By Stephen Charles and Lucy Hamilton

The Victorian government has just acted to ensure that the Independent Broad-based Anti-Corruption Commission (IBAC) is neutered by a subtle gambit in the crafting of the advertisement seeking applicants for the position of Commissioner.

The first requirement in the ad was for a “leader with demonstrated experience and exceptional capability in: public sector leadership and management”. This can only have been intended to place that role not in the hands of someone independent and of judicial stature, but someone with experience in the public service, someone suitable for the role of chief executive officer, rather than the Commissioner of IBAC.

The advertisement that was released for Victoria’s new IBAC Commissioner was clearly crafted in defiance of the IBAC Act. The act specifies that to be eligible for appointment as a Commissioner, a person must be a judge of the High Court, the Federal Court, or a Supreme Court, or be qualified for such an appointment.

Within the Victorian Constitution, however, these requirements were expanded to include people “admitted to practice for not less than five years.”

The advertisement’s wording makes it clear that hardly any judges or barristers could qualify for the role. Judges and leading senior counsel almost invariably have little experience or known capability in public sector leadership and management, and therefore cannot have developed an understanding of the operation of the public sector, its governance or accountability framework. It is believed no judge or senior king’s counsel was on the short-list for consideration, and, if that is correct, the framing of the advertisement provides the explanation.

IBAC’s Commissioner must have the experience, knowledge and standing to challenge the most senior figures in politics, public service and police, and on the bench, if necessary, in the course of performing these duties. The Commissioner must be equipped to be able to decide matters such as whether to start an investigation, including whether there are reasonable grounds for suspecting a crime; whether to investigate a supreme court judge; whether to enter police premises to seize evidence; whether to authorise phone-tapping.

Victoria’s integrity system, consisting of the IBAC, Ombudsman and Auditor-General’s Office, performs a crucial role in ensuring Victorians can have full confidence in the state’s public sector and that it is free from corruption. Each of these bodies can be damaged in various ways to reduce their effectiveness.

Integrity commissions such as IBAC can be unduly limited by restrictive legislation, by funding cuts, by the quality of the staff appointed as Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, and by reducing their capacity to make public their investigations into corruption and misconduct.

In its first decade of operation, IBAC has suffered from time to time: inadequate funding, flawed legislation, and the inability to expose misbehaviour to the public by matters such as the requirement for “exceptional circumstances” to exist before a hearing can take place in public. Victoria’s IBAC Act limits the definition of corrupt conduct to criminal matters, which would exclude, for example, the pork-barrelling that so disgusted the nation in the 2022 federal election.

Notwithstanding these problems, IBAC has survived and thrived by virtue of the quality of senior staff, in particular its Commissioners, and produced admirable reports after lengthy investigations demonstrating repeatedly the misbehaviour of aspects of the Victorian government and public service.

Victoria is not alone in this battle between politicians and integrity bodies. Only NSW’s Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) has the strength required, yet several NSW Premiers have repeatedly praised ICAC for its great work protecting the state from corruption, making them the rare exceptions to the rule.

In September 2021, South Australia’s legislature combined across party lines to attack the powers of investigation of their state’s anti-corruption commission. The Commissioner at the time, Ann Vanstone, described her powers as having been “decimated.”

The definition of what constitutes “corruption” was reduced and the ability to investigate maladministration and misconduct was removed.

No MP in either House, not even the Greens, voted against these attacks on the efficacy of the South Australian ICAC.

In 2020, the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) had its funding cut “in revenge” for its crucial findings about corruption of the sports grants program and carparks funds under the Morrison government.

Preventing public hearings is one of the most harmful of the restrictions besetting state bodies. These are a crucial resource to show that integrity is being pursued, to attract witnesses and to educate our politicians and public servants on what corruption might look like. They are regarded by most commissioners as a critical factor in demonstrating what is corruption to the public and in their principal function of exposing corruption.

The National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC), finally legislated after long consultation by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus’s department, is only able to stage hearings in public in “exceptional circumstances.” This is the result of a deal with the Coalition and is a significant blight on the most important development in the Albanese government’s integrity platform. It will certainly reduce severely the number of the NACC’s public hearings and the public’s trust that corruption is being pursued.

The block to transparency in the expression “exceptional circumstances” in the NACC Act was taken from the IBAC Act. No other state’s integrity body has a similar provision.

It is particularly important that the new Commissioner of IBAC is strong enough to steer the body towards the reforms that Victorians require for its anti-corruption remit to be carried out in a way that fosters confidence. The South Australian government too is looking to restrengthen their ICAC.

One of the principal functions of anti-corruption bodies is in exposing and preventing the corruption and misconduct in government that threatens in so many ways to undermine democracy.

The more subtle the attack on the integrity body, the harder it is for the public to perceive the effects brought about by the manipulation. The framing of this advertisement meant that some of the people best qualified to protect Victorian democracy were apparently not represented on the short-list.

This was first published in Pearls and Irritations as Only parliaments are able to set up integrity bodies, but politicians hate and fear them

Stephen Charles is a retired judge who served on the Supreme Court of Victoria Court of Appeal between 1995 and 2006. He is a member of the boards of the Centre for Public Integrity and the Accountability Round Table. He is the primary author of the 2022 book: Keeping them Honest: the case for a genuine national integrity commission and other vital democratic reforms.

The fact that Elon Musk has just halved his election integrity team this week on X/Twitter at the same time as a former integrity executive at the platform warned that foreign government and extremist bad actors are intervening there to distort the debate on the Voice, policy action to protect our ability to trust government, the media and social media is more important than ever.

Protecting the democratic project ought to be one of our most important goals. The Albanese government has made several timid steps in this direction, but in other crucial areas is dawdling over integrity measures that need urgent attention. One of the most important aspects will be legislating towards promoting truth in political speech.

This ought to have been done before the announcement of the Voice to Parliament referendum: the disinformation deployed by the No campaign threaten this crucial project that ought to be debated based on truths not fear-mongering fantasy.

The Right has elected to make the Voice into a political weapon to try to damage Albanese and strengthen its own chances at the next election. Given that the Voice is such a mild proposed advisory body, the No campaign is manufacturing deceptive propaganda to alienate an inflation-stressed public. Politicians will not even be obliged to consult with the Voice when making policy regarding First Nations’ people, so the dire threats are ludicrous.

The knowledge that the official AEC Yes and No campaign pamphlet sent to every home in Australia was not obliged to be factual is shocking: Australians do not understand the utter cynicism of the contemporary Right and many are likely to assume something issued by a government-affiliated body will be factual, missing the later fact-checks that pointed out the many misleading elements in the No campaign section of the booklet.

This unreliable material was issued at taxpayer expense; so too is the campaigning against the Voice being carried out by serving Right wing politicians. This ought to impose obligations towards truth, even if it doesn’t oblige politicians to serve the public interest.

It is a Herculean challenge to control the flow of conspiracy disinformation on the internet. Some of it is started by paid operatives and spread by bots, but much of the rest is organic, each new conspiracy detail slotted into the metaconspiracy (or omniconspiracy) that the political Right is exploiting. Health misinformation related to the pandemic merged into QAnon and ideas from Pentecostal preachers. These intermingle in a digital jigsaw that makes room for every other conspiracy theory, to form what Naomi Klein in her latest book labels the “Mirror World.”

Such is the complexity of the mirrored “reality” that its people believe those in the fact-based world are actually in a “clown world” or “the matrix.” Klein explains “we are not having disagreements about differing interpretations of reality – we are having disagreements about who is in reality and who is in a simulation.”

In Australia, the Voice is being used (like the war on “gender”) to activate this radicalised base drawn into MAGA Plus Trumpist politics. It is depicted as an “elite” conspiracy aimed to “enslave” Australians to a “global landlord.”

Above all Klein’s Mirror World features a loathing of everything that emerges from academic and professional expertise. Anything from the old sources of authority is intended to deceive and exploit. Fact-checkers are part of the conspiracy world’s enemy elites. There is no source of information outside their sphere that people within the Mirror World will trust (unless it reinforces their current beliefs).

AEC commissioner Tom Rogers declared the scope of the wild rumours spreading about the Voice referendum is “tinfoil-hat-wearing bonkers mad conspiracy theories” including that the vote is rigged or that the AEC is using Dominion voting machines, the company targeted in the Trump election lie conspiracies. These illustrate that the wider implication of the demonisation of the Voice is an unfounded attack on our democratic processes as unreliable.

With this epistemological crisis, it is crucial that political speech – and the news media that disseminates it – is obliged to lean closer to truthful speech. We must earn and protect the trust that the community not yet drawn into the Mirror World should be able to have in these sources.

Truth in political advertising must be legislated at the federal level as it is in many of our states.

We must also legislate that government-affiliated bodies’ publications be fact-checked before publication, not merely trust that the public will find such fact-checks after the item is distributed.

It is time for debating whether we need sanctions for politicians who systematically mislead the electorate. Obviously this would be unpopular with both main parties since, for example, misleading the public on the functionality of climate “solutions” such as carbon sequestration is standard business. Nonetheless, we can only make the best decisions for the country’s present and the world’s future by pushing for this political reiteration of corporate spin to be challenged.

We should demand a public and real-time register of affiliations of politicians (and political journalists). From whom do they accept money to perform speeches? From whom do they accept travel and accommodation? With which bodies do they regularly associate?

We need a more stringent definition of the nature of “think tank.” If the nature of the thinking is to generate propaganda talking points rather than actual research, they need to be accurately labelled as lobbyists. Bodies that are connected to international ultra-free market strategists like the Atlas Network need to be publicly labelled and forced to reveal donors and pay tax.

The Murdoch Royal Commission must be commenced, with other commercial news organisations to be covered by findings about ensuring true “fair and balanced” coverage. In an age where politicians deploy lies in abundance, we need news organisations compelled to be cordoned off from the propaganda mission – or labelled accordingly.

The ABC needs the many recommendations to strengthen its independence from political interference implemented.

The Greens and independent candidates are correct: there should be no exemption for “professional news content” in the attempt to crackdown on social media misinformation.

This domestic program ought to be more straightforward than the daunting challenge of dealing with international mis- and disinformation fomented on the internet. That ‘X’ is so much worse for bigotry and disinformation than Twitter illustrates two key points. The settings implemented by management can work to limit disinformation. It also illustrates the damage of leaving massive platforms in private hands.

Robert Reich recently posted this message: “The forces undermining our democracy, polluting our planet, and stoking hatred are counting on you to give up.

“They have money.

“They have megaphones.

“And they have an even more powerful weapon – one that’s harder to spot but incredibly effective: Cynicism.

“Don’t give up.”

The Albanese government has the power to ensure that Australian political speech is as truthful as possible in a world where reliable information is both difficult to determine and utterly crucial.

This essay was first published at Pearls and Irritations

If you have been watching the aftermath of the Barbie movie, you might have learnt a lot about the Right. The most important lesson is that everything is sex.

Barbie, like almost every “woke” development now, is a “groomer.” Poor Stereotypical Barbie thought she’d fixed the world for women’s equality, and now it turns out she’s a demonic force.

The American radicalising Right had been allowed to like Barbie because, for them, she was only about training girls in the utterly unattainable standards of femininity to which they must devote their lives. It’s all clothes and makeup and the perfect figure. Be pretty/perfect. Be still and silent.

Barbie the movie reminded the moral minority starkly that there was a more dangerous side to the doll than that. She threatened to teach their daughters (white liberal) feminism. Aw heck no.

Barbie has no reproductive organs and, for this Right, woman has no other purpose. Woman is utterly defined by her ability to spawn. Biological essentialism is back with a vengeance. No reproductive rights for you, girlfriend. No contraceptives or ability to initiate divorce. No vote. No career. Get baby fever and know your God-given place.

The opening scene of the film is sin made celluloid. Bored girl children are being socialised into deadening domesticity over their baby dolls, when sexy Barbie appears causing a violent orgy of destruction. Smash those baby dolls, little sisters.

The movie’s central tension between Barbie Land and Patriarchy makes clear that Barbie, for all the damage she does, is meant to help girls aspire to a role in the civic space, or even in space.

More dangerous still is the fact that Ryan Gosling’s Ken reveals the Right’s “truth” about the feminist project: the neutered man. Cue spasms of incel horror. The Right completely missed that the film’s joke was about the movie industry: Ken was being put in the female role in movies. Instead he was perceived as another weapon in the ginned up Masculinity Crisis.

Some on the Right saw what the Left saw: Barbie ultimately leaves the gender dynamic pretty much untouched. They could see Barbie’s conclusion (spoiler alert) in a visit to the gynaecologist as a reinforcement of their anti-trans sentiment: sex is genitalia. I prefer to see it as a pro-trans message: this woman chooses her womanly genitalia.

The Right loathes the concept of “gender.” “Sex” is all, binary and heterosexual.

Sex – identity and act – at least for women, must be sacred and reproductive.

The idea of blurring,“races” or sexes, is a nightmare for the bigots on the Right. And so their performance of gender online is about sexual polarity.

The Right’s performance of gender is only out-dramatised by one sector: drag artists.

For the Right’s men, they are inspired by the fascist posturing of figures like Bronze Age Pervert with constant inspiration from the muscled White warriors of the ancient world. In a homoerotic act, they ogle the glistening muscles of the biggest men. No wonder Melbourne’s gym-junkie Nazis turn out in black shorts instead of black shirts. Hello sailor?

The women of the Right have moved from the honeytrap sexual appeal of their earlier influencers like Lauren Southern to the Tradwife. In this performance of Barbie-like submissive femininity, they hope to tempt women to the glories of domesticity, to catch the Right’s baby-fever.

Some on the young Right also saw a warning that Barbie Land conveys for men. Barbie Land has been equated to “the longhouse.” The Right used to fret about “the cathedral,” a description of the modern world which argued that the liberal establishment had destroyed everything. Only a revolution into patriarchal and authoritarian monarchy could save the nation. The cathedral has become the longhouse, emphasising the shift in focus. The longhouse says that the feminisation of the modern world is the true crisis.

Apparently before those muscled Greek idols forged everything worthwhile about civilisation – including manly architecture – people lived in matrilineal longhouses ruled by the Den Mother. That society was barbaric, muddy and lame. Just like Barbie Land (minus the pink).

The destruction caused by this modern feminised, diverse, and excessively egalitarian world – a new longhouse – has apparently fostered cross-breeding between “races.” It has led, oh horror, to moral destruction in not just extra-marital sex but the existence of LGBTQIA+ people in public. Even worse, they exist in front of children.

If gender ceases to be about wholistic identity and freedom of choice about how the individual presents themself to the world, and instead is a representation of genitalia, everything becomes unavoidably sexual.

There is safe sexual where men are manly and women are cute.

There is dangerous sexual where this mandated binary is confused. Any LGBTQIA+ presentation that does not abide by that binary represents a derangement of genitalia.

Thus the existence of LGBTQIA+ people – or feminists – in front of children is “grooming.” In the Right’s obsession with genitals, this “deviant” presentation of gender is advertising confusing or aberrant genitalia.

This is why a story book that includes a family with two penguin dads or someone with non-binary gender identity is described as “pornographic” in the Moms for Liberty purges taking place in American schools and libraries. A Mem Fox picture book with a woman discreetly pictured in a bath was removed for being pornographic.

And so anyone who merely supports the equal existence of LGBTQIA+ people will find themselves labelled a “groomer” by online commentators. One community member fighting the Florida book bans explained the intent: This entire effort is “designed to put LGBT people back in the closet and keep us there.” Ron DeSantis’s recent campaign ad made clear that his presidential campaign was pursuing that very goal.

A figure that epitomised the clash of worlds in Barbie was Dr Barbie. The vast majority of normie viewers probably never noticed that the actor, Hari Nef, is trans and that’s just fine. It’s the performance not the “sex” that counts. For the Right, this was one of the appalling efforts by the demonic Left to “indoctrinate” their children with “pornography.”

The same cohorts that are driving the attacks on LGBTQIA+ existence are the ones hyper-sexualising prepubescent children in kiddie beauty pageant displays which border on “child sexual abuse material.” Florida is the driving force in the war on Queer. It is also the state where “conservative” rural mothers partake in the highest number of child beauty pageants of anywhere in Republican America where these grotesque displays dominate. Apparently the only safe place to display sexualised womanhood in Purity Culture America is on the pre-teens. No wonder these are also the states supporting child marriage most vehemently.

These mothers treat their children like Barbies.

Barbie was a lot of fun. The lessons the Right are taking from it, however, are scary. Any of us living in a secular world where incels are a laughing stock and the domestic goddess is a cookbook need to pay attention.

Our efforts towards an inclusive and egalitarian world are a call to revolution for them. America is showing us what they intend as theocratic Right forces table ever more laws to constrain sexuality.

The same forces are at work in Australia. The IPA is trying to drum up a parents’ rights campaign (which translates to radicalised Right wing parents dictating what everyone’s children learn at school). The attempt to stop Big W stocking a guide for parents on how to talk to children about sex was precisely the game plan. The campaign to make this an Australian battle is underway.

Don’t ignore them. They are sure as hell not ignoring you.

There may be some Coalition politicians and Murdoch employees who are motivated by genuine racism to oppose the Voice to Parliament. Some might believe First Nations Australians are unworthy. Some probably believe in “reverse racism.” That, of course, is the belief that there is a correct direction for racism to travel.

Some undoubtedly believe in a myopic fashion that there is no inherent disadvantage to being indigenous in settler-colonial nations. There is endless research to establish how historical decisions and policy entrench disadvantage and foster social ills; it is not, as some Coalition politicians might argue, the result of a “bad” nature.

For many more Coalition politicians, however, one presumes the decision to oppose the Voice is strategic. They don’t care who is hurt in the process, just as they didn’t care about the escalated persecution that accompanied the plebiscite on marriage equality.

The Coalition and media friends are using the Voice (just as they used refugees) as an implicitly racist tool to galvanise their own vote, but more importantly to divide the electorate. It is part of our conscious echoing of the CRT argument that is burning through America, fighting acknowledgement of systemic disadvantage in that country.

CRT is “critical race theory.” This is a university law school discipline that examines the elements of the racist past that continue in current institutional structures. A Right-wing agitator, Christopher Rufo, stole this term for school studies to allow “conservative” parents to fight any attempt to teach a less bowdlerised view of history and society.

As is standard practice, Sky Australia, The Spectator and other radicalising organs borrowed the American CRT gambit for use in Australia. It can be deeply uncomfortable for Australians brought up on comforting patriotic myths to have their offspring bring home age-appropriate stories of the Killing Times and Blackbirding (sugar slavery). It is shocking to read the ghastly story of cold-blooded massacres of our First Nations people: it is estimated that we killed in various ways around 90% of the Aboriginal people here when colonisation began. It is chilling to envision Australians dropping kidnapped and enslaved Pacific Islanders in the ocean rather than bothering to return them home. Their unmarked graves are strewn across our sugar plantations, with 30% killed by the brutal conditions.

Forgetting can be even more crucial than remembering in the forging of a patriotic narrative.

Deploying race divisions has been crucial to American politics. White southerners were reconciled to the appalling conditions they were granted by the plantation-owning class by the certainty that the worst of them was better than the best Black man. The workers have been divided and disempowered by the resentment fostered between White and “Coloured” workers.

Such was the disgust for Black people that when legal changes forced the desegregation of public swimming pools built during the public works era of the New Deal, communities shut them down for years. They denied themselves the use of these communal facilities rather than share them with Black townsfolk. This dynamic continues in Republican state logic. Most Republican states refused federal money to grant the poorest Whites medical cover because it would aid Black people too.

America’s winner-takes-all capitalism fosters a “myth of scarcity.” This in turn promotes a resentful, zero-sum psychology where another group’s progress is “our loss.”

Australia’s economic model was not one driven by this model of capitalism. Our labour shortages made for a strong class of worker who achieved notable rights. We were considered a labour model in the early decades of the 20th century to the distress of capitalists who planned fascist revolutions. Our neoliberalism saw a less toxic negotiation between capital, state and worker.

In 1975, however, Milton Friedman brought his American winner-takes-all neoliberalism to Australia. His acolytes, like Peter Costello, founded “think tanks” including the HR Nicholls Society to destroy the strength of the Australian worker. The IPA followed them, turning from promoting Australian neoliberalism – Economic Rationalism – to the ultra-free market neoliberalism that so excited America’s richest.

Our society now displays the damage caused by decades of cynical “trickle down” economics and the crippling of worker strength. Just as in America, our chasm between rich and poor is at historic levels. Wealth is now generational, with the American model and our copycat version having almost destroyed aspirational dreams.

While the Labor Party continues to govern more for the nation, it has still embraced the truisms of this debunked economic model. The Coalition, by contrast, governs for the richest. This is the reason that it also copies the Republicans’ culture war battles, aiming to win a majority and government with grievance rather than sound policy.

Dahlia Lithwick described America’s Republican voters thus recently: the “majority of White Americans continue to vote against interest for parties and ideologies that directly contribute to their economic decline.” This is the position for most Coalition voters in Australia. As in America, the strategists are activating racism to promote this grievance.

The Voice to Parliament is not, as they lie, a “third chamber” of parliament or any other such threat to equality. It is literally nothing more than an advisory body to try to ensure that the best policy is deployed to reverse the deep disadvantage faced by First Nations people. It is placed in the constitution to ensure that cynical governments in the future cannot abandon it. The design of the body itself will be built by parliamentary consultation with First Nation representatives.

Some who reject the Voice do so because they believe it to be a sop. The depiction of it as a threat to land ownership is a pathetic and dangerous slander: it is, however, a handy distraction from the prospect of a wealth tax that could raise $29 billion a year.

The idea that society is a zero-sum enterprise where anything gained by anyone else is stolen from you is a distortion of fact and a miserable basis for community. We must not let a wealthy, self-interested elite divide us with racist lies to ensure their own continued grasp on our common wealth.

This essay was first published in Pearls and Irritations.