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.

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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........

© Canberra Times