but at a very different level of seriousness to the corruption spectacle in the states. This is because corruption has a sweeping definition in Australian legislation, covering everything from "classic" corruption - the fraudulent procurement of financial gain or advantage - to what might be called "administrative malfeasance", including bureaucratic errors of judgement and breaches of codes of conduct.
The "corruption" identified by the ACT Commission has, until recently, fallen entirely into this latter category: poor decision-making in the letting of contracts, public servants misleading ministers, prison officers failing to check on at-risk inmates at night ... reprehensible, yes, but light years away from handovers of cash in brown paper bags.
The most high-profile identification of "serious corrupt conduct" in the ACT by the integrity watchdog before last week was the finding in 2025 against Walter Sofronoff. Sofronoff, a former Queensland judge commissioned to inquire into the failed trial of Bruce Lehrmann for the rape of Brittany Higgins, was found to have "corruptly" leaked his draft report to two journalists.
Again, a breakdown in due process, but a world away from Fitzgerald-type venality. Until last week. With the outcome of Operation Kingfisher, the Canberra community has lost its innocence, but can take some heart that its virginity lasted so many decades.
The recent finding is an opportunity to assess just how appropriate the ACT safeguards against corruption actually are.
The Kingfisher report was an exceptionally long time in gestation - five years. The reflects the architecture of the commission's legislation.
Australian commissions oscillate between two models of corruption investigation: what I call the "attack dog" mode (the investigator very publicly goes for the throat of the accused person - in this analogy, an innocent victim is able to fend off the attack dog, even though they may become a bit bloodied and scarred in the process) versus the "sniffer dog" mode (in the airport, the sniffer dog identifies a suspicious bag, and the bag and its owner are taken off to a private room to have the contents examined).
ICAC is an attack dog, the ACT commission is a sniffer dog.
The latter mode is more appropriate when administrative malfeasance is the dominant problem. Inquiries in that mode tend to focus on cultural or systemic issues within government, rather than free-wheeling corrupt individuals, be they politicians, senior bureaucrats or developers.
Public "show trials", with their potential to unfairly damage reputations (especially political reputations), have been very much the modus operandi at ICAC but may not be necessary in this territory.
A bigger question is whether the Kingfisher report demonstrates value for money from the process that produced it. The Integrity Commission costs $7. 3 million a year to keep going and employs 27 people.
Despite the significance of this particular report, it represents the only finding of "classic" corruption in the commission's seven years of existence. Is this a good return on investment?
Other avenues are available to root out such evils - ad hoc inquiries or royal commissions, for example, whose costs are contained by being task-specific. Another is to contract the national corruption watchdog to provide these services to the ACT community, in the same way we contract with the Commonwealth Ombudsman to provide ombudsman overview to our community.
I would argue that the outcome in Kingfisher, deplorable as it is, is evidence that a full-time, free-standing corruption commission for a city of half a million people is a luxury we really don't need and can't afford.
