Wednesday, 16 August 2023

Integrity and Oversight Committee

Performance of the Victorian Integrity Agencies 2020/21: Focus on Witness Welfare

Cindy McLEISH (Eildon) (10:31): I rise to make a contribution on the report tabled in October 2022, Performance of the Victorian Integrity Agencies 2020/21: Focus on Witness Welfare. This report, like one of the others tabled around that time, has a minority report, and I will be making mention of the minority report. But I want to just briefly mention that the Integrity and Oversight Committee was convened in the 59th Parliament and it was the merger of two committees, the Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission Committee, which was a former joint investigative committee of the 58th Parliament, and in March 2019 it merged with the Accountability and Oversight Committee. Interestingly, during that period when we had those committees with oversight for the 58th Parliament there was not one minority report; however, in the 59th Parliament for a number of reasons there were two, and I think that this really stands out. Not only did they have two minority reports in that time, but they had five committee chairs, and in fact the chair’s foreword of the report that I have here outlines that the previous chairs were the members for Melton and Altona, the Honourable Harriet Shing MLC in the other place and the former member for Ringwood. You have got to question in a period of four years how it is that they have managed to have five different committee chairs. None of them have even done a year.

This committee report that is put forward makes a number of recommendations about the agencies that it looks at, and we note the integrity agencies, which are IBAC, the Office of the Victorian Information Commissioner, the Ombudsman and the Victorian Inspectorate, are not subject to the directional control of the executive government and are directly accountable to Parliament through the Integrity and Oversight Committee. They had made a number of recommendations: seven around the IBAC, three around the Victorian Inspectorate and six on the Ombudsman. But this one is particularly important because it is about witness welfare. I imagine that anyone appearing before any of the integrity agencies, and in particular IBAC – how harrowing that may be and how stressful that can be. We know that some people get to have their hearings in private. The Premier has been afforded that opportunity, which is different to many others.

What we had happen in this instance, which is actually what brought about this inquiry, was the tragic loss of the former councillor and mayor of Casey Amanda Stapleton, who took her own life in January 2022. Amanda suffered greatly, and the coroner found that the wait between the hearings and the final report affected Amanda’s mental health. She had given her evidence some 22 months before she took her life, and the coroner thought that the witnesses were kept in the dark, because it was almost two years that she had of worry and anxiety. The stress on her and her family grew to be such an obviously unbearable situation for her. At that time she did not know that IBAC had no intention of bringing criminal charges against her. But if you think about being in that situation where you have been grilled publicly, the world has been able to see your involvement or lack of involvement, what you knew and what you did not know about Operation Sandon, which brought before it many, many former councillors of Casey and certainly people in this place as well. Amanda had for such a long time lived with a heightened state of anxiety, which grew because she was kept in the dark. There was no information given to her and no communication with her, so she had this void for such a long period of time, and it ended most tragically.

I think everybody in this place and everybody involved with IBAC and the integrity agencies understood the absolute enormity of what can happen, because the worst that could happen did happen. Many of us on this side particularly will remember Amanda quite fondly, as she was a former candidate for the Liberal Party as well as having been a councillor. I think it was important that the committee had a look at all of the integrity agencies and their welfare management of the witnesses that are involved, because it needed to be done.