Political Corruption in Australia: A Very Wicked Place? by Peter John Perry

Author:Peter John Perry [Perry, Peter John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9780754616375
Google: pH-NAAAAMAAJ
Goodreads: 4246744
Publisher: Ashgate
Published: 2001-01-15T12:15:50+00:00

Note

1 T.S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral, where it is described as the ‘ultimate treason’!

5 Corruption Concealed – A Complacent Commonwealth

The newly established Commonwealth formalised and unified Australia’s political identity while maintaining a considerable role – and thus political apparatus and activity – for the new states (erstwhile colonies). The relative absence of political corruption from Commonwealth politics has long been acknowledged. The Commonwealth dealt and deals in matters less susceptible than those which are the major concerns of state politics. It was well served by its first generation of parliamentarians and public servants who from a background at least tainted with corruption but also in many cases recently reformed were determined to distance Commonwealth government from that part of its colonial heritage, both the long standing tradition and the spectacular events of the 1890s.

Political corruption remained endemic and widespread but only occasionally spectacular in Australia during the first three quarters of the twentieth century. There exists a substantial body of source material but neither that material nor the issue in general has received a great deal of attention. Thus when a body of scholarly writing on Australian politics emerges the matter, as has been noted, is scarcely mentioned. Davis’s (1960) treatment of the states’ governments says little on the topic. Certainly neither the terms of reference nor the substance of the Wilenski reports on the government of New South Wales, prepared between 1977–82, nor Alaba’s book on the reports give a strong position to political corruption (Alaba, 1994, 180). Mayer and Nelson’s Australian Politics: a third reader (1973) claims that a chapter which touches on the topic is a first, but corruption gets no index mention and the bibliography musters two items on the subject. The remarkable claim is also made that the subject, at least in terms of councils and planning, is ‘too big to treat here’ (158). Most recently the third edition of Hughes’ Australian Politics (1998) says nothing on local government and its meagre discussion of corruption (324–5) (no index entry) is subsumed into accountability with an inevitable loss of focus. Nevertheless valuable points are made, for example the significance of the extensive and substantially unconstrained character of state government. These in a sense encapsulate the standing of political corruption in this period, known to exist, ignored and understudied, but probably a bigger issue than anyone is ready or equipped to open up and pursue.

How is this situation to be accounted for and remedied? The context of this complacency provides a degree of explanation: the distraction of two world wars; continuing economic and social growth – by world standards Australia remained a lucky country – suggesting that nothing was too seriously amiss; a real improvement by comparison with the last decade of the nineteenth century. Carroll, writing at the end of the period, suggests that consumerism had led to lethargy, that Australians were less likely (than Americans) to become indignant about injustice or inefficiency’. But why the difference? (Carroll, 1978, 14–5). The relocation of the core

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