Commissioner Paul Brereton’s departure from the National Anti-Corruption Commission has been met with wide relief, but will it change how the NACC operates? Paul Begley asks.
Since Paul Brereton handed his letter of resignation to the Governor General last month, there is a case for leaving him to get on with his life. However, his resignation was accompanied by assurances that all is well with the National Anti-Corruption Commission and he has nothing for which he needs to answer.
That impression needs to be contested.
When Senate Estimates time arrived late on the afternoon of 26 May 2026, questions by a dozen or so senators were about to be directed at the assembled long table of two NACC deputy commissioners, a department secretary, the NACC chief executive and the NACC commissioner. In addition, Senator Nita Green, the parliamentary stand-in for Attorney General Michelle Rowland, sat with the group.
Paul Brereton was asked an early question by One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts, who wanted to know why the NACC had such a bad reputation. The best answer Brereton could come up with was to position himself as a
defenceless victim of misinformation promulgated by social media campaigners.
NACC chief Paul Brereton finally gets the message and resigns
What mattered to him, he said, was that the Attorney General had verbally expressed full confidence in him. While that was true, it meant playing down the fact that the same Attorney General had counselled him in writing to ensure that he either managed any conflicts of interest or avoided them altogether.
Architect of disrepute
Come August 2026, Brereton will be a 69-year-old former commissioner of the integrity body, which he had presided over for three years and which he had doggedly brought into disrepute for most of that time. As a senior counsel and former judge of the NSW Supreme Court, it would appear to be within the bounds of reason to expect that of the glittering attributes such a person of Brereton’s professional stature might possess, naivete would not be one of them.
It’s safe to say that when a minister of the Crown is speaking about the head of an agency who reports to the minister, full confidence would predictably be bestowed unless the agency head were about to be sacked.
A mixture of customary decorum and political nous dictate the certainty expressed under those circumstances must not be lukewarm. If there is any question about the degree of ministerial faith in the office holder, it will be found in more private communications rather than public utterances that might give rise to media speculation.
That bell might have rung for Brereton, but didn’t, at the conclusion of the estimates hearing last Tuesday, when Michelle Rowland’s stand-in, Senator Green, gave a short speech commending the commissioner on his lifetime of public service generally and his leadership of the NACC in particular.
Her dutiful speech stood in stark contrast to the tone and substance of the relentlessly scathing interrogation by the panel of senators, yet
Brereton appeared to hear only Green’s words of praise to which he credulously responded in kind.
The NACC Commissioner’s self-assurance that negative reflections on his performance have come from unprincipled lowlife types on social media is at best a case of believing his own propaganda. Some of the most trenchant assessments of his performance have come from sources among his peers on the bench and at the bar as well as from legal academics.
Brereton critics
As a former judge of the NSW Court of Appeals and chair of the Centre for Public Integrity, the Hon Anthony Whealy KC said he was ‘quite startled’ to learn that Brereton had not seen the conflict of interest in his handling of the Robodebt referral.
Former Victorian Supreme Court judge Stephen Charles KC described the performance of the NACC under Brereton as ‘a bad fail’. Geraldine Allan, writing in The Australian, noted that “former Queensland Court of Appeal judge Margaret White was horrified, arguing Mr Brereton’s error of judgment was
much more fundamental than an appeal court overruling a trial judge.
Anyone familiar with the work of the distinguished Australian international expert on public integrity, Professor AJ Brown from Griffith University, knows that he characteristically leans towards the use of diplomatic language.
Yet in a Conversation article, the professor found himself describing NACC’s decision on the Robodebt referral as ‘contaminated’, while also alluding to the decision as one in which the integrity body’s claim to transparency had been ‘nobbled’.
To the extent that the NACC had been nobbled on transparency, Brereton’s failure of leadership would have played a part in that. The legalistic culture that the Commissioner appears to have instilled from the top, as Geoffrey Watson observed during an ABC interview, was one in which
NACC staff lived more in fear of making a small error than in the pursuit of exposing corruption,
especially if that meant exposing corrupt or criminal wrongdoers who were rich and powerful holders of high office.
A low bar of success
The NACC successes Brereton listed in his resignation letter consisted mostly of prosecutions of lower-level public servants, many of which had been carried over from NACC’s predecessor, the Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity (ACLEI).
The NACC’s reluctance to take any action on the Robodebt Royal Commissioner’s referral of six individuals for “civil action or criminal prosecution” caused a storm of complaints in 2024 to the NACC Inspector, who reversed the decision. A reinvestigation was scheduled in 2025 under the leadership of Deputy Commissioner Kylie Kilgour.
Because the Royal Commission hearings were heard in public and streamed live on YouTube, verbatim evidence was heard from senior public servants and ministers, many of whom knowingly perpetrated or enabled the unlawful scheme that greatly traumatised the lives of around 470,000 defenceless Australians, an unknown number of whom took their own lives.
The Robodebt six
The NACC appeared more concerned about ensuring that the ‘Robodebt Six’ not be subject to ‘oppression’ rather than to pursue a robust investigation into “the massive failure of public administration” that was Robodebt. Many Robodebt victims received notices in the mail for substantial debts they didn’t owe.
The onus of proof had been illegally reversed so that they were required to prove, without any legal or departmental assistance, that they didn’t owe the debt, while debt collectors knocked on their doors and government ministers, such as Alan Tudge, terrified them with threats that they would be hunted down and jailed.
By contrast, former Senator Rex Patrick discovered through FOI that one of the Robodebt Six, Scott Morrison, had been given legal assistance in October 2022 to the tune of $461,445 to defend himself over Robodebt matters.
And the biggest compo payout for Robodebt victims is … Scott Morrison!
Although it might be argued that the NACC was dysfunctional on key performance indicators under Brereton’s leadership, it is also arguable that the Albanese Government had nobbled the NACC from the outset.
According to AJ Brown, the decision in 2022 to add an ‘exceptional circumstances’ test to the NACC’s ability to hold public hearings was a late intervention, and one added by Albanese himself in overruling his Attorney General Mark Dreyfus, who had proposed a public interest test as the threshold.
Professor Brown made the following observation about that late addition:
The problem will haunt the NACC until the unnecessary threshold is removed.
The PM’s intervention caused unease among the crossbench and community advocates who saw it as a betrayal of the institution they had fought to establish.
As it turned out, the test was a perfect provision to complement a NACC led by a commissioner with no appetite for pursuing rich and powerful wrongdoers, an attribute he had already displayed following the Brereton Report on Afghanistan war crimes when he opposed the pursuit of responsible top brass in Defence.
The advocates for an anti-corruption body called for a NACC with teeth, but
there is little point in having teeth if there is no appetite to use them.
Deputy Commissioner Kylie Kilgour’s report in March on her reinvestigation of the Robodebt Six revealed the lenient culture that Brereton has bequeathed to the NACC in its dealings with holders of high office. Her credulous convolutions on motive and self-serving irrelevancies in assessing the evidence given in secret by Scott Morrison and Kathryn Campbell landed firmly in their favour, and let both of them off the hook.
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