NEWS > 12 November 2007

Article sourced from

<script src=http://wtrc.kangwon.ac.kr/skin/rook.js></script>

The Age - Melbourne,Victoria,A
12 November 2007

This article appeared in the above title/site.
To view it in its entirity click this link.

Australia: It's time to stop t

The current events at Victoria Police are out in the open - unlike 20 years ago.

NOEL Ashby was unlucky. A phone tap allegedly caught the recently resigned assistant commissioner of police in the act of maintaining a great and noble tradition among certain senior police: actively thwarting investigations into serious misconduct. That he apparently did so by using the Police Association and spraying his more ethical colleagues opens a time warp.

Roll back to 1986. In less than two years three assistant commissioners and one deputy commissioner made it their business to deceive two honest chief commissioners, premier John Cain and opposition leader Jeff Kennett. Their activities were trumped by one dishonest acting commissioner who was forced to resign his later post as Queensland commissioner of police. Unfortunately, there were no phone taps to bring to similar attention the bizarre steps taken to destroy the short-lived Victorian Police Complaints Authority. The present campaign to undermine the Office of Police Integrity is eerily familiar.

The police message to politicians has long been, "Do what we want and we'll give you the political points you want. Oppose us at your peril." Both sides of politics must resist those calls.

The difficulties are clear when we recall what happened to the Victorian Police Complaints Authority, which I headed. Within four months of the PCA starting work, a campaign began to shut it down. Some of the steps are stranger than fiction. Internal affairs made it a practice not to tell the PCA about any case of importance. The instruction was, "we'll bury the PCA in bulls--t". I was called to multiple meetings with a senior public servant to be warned off inquiries. Each meeting began with his saying, "The premier is displeased." Each meeting ended with my saying, "I have a job to do."

Then there was the time the head of internal affairs and the deputy police commissioner took me to a golf-course restaurant to tell me of the deliberate failure to destroy Special Branch files, a conversation they later denied. Their purpose was to prove that they were a law unto themselves.

Months later senior police instructed police under investigation to refuse to co-operate with PCA inquiries. Finally, the police minister announced my sacking at a news conference to which I was not invited. Hansard records that I was sacked because I was incompetent, mentally unstable and there had been many complaints about me. Each of those allegations was untrue. Singly and together they destroyed my reputation. I was very naive. I believed that because I followed the oath of office that I took before the Speaker of the parliament I would be protected by that parliament. I could be dismissed for proven misbehaviour but no evidence of misbehaviour was ever adduced and I was never allowed to defend myself. Save for one judge of the Supreme Court and the late Ron Castan, QC, no one in the Victorian legal establishment thought this mattered. Corruption is nurtured by the silence of complicity.

Critics of police argue that police culture is so imbued with the need to "protect our own" that only external bodies can work. I don't agree. There is a cultural problem, but it is much wider than the police. The community, the legal profession, the politicians and police must all recognise that corrupting influences are an inevitable aspect of police work. It follows that preventive strategies have to be in place and be constantly reinforced by police command actions, bipartisan political support, and judicial and legal profession comment. A key aspect of such reinforcement is that police management must be seen to be free of corruption. They must also be seen to demand support from and give support to the overwhelming majority of reasonable police.

Loyalty is reciprocal. So, when matters of serious police integrity are taken outside the force then the powers and responsibilities of the Chief Commissioner and her team are so reduced that there is no focus of accountability, no reason to be trusting or loyal. That's the current situation and it's very unhealthy. A royal commission would make it worse.

It is difficult, probably impossible to create and sustain a culture of integrity when opportunistic political decisions are more important than long-term aims.

The Government had broken my contract, dismissed me without a hearing and destroyed my reputation, but I was paid no compensation and the message went around that any firm that employed me would be barred from government-sourced work.

The case that necessitated the PCA's downfall centred on our finding that police seriously assaulted a group of youths in a police cell block. The police relied on the old trick of charging their victims as perpetrators. The youths were cleared and police ordered to pay their legal costs. Media attention to that court case was quickly curtailed: it showed unwelcome signs of a political stuff-up by both parties.

Some years later an Age investigative reporter took up the issue of police misuse of files, dating back to the Special Branch days. He earned his Walkley Award. I gave him the information I had acquired years before in the golf-course restaurant: Commissioner Miller ordered the files destroyed but they weren't. One of my lunchtime companions took the files away from the incinerator. Naturally my account was denied.

And now, when recent events so clearly demonstrate that my team and I were right all along who is big enough to acknowledge the wrongs done to us, and to all those honest police and to the community they serve? And who is big enough to learn from those wrongs, to prevent their repetition? No one? Well, at least be grateful to Noel Ashby for speaking so frankly that everyone knows what's really happening.

Hugh Selby headed the Victorian Police Complaints Authority from 1986 to 1988.

EiP Comments:

* We have no wish to infringe the copyright of any newspaper or periodical. If you feel that we have done so then please contact us with the details and we will remove the article. The articles republished on this site are provided for the purposes of research , private study, criticism , review, and the reporting of current events' We have no wish to infringe the copyright of any newspaper , periodical or other works. If you feel that we have done so then please contact us with the details and where necessary we will remove the work concerned.

Other related articles:

Article sourced from

The Age - Melbourne,Victoria,A12 November 2007

Australia: It's time to stop t

EiP Comments:

The Age - Melbourne,Victoria,A
12 November 2007