Dispatches from the war on corruption

From The Age Newspaper:

"As Victoria's Special Investigations Monitor, Mr (David) Jones kept watch over the Office of Police Integrity, whose high-profile corruption court case against former deputy commissioner Noel Ashby collapsed on Tuesday due to an OPI legal bungle. Mr Jones' handballing arose from the limits placed on him by the state government to scrutinise the OPI. This meant that when he received a complaint about the conduct of an OPI investigator or the direction of an inquiry, he had to tell the complainant to instead raise their concerns with State Ombudsman George Brouwer - the man who was the OPI's director until May 2008."

Potential conflict of interest, says Jones.

Well why wouldn't he? Pretty bloody obvious, I would have thought. Meanwhile the OPI look like idiots and Ashby's rep is ruined anyhow.

"Ashby, 52, was due to face trial this month on 11 counts of perjury to evidence he gave at hearings held by the Office of Police Integrity in 2007. He was accused of falsely telling the OPI twice, during secret and public hearings, that he had not received any information about a serving detective being investigated for murder. Former Federal Court judge Murray Wilcox, QC, who presided over the hearing, ruled that although no "smoking gun" showed that former police union chief Paul Mullett had directly passed information about a murder investigation to a suspect - a serving detective - it was logical to think that he did so."

So it's logical to think that we have corruption but a technicality - mired anyway in a conflict of interest - means we can't actually say?

How then is the public meant to take political assurances that sufficient anti-corruption powers exist? Maybe the opposition had a point. Maybe there needs to be a broad-based commission.