The National Anti-Corruption Commission has given its tick of approval for multibillion-dollar federal corruption – the sort of corruption that NSW’s ICAC has had the backbone to confront, but the NACC does not.

If you thought the NACC deciding not to investigate Robodebt was, um, “disappointing”, the NACC walking away from the Coalition’s blatant corruption of massive grant schemes is another whole level of failure.

Given a referral with conclusive evidence of corrupt conduct by the Morrison government, the NACC has “decided to take no further action”.

According to the NACC, the most flagrant pork barrelling, skewing billions of taxpayers’ dollars into favoured seats for the obvious reason, is just fine and dandy.

Nothing corrupt about that – let it rip.

So whatever party is in federal power can use public money for its political ends without worrying about the NACC.

Standards query

That puts the NACC at odds with overwhelming public opinion and the higher standards being pursued by the ICAC.

The NSW body’s investigation of “pork barrelling” – Operation Jersey – found: “Defined as ‘the allocation of public funds and resources to targeted electors for partisan political purposes’, the ICAC concluded that pork barrelling can, under certain circumstances, involve serious breaches of public trust and conduct that amount to corrupt conduct.”

In rejecting a referral over sums that make the NSW operation look like a chook raffle, the NACC decided not to investigate as the evidence “does not support the view that corrupt conduct has occurred as defined in the act”.

Matter of trust

Yet in the same letter rejecting the referral, the NACC general manager evaluation Peter Ratcliffe spelt out that “corrupt conduct is conduct by a public official that is in break of public trust”.

If allocating billions of dollars along party political lines (rather than the basis of greatest need and doing the greatest good) isn’t a “break of public trust”, I don’t know what is.

And so do four out of five of Australians, according to Australia Institute polling – 81 per cent of us “consider it corrupt conduct to allocate public money to projects in marginal seats in order to win votes”.

In the billions splurged over nine years by the Coalition in general and the Morrison government in particular on a much larger scale, it wasn’t only marginal seats being targeted, but government seats in general being rewarded for voting LNP.

Plenty of evidence

InDaily’s sister publication The New Daily published scores of articles over three years, starting with Bridget McKenzie’s infamous Sportsrorts scandal and on to much bigger scams, detailing the abuse of public funds on a corrupt scale.

Those stories had their genesis in spreadsheet sleuthing by a New Daily reader, Vince O’Grady, with the help of IT-skilled associates, breaking down multiple billions of dollars of government grants by postcode and electorate.

The evidence was overwhelming, ranging from the relatively petty blackballing of Labor electorate golfers to the grandest and most egregious of them all – the $3.2 billion Community Development Grant racket, specifically designed by the Abbott government to avoid public service interference in rolling out the barrel and maximised under Morrison.

Three days after the start of the NACC on July 1 last year, Mr O’Grady made an official complaint, providing the data he had accumulated. A year later, the NACC has dismissed his referral – all that corruption is not “corrupt” by what the NACC chooses to be its standards.

A lot of past and present Coalition ministers and members will breathe a little easier with that knowledge.

Be brave

Aside from the individual MPs up to their elbows in CDG largesse, there were the members of the Expenditure Review Committee officially approving and therefore responsible for the whole “break of public trust”. Of the nine members of the Morrison government’s final ERC, six remain in Parliament, all Coalition frontbenchers.

It would take a brave NACC to launch an official investigation into such a half dozen, an action that would have the obvious media suspects calling for its gutting.

First find the guts, a cynic could say.

But all might not yet be lost.

Hope remains?

Ratcliffe’s letter to O’Grady did provide two paragraphs holding out a little hope that the NACC isn’t already knackered.

“While we have decided to take no further action in relation to your referral, the information will be retained for intelligence purposes and to inform our educational and reporting activities,” Mr Ratcliffe wrote.

“The allocation of Commonwealth grants remain (sic) an area of significant interest to the commission. While in this instance we did not find justification to conduct an investigation, we are actively looking at a number of other matters relating to the subject of Commonwealth Grant allocation.”

Oh, have I buried the lede? Should this article have started with “NACC confirms it’s looking into Commonwealth grants?”

No, I don’t think so. A big, bold, brave NACC – the NACC Australia needs, the only type worth having – would already have enough to launch an official investigation. It could have done that from reading The New Daily.

A year later it is simply weak to be only “actively looking at” public officials systemically breaking the public trust to the tune of billions of dollars.

Or maybe there isn’t the appetite in Canberra to really clean up politics.

This story also appeared in our sister publication The New Daily.