Margaret Simons at Crikey summarizes the Victorian Office of Police Integrity’s report of an investigation of the dealings between the Victorian Police Association, former Deputy Commissioner Sir Ken Jones, ministerial adviser (and former police officer) Tristan Weston, and various Victorian media outlets. These groups formed an alliance of convenience in a campaign (ultimately successful) to remove then Police Commissioner Simon Overland.
Read the whole thing.
Aside from possible criminal charges against Weston, one of the key questions here is the responsibility of Police Minister Peter Ryan, Weston’s boss. While Ryan may well have had no knowledge of Weston’s actions, he was a ministerial adviser, his direct hire, not a bureaucrat six links away on the org chart. Hiring Weston, and not at any point realizing what he was up to, must surely constitute Ministerial incompetence of the highest order, worthy of a quick trip to the back bench at the very least.
Then there is the remarkable coincidence that the day before this appears, the Police Association and the government settled their industrial dispute with a generous payrise to police. It seems that whatever happens, the most powerful union in Australia always comes up trumps…
What, more powerful than the AMA?
What you say is true but your comment is naive.
The Victorian Nationals know as much about, and care as much about, things like Ministerial accountability and the separation of powers as Joh did in Queensland in those dark days.
What they care about is their access to power and the spoils of that power when they can get it.
While Ted Baillieu relies upon them for his majority in the lower house of the Victorian Parliament he will do nothing to remove Peter Ryan from office.
“a quick trip to the back bench” for the Deputy Premier?
Unlikely.
Both of you are probably right, but in the context of federal politics he’d be gone.
The pathetic condition of state political reporting will probably see him get through unscathed.
@1, 2, 3, and 4: yes, yes, yes, and yes.
Unfortunately.
The more I read about this the less I can believe the Minister has kept his job. Staffers simply don’t take the fall for Ministers; they’re employees, not scapegoats. If there was anything Weston was doing as an advisor, and using the name of the Government, that the Minister didn’t know about, even if it was legit and above-board, he should walk just for that.
Liam @ 6 – staffers take the blame all the time!
We should also note that Parliamentary Secretary Bill Tilley has resigned for his part in this.
With any luck, he’ll lose his preselection, but I suppose that’s too much to ask. Certainly, the voters of Benambra won’t do anything about him.
How embarrassed are Murdoch’s Hun hacks that they have been revealed as Weston’s dupes?
My guess that crocodile tears only will be shed in the Rupert Bunker.
After all, Murdoch’s mission is not to inform but rather to rabble-rouse.
I love the smell of implausible deniability in the morning.
However, behind the intrigue and the parliamentary politics, there is a more significant narrative. One participant in Occupy Melbourne, somewhere on the net (it’s all been such a whirl, so I can’t remember exactly where I read it) overheard a cop, in one of the pauses during the police riot, say something like: “Good! None of that Christine Nixon rubbish now”.
I heard Nixon being interviewed by John Faine a little while ago about her autobiography and she identified an important experience, as a young constable stationed in Darlinghurst, when she returned to the station after leave which just happened to coincide with the police attack on the first Mardi Gras/Gay Pride in trhe late 1970s. She recalled seeing how the station appeared to be under siege from a hostile community and how this was the opposite of how policing should be done.
I’m the last person to try and paint Nixon or Overland as saints or to pretend that, if Overland was still there, everything would have been handled better at Occupy Melbourne. Nixon, for instance, had not been above developing a cozy relationship with the Herald Sun in the early days of her tenure, based on her personal friendship with Murdoch’s sister, and using that to her own ends. However, it’s also clear that she and Overland saw themselves as modernisers, rooting out corruption and the old “boy’s club” mentality.
The problem is, that there is another “modern” trend in policing. There is kettling, there is the sort of militarization of the police in America which we just saw revealed in its full horror in Oakland, and there’s the Orwellian full-on assault on Civil Liberties that has been launched against clearly harmless protesters in Perth ahead of CHOGM. The move towards “community policing”, cop contingents in Mardis Gras, targetted recruiting of ethnic minorities to the force, have since 9/11 been matched by new coercive powers, a demonisation of dissent, the explosion in numbers at ASIO and so on. Increasingly, as Laura Norder has been given new powers, new weapons and a licence to do whatever she wants in the name of protecting us from, at times unspecified, terror, the earlier trend towards a more nuanced, less corrupt, more politically sensitive policing has been reduced to a shallow PR exercise.
Of course, to a certain extent, it always was. But the problem with the likes of Nixon and Overland was that they, to some extent believed in it, and that doesn’t fit the brave new world where the whiff of crisis is in the air, mingled with capsicum and tear gas.
Individually, Katz, they might be moderately embarrassed. Collectively, not so much.
Yairs,
I can’t quite see how an order to move on, resisted, allows plod to turn passive resisters into human tacos.
In England, it was revealed that the British Press was illegally paying the police for stories. I understand that it is also illegal in Victoria for such practices to occur. The question I have is as there is clearly a very cosy relationship between the police and media organisations like 3AW and the Melbourne Sun/ Herald, as well as individuals in the media, is money changing hands.
And now for further and more intense attacks on the OPI, started by Ryan already. ABC news 1 pm.
And his quote? “We wouldn’t have had this problem if it weren’t for the phone taps that are an abuse of policing procedures.” Evidently “serious crime” warrants taps and not police machinations.
Zorronsky, it’s obfuscation.
Yes, it’s a reasonable question as to whether the scope of the wrongdoing justified a phone tap. Doesn’t alter the inappropriateness of the conduct uncovered.
it’s a reasonable question as to whether the scope of the wrongdoing justified a phone tap.
I don’t even really get this line. Overland knew someone close to him was leaking (which is a straight up crime). He thought it was his deputy, so he got the tap put on him. Turns out it wasn’t Sir Ken, but it was the person Sir Ken was talking to.
You don’t normally get taps put on the phones of people when you already know what they’re saying, do you?