Operation Rosny Ends Quietly But May Define Political Donations
The Scalp That Never Arrived
Most people who follow a corruption inquiry keep score in resignations. A hearing that ends a premiership was worth holding; a hearing that ends quietly was not. That is the commonsense ledger, and the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s Operation Rosny hearings finished firmly on the quiet side of it. The ledger is the wrong instrument. ICAC’s public hearings for Operation Rosny closed ten weeks after the counsel assisting the inquiry (the barrister appointed to present the evidence and arguments to a public inquiry), Peggy Dwyer SC (Senior Counsel), laid out the allegations on the opening day in July. No senior figure fell. Anyone expecting another premiership-ending spectacle of the kind produced by the appearances of Gladys Berejiklian, Barry O’Farrell or Nick Greiner got a whimper instead of a bang. Anthony Whealy KC (King’s Counsel, the senior rank of barrister in Australia), the chair of the Centre for Public Integrity and a former ICAC assistant commissioner, rejects the ledger outright. For him, the measure of an inquiry’s success does not have “anything to do with resignations”. He expects the impact of Rosny to arrive in two parts, and neither of them is a resignation. The hearings opened with allegations that senior New South Wales Liberal politicians supported the branch-stacking efforts of a factional group (a group belonging to an organised grouping inside a political party) of young conservative Christians known as the Reformers. Branch stacking — recruiting or renewing members to a political party — is the practice at issue. What it does in the choice of candidates and policy may nonetheless surprise many voters. Dwyer put the legal frame at the centre of the case on day one, observing that “money in politics, as in other spheres of life, has the potential to corrupt”. [1] She emphasised the central role of electoral donations laws in ensuring a level playing field in her opening. Ten weeks of testimony then tested how far the written rules actually reach.
The Octopus and the Untested Rule
The long-running argument underneath Rosny is definitional, and it is not academic. When does money given to people inside a party become a political donation? The commission examined whether three Liberal figures took $2m in donations from the property developer Jean Nassif to support branch stacking, damage the career of the then Liberal minister David Elliott and remove the building commissioner David Chandler. [1]
The question has been put to the institutions before. Asked in parliament whether payments to factional groups inside parties are donations, the NSW Electoral Commission declined to comment on matters referred to Rosny. That leaves the definition to the commission’s report. Whealy expects that report to settle the ground: “We will get a series of definitive rulings on what is a political donation… [in] a carefully considered report that draws all these strands together”. [1] He rates the ruling as conclusive in a way the current position is not, because the area is untested. The rulings themselves are still to come. He groups the three main allegations as a “three-tentacled octopus”. One tentacle is the Reformers’ plan to recruit 5,000 Christian conservatives “and thereby take control of the NSW division of the Liberal party”. Their stated aim was more conservative policy on abortion, euthanasia, marriage equality and climate change. The second half of the impact Whealy describes is procedural rather than personal: “this will have all played out in public”.
What the Hearings Cost the Bystanders
No scalp at the top of politics, then — but the hearings still carried consequences for people whose names entered them. That ended speculation that the former premier, who now lives and works in the United States, might make a surprise appearance. His name surfaced in messages as “Dom”, and in phone taps of Nassif as “my boy” and “my best friend”. Whealy says he retains a “sparkling reputation”, and reads the decision not to call him as “a reflection of the fact that he’s not a person of interest in this, and even though he might have been able to give some peripheral assistance, it’s not needed”. Nassif himself gave evidence over two days by video link from his Beirut bedroom. He raged against the allegations of corruption, and against Elliott and Chandler. He claimed he had left Australia to receive “an international award for number one businessman from [an] Arabic background” and would return once he had collected “a beautiful legal team who are willing to fight politicians — to clear my name”. He would not come back, he told the patient Dwyer, to be “killed by the mafia boys”. Whealy calls the performance “theatre of the absurd”, and expects the commission to reject most of the fugitive developer’s evidence. Whealy also contrasts the present with the past: “20 years ago” public hearings could expose witnesses to embarrassing media coverage before any finding of corruption or any recommendation of criminal prosecution. These days, the rules of procedural fairness are “very carefully observed” — including making it very clear when someone is not the subject of any ICAC allegations. That care has not appeased everyone caught up in the process. One senior Liberal complained about the frequent “name-dropping” of politicians who were not subject to allegations.
So the accounting runs the other way from the expectation. An inquiry that produced no resignation at the top still took a chief executive’s job, left a senior MP stood aside from his leadership posts, and sent a company strategist on leave. The audience came for the Beirut bedroom and the theatre of the absurd, which the commission is likely to discard. The ruling that may outlast all of it — what a political donation actually is — will arrive in a written report, on untested ground, without an audience at all. Which is the humbling part: the definition will outlive the spectacle, and the definition was never the spectacle.